Jet Tila’s 7-Ingredient Secret to Better Barbecue Chicken
Slashing the chicken creates more surface area for sauces to soak into the meat.
A Thai shortcut for bold, weeknight-easy chicken
In Thailand, aromatic, spice-paste-slathered gai yang is so ubiquitous its name translates simply as “grilled chicken,” a name that doesn’t do justice to its deep, complex flavors.
Recalling childhood family trips, Thai chef Jet Tila remembers the scent of spiced whole chickens as they roasted over charcoal. “It’s a pretty romantic dish,” he says. “Everyone has their own sense memory of their favorite gai yang.”
As a professional, however, Tila found it a challenging recipe to cook for thousands of diners. Traditional gai yang can be both labor- and ingredient-intensive. “My family would have, like, 50 ingredients—like garlic, lemon grass, fish sauce, sweet soy, curry powder and cumin,” he says.
But inspiration for a way to streamline struck in the form of a jar of Thai red curry paste, which already contains many of those ingredients. Using that as a base, he created a marinade that requires nothing more than the addition of coconut milk, curry powder, garlic, sugar and salt.
We took his lead and applied his sauce to bone-in chicken thighs that we slash before marinating to create more surface area for flavors to penetrate. This ensures a boldly flavored gai yang that requires seven—not 50—ingredients and just 35 minutes of hands-on cooking time.
Shaula Clark
Shaula Clark is a Boston-based writer and editor. Her six-year stint as managing editor of Milk Street’s magazine absolutely leveled up her cooking game—though her trusty canine sous chef, Roxie the Schipperke, remains unimpressed unless cheese is involved. In the kitchen, she likes to get weird, with experiments yielding both great success (absinthe sorbet) and dismal failure (liquid smoke-infused rice paper “bacon”). Thanks to a terrifyingly productive tomato garden, Milk Street’s salmorejo—a luscious Andalusian tomato soup—has become a particular favorite recipe. She is, for the record, also staunchly pro-ketchup. Disagreements over her stance on condiments may be sent to .
