Play with Your Food
This Health Food Ain’t “Fusion,” Just Interesting: Chipotle-Lemongrass Barbecue Sauce
I'm an Eastern North Carolina boy -- if we're not assaulted by vinegar, we're just not happy. Wanting to make an interesting twist on my childhood favorite, I created a Chipotle-Lemongrass Vinegar BBQ Sauce I'll be making forevermore
It’s one thing to just make “fabulous recipes.” It’s another to realize you’re doing more than food — you’re changing your life a dish at a time. From dashboard-diner to healthy improvisational cook, Russ seeks to not only provide health food that will BLOW YOUR MIND but also show how gaining confidence in the kitchen is a weight and post-weight secret weapon.
Don’t call it fusion. Call it “clever health food.”
If you think of food in terms of cuisines and standard recipes, it’s much more difficult to eat healthfully because, on a cuisine-by-cuisine basis, the available dishes are more limited.
So to make interesting health food, I simply stopped thinking that way. Gastronomic purity — a fancy term for “eating Italian exactly like an first-generation Italian grandmother would from scratch.” — just isn’t a priority.
Case in point: I had no desire to create a Thai-Eastern North Carolina fusion this weekend. I just peeked in my pantry one night after the gym and created a recipe I’ll be making for the rest of my life.
For months, I’ve kept an inexpensive packet of dried lemongrass in my cupboard. It was an impulse purchase at an Asian supermarket, but I hadn’t decided what to do with it.
Chipotle-Lemongrass Barbecue Chicken
About 3 quarts Water
3 tablespoons Ground Chipotle Powder
Half package (Approx. 2 ounces) about Dried Lemongrass (available in Asian Markets or here
)1 tablespoon Granulated Garlic Powder
1 tablespoon Onion Powder
1 tablespoon Dried Basil
3-4 Boneless, Skinless Chicken Breasts
1/4-1/2 cup Apple Cider Vinegar
Salt and Pepper, to taste
Fill saucepan with water and add all ingredients except chicken. Bring to a boil.
Add chicken and reduce to a simmer. Simmer 6-8 minutes until chicken is cooked through.
Remove chicken and place onto a cutting board to cool. Once cool, pull chicken into strands with fingers. Return liquid to a boil.
Boil until liquid is reduce to 1/2 or 3/4. Remove from heat and strain liquid into a seperate bowl or saucepan to separate solids. Discard solids.
Return strained liquid to heat and add vinegar. Continue to simmer 5-10 minutes.
Add chicken and stir until meat is thoroughly covered in sauce. Cook for additional 5 minutes or until chicken absorbs most of the sauce. Remove from heat, taste and add salt and pepper as necessary.
The original idea was to poach and shred some chicken. Because I was out of fresh vegetables for my poaching liquid, I pondered the dried lemongrass, its fascinating clash of subtlety and assertiveness, and determined that it could stand up to chipotle powder in the correct quantity.
After poaching the chicken in its liquid, I decided to bring the liquid to a boil and let it concentrate the liquid’s flavors. Originally I intended a pan sauce, but then realized some apple cider vinegar and a lengthy cook time would result in a twist on the vinegar-based barbecue of my youth.
Once the chicken was shredded, I added it to the pan again to absorbed the sauce. For the rest of the week I keep making dishes that either accentuated the Asian or Eastern North Carolina influences: Chicken salad with crushed raw peanut, cilantro and shredded carrot, BBQ sandwiches with chopped Kimchi and mustard seed, homemade black bean burgers with the chicken as garnish and complemented with fresh spinach.
Take that, insipid health food. Take that, fusion. Take that, The Way Things Are.
Key Principles
- No one like a bully | When using an overpowering spice or herb like chipotle (this includes raw green pepper or rosemary), season with weaker ingredients strongly. The idea is to create a flavor balance that can stand up to the overpowering element.
- Let nothing go to waste | This sauce’s life began because I didn’t want to throw away the amount of flavor I had built into my poaching liquid. Scraps on the bottom of a pan, squeezed citrus, even leftover sauce from a restaurant doggie dish can be the foundation for something clever.
- Laugh at Food Snobs and Purists | Don’t worry about whether something’s “authentic” or “fusion”; a classic cooking principle is working with what’s at hand and getting creative with it. In healthy cooking, technique naturally overlap from a variety of cuisines — calling it “fusion” misses the point. It takes more thought and work to create interesting health food than it does eating the same things the same way — don’t let anymore tell you different.
