Chicken pieces roasted in homemade barbecue sauce

This is a one-dish recipe requiring very little attention once it’s in the oven – a good option when you have guests for dinner and you want to talk to them before eating rather than skip in and out of the room in an apron with a spoon all evening.

If you’re not comfortable cutting a chicken into joints at home, you can ask your butcher to joint it for you. If you don’t have easy access to a friendly butcher, you can make this dish with a mixture of chicken thigh and leg joints from the supermarket instead – it’s important, though, to use chicken pieces with the bone in and the skin on for ultimate tenderness and flavour. This barbecue sauce is made from dried spices, soya sauce and white wine. It’s strong and delicious, so serve with plenty of rice (I cooked mine with a little saffron) or another plain starch to soak up all the flavour.

To serve four, you’ll need:

1 large chicken, jointed
4 shallots, cut into large dice
150ml white wine
150ml soya sauce
1 tablespoon tomato puree
1 tablespoon sundried tomato puree
1 inch of fresh ginger, grated
5 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tablespoon mustard powder
1 teaspoon chilli powder (chipotle powder is nice here for the smoky flavour)
1 tablespoon liquid smoke (leave this out if it’s unavailable where you live)
2 tablespoons soft brown sugar

Preheat the oven to 200° C (400° F).

Space the chicken pieces evenly in a large metal baking dish, and sprinkle the shallot pieces around them. Drizzle with a little olive oil and bake for 30 minutes, until the chicken is browning and the pieces of shallot are starting to take on colour at the edges. A lot of fat will have rendered out from the chicken skin, so use a tablespoon to remove as much of it as you can.

Mix all the other ingredients in a measuring jug and whisk with a fork to make sure everything is well blended, then pour evenly over the chicken pieces and shallots, trying to make sure all the chicken is nicely coated. Put back in the oven for another 30 minutes, basting twice, and serve immediately.

If, by some amazing freak of appetite, you don’t eat this all in one go, the chicken is great the next day taken off the bone in sandwiches.

3 Replies to “Chicken pieces roasted in homemade barbecue sauce”

  1. Hello,

    Can you tell me how long it will last if I were to do everything you said, cooking the shallots first and bottling the sauce the same day to preserve it?

    We are having a party in August with Spit roast Pork (aka by the butcher as a pig on a pole) and I would rather make my own sauces ahead of time to allow it to mature instead of buying a bottled sauce (I will be cross posting this question to your home made barbecue sauce).

    Thank you (again).

    1. This one really benefits from the fresh chicken juices in it and the way it caramelises on the meat, so I think it’s probably not going to be appropriate for your hogroast. That said, I have a different barbecue sauce recipe which might fit the bill rather better. (If you have suspicions about the use of ketchup as an ingredient, I can only suggest you make up a small batch to sample before you go the whole…hog.) In your case, you should be able to make the ketchupy one up months in advance and refrigerate without any trouble; if that’s the case, though, I’d be sure to bring it to a boil before bottling because of the raw garlic. I also think you might benefit from caramelising some shallots and popping those in the sauce as well before boiling/bottling. Let me know how it goes!

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