Grilled Lemongrass Chicken is a perfect make ahead dish for a busy weekday dinner. If you have the habit of doing weekly meal prep on a weekend to make your life easier, this recipe is an excellent dish to include.
In fact, the longer you infused your meats with the aromatics, the more flavourful it gets. To get the perfect citrusy flavoured chicken, I would usually leave the marinade in for at least 8 hours.
However if you are short of time, 1-2 hours would be sufficient too.
Once you are ready to cook, simply leave it at room temperature for at least 30 minutes before popping into your oven or air fryer for a fuss free meal.
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Lemongrass
Lemongrass is an essential herb that is used across the cooking of the Indochinese Peninsula, such as Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia.
While it is named lemongrass, this fragrant herb has no relationship with lemon. Rather, it’s a type of grass that produce a citrusy smell. They are related to citronella grass though often being mistaken for.
Living in Southeast Asia, lemongrass is easily available from small groceries stores to major supermarkets. It is widely used in Singapore from marinade to tea and even curries. However if you are living in the western part of the world, you can probably get it from Asian grocery stores.
My first encounter with Lemongrass Chicken was at a local Vietnamese eatery. The fragrance from the lemongrass was very enticing, appetising yet not overpowering. It was also a favourite of my children. Juicy, tender and super flavourful chicken are really hard to resist.
Apart from chicken, you can use it for pork chop and curries for Southeat Asian cusine.
Other Ingredients
While lemongrass is an important ingredient in this recipe, we should not forget about the other supporting characters. To spice up the dish, we need garlic, shallots, and sweetener to balance out the flavour.
For sweetener, I chose to use gula melaka as I love the sweet smokey taste which compliments the lemongrass. Gula Melaka, or Palm Sugar is a sweetner from the Palm Tree. This is a essential Southeast Asian sweetener that is use from savoury dishes all the way to desserts.
How Else can you Use Gula Melaka
Many a times, I will add it to my tea as well. In fact Gula Melaka Latte is quite a popular drink at some of our local coffee shops where you add Gula Melaka Syrup into Espresso and Milk.
However, if it’s hard to get from your groceries stores, brown sugar, white sugar or even honey can do the job as well.
Technique for the Aromatics
In order to infused the herb into the meat, minced it up using a blender before rubbing all over it. Traditionally, Pestle and Motar are the go to tools to pound all the herbs together. However, in a modern family, it can be hard to find this stoneware.
What is the difference, you may ask.
In most blenders big or small, you may need to add a little water to get the dry ingredients going. This in turn dilute the taste of the herbs and they get a little soggy. Ask any older aunties in this region, they will swear by pestle and motar. Because the poundng breaks up the herb but doesnt really minced it. As there is no need to add any water when you pound, the aromas are more concentrated.
But if you are making this in big batch, blend away, I say. Because it’s just too time consuming to pound so much herbs.
How To Make
Step 1 – Using a mini blender, blend up the aromatics up finely. You can also add in the rest of the marinates such as palm sugar, Fish sauce, black pepper, cooking oil.
Step 2 – Place your boneless chicken thigh in a container for the marinate to work their magic
Step 3 – Rub the marinate all over the chicken, ensuring that both from and back are cover with it.
Step 4 – Marinate the chicken from 1 hour to 24 hours. If your intention is to batch make, freeze them seperately using ziplocks or baking paper.
Step 5 – When it’s time to cook them, defroze them or place them in room temperature for 30 minutes. Romove as much aromatics as possible because they will burn. Preheat your air-fryer to 180 degrees Celsius. Bake for 15 minutes.
Step 6 – Once it’s done, rest for 5 minutes, serve.
Tips
- Infused the aromatics for as long as you can. The longer you infused, the taste will get stronger.
- Try to remove the herbs before you cook it because it will burn after grilling in high heat and thus your chicken will get bitter.
How Can I Serve?
In Vietnam, this Grilled Lemongrass Chicken is often serve with fresh rice noodles with a side salad and dipping sauce, Nuoc Cham. You can also have it with rice or as a main dish with roasted potatos and bread or use it in a sandwich.
FAQ
- Can I replace Gula Melaka? – Yes, with sugar or honey
- How long do I marinate the meat? – Minimally 1 to 24 hour but you can marinate and freeze it too.
- What happened if I do not remove my herbs before cooking? – They get burnt and turn bitter
- Why do I need to remove the outer layer of the lemongrass? – It’s usually dried up and had lost the flavour.
- Do lemongrass tenderise the meat? Yes, it does.
- I bought a huge bag of Lemongrass, what do I do with the rest? Chop them up and freeze them in batch for future use. You can make tea with it too.
- Can I just use lemongrass and not the rest of the herbs? – No as the other herbs give a well belance aroma.
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Grilled Lemongrass Chicken
Equipment
- 1 Cutting Board
- 1 KItchen Knife
- 1 Blender
- 1 Air Fryer/ Oven
Ingredients
- 2 boneless chicken thigh
- 3 stalks lemongrass
- 4 -5 shallots
- 5 garlic cloves
- 2 cilantro roots
- 1.5 tbsp fish sauce
- 1.5 tbsp light soy sauce
- 1.5 tbsp gula melaka
- 2 tbsp cooking oil
- black pepper
Instructions
- Prep the aromatics. Slice around 1/2 cm from the top and bottom and peel off the outer layer of lemongrass. Chop each lemongrass into thumb size. Peel the skin of the shallot and garlic cloves.
- Blend/ pound the aromatice of lemongrass, shallot, garlic and cilantro root into a rough paste. When its done, add in the marinate of into the paste and mix well.
- Pat the chicken dry and place them on a tray or plate. Transfer the marinate paste onto the chicken and rub them in.
- Marinate the chicken for at least 4hours to overnight.
- Remove the chicken from the fridge at least 30min before cooking to bring the tempreture to room temperature.
- Pre-heat the oven or air fryer to 180 degrees.
- Once the chicken has rested for 30 min in room temperature, remove as much of the aromatics as possible as possible.
- Lined your baking tray with baking paper and bake it for 15 minutes.
- Once it’s done, remove from the oven, rest the chicken for 5 minutes before slicing into bite size.
Notes
- The outer layer of the lemongrass has been dried out therefore do not offer any flavours. Removing the first outer layer will maximize the flavours.
- Do not transfer the sauce over unless you want a soggy chicken.
- Aromatics will burn in high heat, thus will create a bitter taste. The herbs will also be tough to chew. So it’s best to remove as much as you can.
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