Recipe: Chicken in Barbecue Sauce (Delia Smith)

I am always on the lookout for easy, quick and delicious recipes and this Delia Smith recipe for chicken in barbecue sauce ticks all the boxes. For readers living in the UK, this will be a great dish to prepare for your mothers or wives on Mothering Sunday (ie Mother's Day on 10th March) this weekend if you're not taking them out for a meal.

This dish requires very little preparation but is big on taste. I chose to use chicken maryland (the thigh and drumstick), but you can use all thigh, drumsticks or even chicken breast for the more health-conscious. The chicken is patted dry and then rubbed with olive oil and pepper and roasted for 20 minutes to give it a nice crispy skin before the barbecue sauce is poured on and cooked for a further 20 minutes. The original Delia recipe's cooking time is 55 minutes in total, but I have cooked chicken maryland many times before in my kitchen so I revised cooking time as necessary.

The chicken in barbecue sauce was served with a brown rice salad (click for recipe). I would definitely make this again, chicken was very tender and love the flavorful sauce. You can cut down the light soy sauce to 4 tablespoons if you prefer your food to be less salty. This barbecue sauce will also be good on pork ribs.

Chicken in Barbecue Sauce
Recipe adapted from Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course
Preparation time: 5 minutes
Cooking time: 40 minutes
Serves 4

Ingredients
4 chicken maryland (thigh and drumstick)
1 tsp olive oil (enough to coat the chicken)
Freshly ground black pepper
1 medium onion, chopped small

For the barbecue sauce
5 tbsp dry white wine (or dry cider)
5 tbsp light soy sauce
1 heaped tsp ground ginger
1 heaped tsp mustard powder
1 heaped tsp tomato puree
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 tbsp soft brown sugar

Fresh thyme, to garnish

1. Preheat oven to 200°C.

2. First of all, make sure the chicken maryland (or joints) are absolutely dry by patting them with kitchen paper. Then rub the chicken with the olive oil and season with freshly ground pepper (NO salt required at this point as it will be seasoned with the sauce later).

3. Place the chicken in a shallow roasting tin, tucking the chopped onion in amongst them and sprinkling with a few drops of olive oil. Place in the oven and allow to cook for 20 minutes.

4. Meanwhile, combine all the ingredients for the sauce in a bowl and whisk with a fork until blended thoroughly.

5. Once the chicken has been in the oven for about 20 minutes, remove from oven and pour the barbecue sauce over the chicken. Cook for a further 20 minutes, basting frequently. (twice would be sufficient)

6. Garnish with fresh thyme and serve immediately. You can serve it with a brown rice salad like I did or just  white rice or potatoes.

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I am submitting this to the "Cook Like Delia Smith" bloghop which I am co-hosting with Zoe of Bake for Happy Kids and Mich of Piece of Cake. To join, simply cook or bake any recipe from any Delia Smith websites or cookbooks and blog hop with us for the whole month of March 2013.

Your post must be a current post i.e. posted in March 2013 - please do not link older posts.Please mention Cook like a Star in your post and link back to Zoe of Bake for Happy Kids, Mich of Piece of Cake and Baby Sumo of Eat your heart out.

You can get the HTML code here: get the InLinkz code (Click on the link, copy and paste the HTML code into your blog post where you want the blog hop list to appear. Make sure you are in HTML mode when you paste in the code)

Happy cooking! Do check out the other bloggers recipe below:

I am also submitting this to my friend mui mui's Little Thumbs Up "Tomato" event.