Tender, tasty chicken breast, cured in miso, and pan fried to perfection. You are gonna love this! It’s super easy to do, you just need to plan ahead. The idea is simple : get some chicken breasts, rub miso on them, wait a day, or two, or three. Pan fry them, make sauce. Eat!
Ingredients and Prep
For 2 :
- One (that’s two halves) skin-on chicken breast, taken off the bone, skin intact.
- Two tablespoons medium brown miso
- Two tablespoons sake
Mix up sake and miso into a spreadable paste, and spread it over the meat side of the chicken breasts :
The picture above shows how I do it. I use boneless chicken breasts, skin on, and I spread the miso only over the meat side, and leave the skin side clean.
Some fine points to note :
- Chicken breasts – I think this recipe is ideal with chicken breasts, and not thighs. Go ahead and do whatever you want, but there is something about miso chicken breast. Getting boneless, skin-on breast might be a problem in a standard supermarket in Singapore. Either buy a whole chicken and do it yourself, or go to a butcher willing to do what you ask.
- No miso on the skin side – you will see why soon. You want crispy skin, and miso burns when you fry it!
The Wait…..
Wrap the chicken up tightly with cling wrap, and leave them in the fridge.
The heart of this recipe is a long marinate with the miso. The miso will flavour, tenderise, and somewhat cure the meat. It will make the chicken breast super tender, delicious, juicy. Wait at least overnight, but why not two, three days? From a food safety point of view, I say, three days is max, if the chicken was fresh to start with. Do not exceed the use-by date of the package!
Cook!
After the chicken and miso have got to know one another, unwrap the chicken. You might find that the miso has absorbed into the meat. If not, scrap off excess.
Place a fry pan on medium heat, splash in some oil.
Lovingly lower the chicken, skin side down, onto the hot oil. It should sizzle at once.
Let them sit there, for a bit. The chicken should spend most of its cooking time on the skin side, its a bit like pan-frying a fish fillet. You have to be patient and wait, till you see the chicken breast starting to cook – the edges will turn white, and the whiteness start to move up (I think its something like 10 minutes). You can now flip:
Once you have done the flip, you need to lower the heat a bit, and be a bit careful, because the miso on the meat side could burn. It should need only three or four minutes more. It’s important not to overcook. At this point, I will keep prodding the chicken with a finger – is should just turn firm, but not tough. You could also finish this in an oven, set at 180 degrees C, for a few minutes.
If you have a meat thermometer, the target internal temperature is about 63 deg. Remove from heat at this point.
Let the chicken breast rest for a bit in the pan – if you have a thermometer, you will see the temperature rise a few degrees.
Eat!
Slice the chicken up, if you want.
It should look like this – just a little bit pink, a slight pink hue, in the center, with crispy, brown skin. Yay. You want chicken with skin so you can enjoy the crispy skin with this!
You can easily make a sauce in the fry pan – its now full of chicken flavour and burnt miso. Add a little butter if you want. Splash in some sake (or stock), scrap a bit to clean the pan :
Pour sauce over the chicken. Garnish. EAT!!!!
Best with steamed pearl (Japanese) rice!