Trinidadian Brown Stew Chicken

The SEasOning

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here – Summer showed up and things got busy. But never fear your brown chef is here.

I decided to jump back into this with a pretty straight forward recipe. This is another one of those dishes that uses burnt sugar for flavour and colour. I’ve always been interested about where this technique comes from, but I’ve found nothing concrete: there is a Basque Cheesecake that uses burnt sugar, so maybe the Spanish brought this over?

Enough prattling on. Let’s get to it.

This makes enough to feed two people and should come together in less than 45 min. This scales up very easily. Also if you want to increase the decadence of this, add in a splash of coconut milk. This also works really well with bone-in chicken legs. This dish pairs really well with macaroni pie, rice, or even roti and a nice garden salad.

The Ingredients

• 4 boneless skinless chicken thighs – Washed, cleaned, and cut into 1/2″ cubes
• 1 heaped tbsp of Green Seasoning
• 2 tsp dried thyme
• 1 tomato diced
• 2 dashes soy sauce
• 4 dashes Lea & Perins
• 1 hot pepper of choice
• 1 tbsp brown sugar
• 3 tbsp canola oil
• Salt and pepper to taste

The Method

1. Mix together the chicken, seasoning, thyme, tomato, soy sauce, Lea & Perrins, and the hot pepper. Let marinate for a couple hours. Ideally overnight.
2. In a pot over medium (medium high if you’re confident about this step) heat your oil and add your sugar. I suggest adding the sugar when the oil is cold. It’ll make your life a little easier and have your chicken sitting next to your pot ready to go.
3. Cook the sugar till it’s DEEP DARK BROWN and very bubbly and foamy. You’re going to need to go past the caramel stage. Once it hits caramel, watch it like a hawk. It goes from caramel – burnt – garbage real quick.
4. Once your sugar is at the right colour, very quickly, but carefully add all your chicken to the pot (along with any juices that have sprung from the marination process) and slap a lid on real quick. Let that hang out for 30 seconds then give it a stir to make sure all the chicken bits are coated in the burnt sugar.
5. Reduce the heat to medium and keep stirring till the chicken starts springing some water. Once that happens you can put the lid back on and let the chicken cook for 5-10 min stirring occasionally. You’re waiting for this initial water to dry up. As the water dries up, the sauce is going to get darker and darker. You want this to happen. This is the sugar caramelizing further and developing a rich dark flavour.
6. Once most of this water has dried up, add in just enough water to barely cover the chicken. Alternatively you can add in coconut milk. Keep the heat at medium and continue to cook till the chicken is cooked through. Adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper to taste.
   NOTE: depending on how juicy your chicken and or tomato is, you may not ever need to add any additional water. When I made the batch for this post the chicken sprung enough water to cook everything a leave a nice thick gravy. Once past step 4 this recipe is quite forgiving.

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