Peppercorn Chicken with Chilli & Mint

Here's my latest MasterChef recipe, the second in a series of four recipes I've developed for Woolworths, food sponsors of the latest South African series.

Tender, mint-infused chicken breasts with a sticky-sweet honey and soy glaze

I was stumped by this week’s mystery-box ingredients (see the list at the bottom of this page). The spices in the list hinted loudly at a home-made Chinese five-spice powder, while coconut and soy sauce confirmed the Asian theme. But, oddly, there was no acidifying agent (such as lime or rice vinegar) in the ingredients list, and my first three recipe attempts were disappointing flops.

These are some of the ingredients I had to work with.
Picture courtesy of Woolworths.

In the end, I decided to focus on my favourite flavours in the list, and to combine them in a simple dish of succulent chicken breasts infused with fresh mint and chilli, and coated with rainbow peppercorns and a honey/soy sauce glaze.  Mint, peppercorns and chicken are an unusual combination – but why not?

The only tricky part about this recipe is making sure the chicken is perfectly cooked. This is not as easy as it sounds, because the one end of a bone-in chicken breast is considerably thicker than the other. How long your chicken will take to cook depends, of course, on the size of the pieces.  I always cut a deep slit into the thickest part of the breast, then prise it open to check that it's cooked to the bone.  Any sign of pinkness in the juices, and I put it back in the oven for another few minutes.

Finally, this year, it’s not just bloggers getting the chance to get creative in the kitchen along with MasterChef and Woolies. Create a recipe with the same ingredients used each week by the Woolworths Masterchef Competition bloggers and you could win one of fourteen R1000 Woolies gift cards, or the (very!) grand prize of a R10 000 gift card. Head over to the Woolworths Masterchef Hub for more info and T&Cs.

My first recipe for Woolies/Masterchef:  Slow-Roasted Leg of Lamb with a Basil Walnut Sauce 

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Peppercorn Chicken with Chilli & Mint

4 large free-range chicken breasts, on the bone
flaky sea salt
20g (half a cup, closely packed) fresh mint leaves
2 fresh red chillies, deseeded and finely chopped
4 Tbsp (60 ml) olive oil
4 Tbsp  (60 ml) honey
2 Tbsp (30 ml) light soy sauce
2 tsp (10 ml) rainbow peppercorns, coarsely crushed


Heat the oven to 180 ºC. Put the mint leaves, chillies and olive oil in the jug attachment of a stick blender and whizz to a fairly fine pesto.

Season the breasts lightly with salt. Slide your fingertips under the skin on top of the breasts, breaking the fine membrane as you go to create a pouch. Take half the mint paste and spread it evenly under the breast skin (reserve the remaining mixture). Pull the breast skin back into place.

Cut a deep horizontal slash into the fleshiest part of each breast, and rub the remaining paste into the slashes. Set aside for an hour, or until you’re ready to cook the breasts.

Place the breasts skin-side up in a roasting pan, cover them lightly with tin foil or baking paper and roast for 25-30 minutes, or until they are just cooked through. Drain any excess fat from the pan.

Warm the honey until it’s runny, then stir in the soy sauce.  Drizzle this mixture all over the chicken breasts – and don’t worry if it slides off into the pan. Press the crushed peppercorns onto the skin of the breast.

Drizzle the glaze over the partly cooked breasts before  returning them to the oven.

Turn the oven grill on to its highest setting and place the roasting pan on a middle shelf, not too close to the element.  Grill the breasts for 5-8 minutes, basting them every few minutes with the honey-soy glaze.  Watch them like a hawk, as the honey burns quickly.

When the skin is golden and beginning to blister, remove the chicken breasts from oven and let them rest for 5 minutes.

Cut the breasts into pieces and drizzle over any pan juices.

Serve hot, with wedges of lemon.

Serves 4.

Here is the list of ingredients I was given to work with (I was also allowed to add salt, pepper and oil to my 'mystery box'):

Chicken
Honey
Light soy sauce
Star anise
Fennel seeds
Three colour peppercorns
Cloves
Cinnamon
Coconut
Chilli
Mint

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Warm Marinated Olives with Lime, Thyme and Chilli

Fresh limes and olives are unlikely bedfellows, I know, but I was fresh out of lemons when I made this yesterday, so slices of lime it had to be. And, my goodness, the lime tasted good! (Although there's no startling difference in the final taste, a green and perky note of lime adds special zip to the olive-oil marinade.)  I often make this dish in summer as a snack to go with drinks: it's so quick and easy to prepare in advance, it tastes gorgeous, and it goes a long way if you serve it with a big platter of sliced crusty bread for dipping.

Warm Marinated Olives with Lime, Thyme and Chilli

It's not essential to warm the flavouring ingredients in the olive oil (if you're in a hurry, pack everything into a jar and leave it to steep for three days) but I've found that heating the marinade helps to release the lovely aromatic oils in the thyme, citrus zest, chilli, garlic and pepper.

It takes less than a minute gently to reheat the olives before you take them to the table, and it's well worth the effort, because the aromas that drift from the warm oil are quite irresistible.

You can stone the olives if you like, but I think half the fun of eating an olive is rolling its pip around your mouth (and then seeing how far you can spit it  placing it daintily on the side of your plate).

I alway use Calamata olives because they're so big and glossy and delicious, but you can use any sort of black brined olive, or a mixture of green and black olives.



Warm Marinated Olives with Lime, Thyme and Chilli

1 large jar Calamata olives, drained (or olives of your choice)
enough extra-virgin olive oil to cover the olives (about a cup and half; 375 ml)
2 slices of fresh lime or lemon
½ tsp (2.5 ml) dried red chilli flakes
1 large fresh red chilli, split in half lengthways (or more, to taste)
4 cloves of garlic, unpeeled and sliced in half lengthways
2 large sprigs of fresh thyme
2 fresh lemon leaves, if you can find them
milled black pepper
flaky sea salt
the juice of half a lemon

If you have time, cut a slit in the side of each olive.  Pour the olive oil into a saucepan and stir in the olives, lime slices, chilli flakes, fresh chilli, garlic, thyme and lemon leaves. Add plenty of freshly ground black pepper (eight to ten twists of the mill). Very gently heat the olive oil over a low flame, until it's quite hot and beginning to seethe, but not yet bubbling; this will take 3-4 minutes.

Take the pan off the heat and, using the back of a fork, squash and squish the garlic cloves to release more of their flavour. Tip the mixture into a lidded plastic container (or a very large glass jar) and set aside at room temperature to steep for at least six hours - preferably overnight.

If you'd like to make this a few days in advance, you can refrigerate the mixture. Don't worry if the oil solidifies in patches: it will melt down again when you rewarm the mixture.

When you're ready to serve the olives, tip the mixture back into the saucepan and reheat it gently over a medium flame for one minute, or until very warm, but nowhere near piping hot.

Remove the pan from the heat and squeeze in the fresh lemon juice. Season with flaky sea salt, add a few more grinds of black pepper and stir well. Tip the mixture into a shallow serving dish and take it straight to the table with some sliced fresh bread.

Serves 6-8  as a snack





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Baby Mielies with Smoked Butter, Chillies, Lemon and Garlic

A flavour-packed cold butter dabbed on hot-off-the-braai baby mielies. Baby mielies are a vegetable I don't often buy because I've found they tend to be somewhat tasteless, even soapy. All that has changed recently, as I discovered when I bought a punnet of dear little ears of corn on impulse. My goodness, they were good: packed with nutty, sunshiney flavour, and so good I ate most of them raw.

Plate and espresso cup by David Walters

I imagine that this new breed of super-tasty mielie is the product of careful hybridisation. Whatever the case, I'm going to be buying them by the bucketload from now on.

They're lovely with plain butter and plenty of salt, but I'm such a fan of flavoured butters that I thought I'd add some vibrant Mexican flavours. Please try to get hold of some smoked butter, which adds a most delicious tweak to this dish. It's not something that's readily available; enquire at your local deli (or order in from Cape smokehouse Aphrodisiac Shack). If you can't find it, use 200 g salted butter.

This is lovely with boiled mielies, but there's something about the nutty taste of a braaied mielie that just cannot be matched. If you're not in the mood for firing up the braai, cook the mielies on a ridged, oiled griddle pan, over a high heat.

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Baby Mielies with Smoked Butter, Chillies, Lemon and Garlic

two punnets of baby mielies, or 6 whole mielies cut into thirds

For the butter:

100 g salted butter, softened
100 g smoked butter, softened
2 red chillies, seeds removed, finely chopped
the finely grated zest of a lemon
a squeeze of lemon juice
a big clove of garlic, peeled and finely chopped
4 Tbsp (60 ml) finely chopped fresh coriander
salt and milled black pepper.

To make the flavoured butter, combine all the ingredients in a bowl. Go easy on the salt, though, as the butter is already salted. Pack the butter into a pretty little bowl and place in the fridge to firm up.

Braai [barbeque] the baby mielies over a medium flame, until just tender, or cook in a ridged griddle pan (see above).

Serve piping hot, with nuggets of cold butter.

Serves 6 as a starter or side dish.

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Scorching Chilli, Garlic and Cumin Paste

This aromatic paste of dried red chillies, cumin, fresh garlic and preserved lemons is similar to Tunisian harissa, but has only four main ingredients. It keeps for months, out of the fridge, in a sealed jar, and is made in minutes in a blender or small grinder.

It's delicious added in (small!) dabs to yoghurt- or oil-based marinades, stirred into tomato-based sauces, or with pasta, couscous or rice. Flicked over a fried egg, it's eye-wateringly good.

You can add any spices you like - coriander, cinnamon, black pepper, and so on - to this paste, but I like it just as it is. If you don't have preserved lemons to hand (do you know they keep beautifully in the freezer?), use finely grated lemon zest.

This looks like an enormous quantity of chillies, but the mixture makes just one jar.

Scorching Chilli, Garlic and Cumin Paste

45 dried red chillies
2 heads of fresh garlic
a preserved lemon
4 T (60 ml) fresh powdered cumin
salt
enough olive or sunflower oil to make a wet paste

Soak the dried chillies in a bowl of water overnight, weighing them down with a plate so that they are totally submerged. Put on a pair of gloves and, using the sharp pair of scissors, snip off the stalks, slit the chillies lengthways and scrape out most of the seeds. It doesn't matter if you leave a few behind. Put them into the goblet of a blender fitted with a metal blade. Peel the garlic and add the whole cloves to the blender. Scrape the pulpy flesh away from the quarters preserved lemon, chop roughly, and add to the mixture, along with a good pinch of salt. Now half-cover the ingredients with olive oil, cover the blender and blitz to a fine paste. If the blades clog, add more oil. Tip into a glass or plastic jar, cover with a little more olive oil and seal tightly.

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Mince for supper again? Try this quick easy no-fry method

What a great stand-by beef mince is when you're feeding a family. I'm not wild about mince ( isn't it an annoying and gristly word, 'mince'?) and I loathe the way it goes all lumpy and grey and sticks to the pan when you fry it. However - provided that it's lean mince you're using - it's a good healthy high-protein staple, loved by most kids and teens and also by men hankering after mom's spag. bol or meat loaf.

Here's a quick way to cook beef mince that involves no tedious frying. Using this method, you can get dinner on the table within 30 minutes. Purists will be shocked at the idea of not browning mince first but, if you're cooking for kids, what's the point? You might miss out on that extra layer of flavour that the caramelising of a meat's surface produces, but no child (or husband, for that matter) is likely to notice the difference. It might look grey to begin with, but once you've added all the bits and pieces you'll end up with a mince of a nice reddish-brown and a good flavour.

Another plus about mince: the way I got my kids to appreciate fresh salady ingredients was to present them with mince (or stir-fried chicken) with a whole selection of healthy crunchy toppings. This mix-and-match approach has really worked: I've noticed that, as they get older, they take bigger helpings of lettuce and tomato and cucumber and avocado, and smaller helpings of meat and cheese.

You can serve this within half an hour, but the longer and slower you cook it, the better it is.  If you have a slow cooker, make this in the morning and leave it to bubble all day. Alternatively, mix all the ingredients together in the morning, and place in the fridge to marinate until you get home. The mixture will taste the better for it.

This is a versatile recipe, because you can add any of your favourite seasonings and spices to it: anchovies, sweet chilli sauce, soy sauce, tomato paste,  shavings of black truffle, clippings of dragons' toenails; whatever. This recipe contains the flavourings I use.

Quick, Easy No-Fry Mince
1 kg lean minced beef [ground beef]
2 tins of All Gold tomato-and-onion mix** (or two tins of good canned tomatoes, finely chopped, and with their juice)
1 cup (250 ml) white wine (or red wine, or stock, or water)
salt and freshly milled black pepper
2-3 cloves garlic, finely crushed
a handful of fresh herbs, finely chopped (thyme, oreganum, rosemary, sage)
OR 2 T (30 ml) good dried herbs
4 T (60 ml) tomato sauce [ketchup]
3 T (45 ml) Worcestershire sauce
a squeeze of fresh lemon juice
1 tsp (5 ml) powdered cumin
1 tsp (5 ml) powdered coriander
1 tsp (5ml) paprika
salt and milled pepper, to taste

Put all the ingredients into a big saucepan. Using a fork, stir and stab briskly to break the mince up into granules. Set the pan over a medium heat, bring to the boil, then reduce the heat and allow to bubble gently for 25-30 minutes, until cooked through. If the mixture seems too dry, add a little water.

Serve with boiled or mashed potatoes, or rice, or spooned over fresh buttered rolls.

Or:

For Beef 'Chilli': Add 1 tsp (5ml) of dried red chilli flakes or cayenne pepper (or more if you aren't feeding kids), another teaspoon each of ground cumin and coriander, and a can or two of red kidney beans or white butter beans, drained of their liquid. Cook over a high heat until the liquid in the pan reduces. Serve in hot bowls with the following toppings: grated cheddar, sour cream (or Greek yoghurt whisked with a clove of crushed fresh garlic and a few tablespoons of mayonnaise), shredded iceberg lettuce, chopped fresh green chilli and a handful of chopped fresh coriander. A few slices of freshly baked mielie bread make this meal a real winner.

For beef wraps: Cook the mince well until almost all the liquid has evaporated. Warm a packet of rotis or naan bread, or even pita bread. Serve the mince with the wrapping breads and any or all of following toppings: avocado mashed with a bit of lemon juice, Greek yoghurt, grated cheddar, chopped tomato, chopped cucumber, chopped fresh parsley or coriander or mint, hummous, and so on.

** Tomato-and-onion mix: a useful South African staple consisting of chopped tomatoes and pre-cooked onions in a can. I will not hear a word against this product, which is so useful when you're making a stew or a potjiekos and don't feel like chopping onions.

Serves 4 Print Friendly