Southern Africa · Volume 19, Nshima and the Relish
Galinha à Zambeziana
Zambézia, Mozambique
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 4 hours
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Chicken marinated in fresh coconut milk, pounded garlic, lime juice and piri-piri, grilled slowly over charcoal and basted with the marinade. It is on every serious Mozambican menu in Lisbon, and it is the one dish in this volume a Big Green Egg was built for. The technical interest is what the coconut milk replaces. A Portuguese piri-piri marinade is built on vinegar. Here the acid is lime and the medium is coconut milk. The fat carries the capsaicin and the aromatics into the meat rather than leaving them on the surface; the sugars and proteins in the milk lacquer the skin as it grills; and a fat rich marinade acts more gently than an acid one, so the surface does not go chalky. A note on quantities. The Mozambican sources name the four marinade components and the method and give no proportions. Below is a working formulation, said plainly to be mine.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. 4 hours marinating, about 1 hour cooking.
Ingredients
- 1 chicken, about 1.6 kg, spatchcocked
- 400 ml full fat coconut milk, or first press from one fresh coconut
- 6 cloves garlic, pounded
- 4 to 6 piri-piri chillies, pounded
- 2 limes, juiced
- 1 tsp salt
Method
- Pound the garlic, chillies and salt to a paste in a mortar.
- Mix into the coconut milk with the lime juice.
- Coat the spatchcocked chicken thoroughly and marinate at least 4 hours, refrigerated, or overnight.
- Grill slowly over charcoal, skin side away from the fiercest heat, turning and basting repeatedly with the marinade. About an hour for a chicken this size, until the thigh reads 75°C.
- Serve with rice, xima or chips, and a piri-piri sauce on the table.
What a modern chef changes
Split the marinade, cook the glaze, two zone the fire
Rungs 6, 4 and 2
Method
- Split the coconut milk into a marinade and a glaze, and cook the glaze. Marinate in three quarters of it. Reduce the remaining quarter, plus a spoonful of the pounded paste, to a thick glossy glaze and use that for the last twenty minutes of basting. You get the lacquer without repeatedly painting raw, chicken contaminated liquid onto meat you are about to serve, and the reduction concentrates the sugars that do the browning.
- Bloom the chilli and garlic in warm coconut fat before mixing the marinade. Rung 6. Five minutes at low heat in the thick top layer of the tin, then cool and combine, so the heat penetrates the meat instead of sitting on it.
- Two zone the fire and finish indirect. Direct heat for eight minutes a side to set and colour the skin, then indirect at 160°C with the lid down until the thigh reads 75°C, glazing in the last twenty minutes. Coconut sugars burn readily, and a glaze applied early over direct heat will be bitter before the bird is cooked.
- Build the sauce on kapenta rather than on a stock cube. Rung 4. Pan juices plus 200 ml of kapenta steep, reduced, with lime off the heat. A Royco or Knorrox cube gives salt and monosodium glutamate on a flat curve and nothing else, which is why cube built sauces hit hard and vanish.
Notes
Part Four