Japanese cuisine is a marriage of simple ingredients and fresh produce. My mother, being Japanese, loves adding certain elements of her national cuisine into Indian cuisine no matter if it's aloo gobhi or scrambled eggs.
When I lived in Glasgow, my favourite food store was Sea Woo. It was a huge oriental wholesale market and it always smelt of Niigata for some reason. Needless to say, I experimented a lot with Asian ingredients. I successfully made Alvin's (from Masterchef Australia, season Two) Drunken Chicken and I think I made pints after pints of Japanese Curry. A staple in my freezer were frozen chicken and pork dumplings that you just steamed and voila, Hors d'oeuvre disaster avoided.
A common after work snack in Japan is Yakitori which means: Charcoal Grilled Bird (in this case, Chicken). Yakitori-yas are famous for this mouth watering speciality. Oddly enough, even though the base of the marinade (Mirin, Soya, Sugar) is the same for all yakitori-yas, there are perceivable differences in flavours in different shops.
If you can make this on a grill, that's great. But most houses in India don't have a grill (Mom said something about making this in a tandoor clay pot. See, what did I tell you? Food Fusion!) but they do have an oven. So, this is an oven-ed Yakitori.
The preference meat here is the chicken thigh meat and not the chicken breast meat. For one because: as the thigh meat is closer to the bone, the meat has more taste. Also, thigh meat doesn't dry up, unlike breast meat that goes all stringy when cooked for a bit more that it's supposed to. But if you don't have thigh meat or don't like thigh meat, use breast meat.
I had leftover chicken breast boneless (1/2 kg) from before so mum forced me to use that instead. Another problem with chicken breast is that it's not equal in thickness all around. So, to solve that, I hammered the little suckers till I got an even thickness of 3/4 centimetre in width.
That's plastic cling film on top of the chickens by the way.
After they were all nice and (semi) flat, I cut them into strips of one centimetre each...
...and marinated them in 1 tablespoon of sesame oil and 4 tablespoons of home-made yakitori sauce (details at the end of the recipe).
Then, 3 hours later, I skewered them on presoaked (soak your wooden skewers for atleast 1/2 hour before you skew on your meat. This will ensure that the wood doesn't burn.) wooden skewers.
Preheat the oven to the highest temperature that it will go to. Mine went upto 240C. Then, place the chicken skwers on an oven proof metal rack (like the one in the picture above. Mine is actually a cookie cooling rack that I double for oven grilling purposes), place it in the oven and either grill (if you have a grill setting in your convection oven) or bake for five minutes.
After five minutes, your chicken should somewhat look like the two pale skewers in the picture below.
Brush the marinade over the chicken, coating the front and then flip the chicken and coat it on the other side as well. Grill again for 5 minutes (with the new side up) and repeat the process 3-4 times or until the chicken is fully cooked.
Now, reduce the leftover marinade over medium heat till it just stars to get sticky (between two spoons/chopsticks. Unless you like the feeling of scorched, and peeled skin, I wouldn't suggest using your fingers.) and use the thick marinade for the final coating over the chicken.
See how the colour has changed to a dark amber? If we had used a proper grill, I reckon that the colour would have been darker and that we'd have gotten those charred grill marks. Oh well.
Bake/grill this for an additional two minutes and then serve :)
Yakitori Marinade/Glaze
Traditionally, Yakitori sauce is made with sugar, soya sauce and Mirin (a Japanese sweet rice wine) but here in India, it's very difficult to come across Mirin, unless you go to the few oriental stores in the country (One of them being Yamatoya in New Delhi.). And these, oriental store bought Mirin, tend to be really expensive. So, instead of Mirin, I used Whisky. The closest alcohol to Mirin would be dry sherry. You could use that instead.
In a pan, I put 1/3 cup of whisky and 1/3 cup of soya sauce on low heat. Then, I put 3.5 tablespoons of sugar and 2 tablespoons of honey (quick trick: If you lightly oil your spoon before using it to take out honey, the honey will never stick when you spoon it out.), half inch of grated ginger and 1 large grated garlic clove. To this, I added half teaspoon of shichimi powder (Japanese seven flavoured chilli pepper fakes. You could use 1/2 teaspoon of red chilli powder instead if you don't have shichimi) and, on medium-low heat, I stirred the mixture till the sugar dissolved. Let this mixture cool completely and strain it just before marinading the chicken. This ensures that the ginger and the garlic have enough time to seep into the sauce.
And that's the Yakitori sauce!
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