Since I’ve been learning a little more about cooking, I’ve been trying to focus a little less on just grilling meat. Aside from a 2.5 lb prime grade cowboy cut ribeye that I burned the other day (it was salvagable once I trimmed away a black layer), I’ve got the grilling thing mostly down.
So I started really looking into different dishes than I normally would make and I focused on using non-traditional exotic spices like Garam Masala. This week we started playing with cooking with cocoa and chilis. It’s farily common knowledge in the culinary world that cocoa powder and chilis complement each other. Even the Mayans used chilis in their hot chocolate. And now Lindt makes a chocolate bar with chilis. So we tried two dishes.
First was cocoa chili steak. It was a choice ribeye crusted with cocoa powder and crushed smoked chipotle dust had a sweet and hot aftertaste. The butter dripped tri-color rotini was a nice complement.
A much better example of the combination was the cocoa chili chicken mole pronounced (MOH-lay). The mole was entirely unique, the taste was both sweet and chocolatey, the cocoa was unmistakable. That said, every bite had a very slight aftertaste of chipotle. I’m not much for spicy hot food, but the post-bite burn was just enough to make it interesting. I was really happy with the tender sweet potato and the vidalia onions, which had absorbed so much of the sauce that they had a very sweet flavor. Overall, I was impressed with this recipe.
Not the exact same thing, but a similar idea – this is an appetizer recipe that I’m fond of:
– cut skinless/boneless chicken breasts into pieces that are roughly “bite-sized”
– marinade the pieces for about an hour in a mixture of soy and black bean sauce
– mix together some granular sugar and cayenne pepper (powdered)
– put the pieces of marindaded chicken onto a cookie sheet & sprinkle the sugar/cayenne pepper mix onto them
– standard poultry cooking instructions (15-20 min at 350)
Great recipe. I cooked this last week as a for the family dinner and everyone loved it. Thanks.
Seve – reseller hosting
I’m glad people are starting to treat Chocolate as a raw ingredient rather that just for a desert! I find when using chocolate for cooking savoury dishes you need the purest Cocoa so the sugar doesn’t interfere with the seasoning. Apart from grinding your own Nib’s , next time try Venezuelan-black , the Nut and Spice goes really well with Red Meat