Thai Chicken Satay - Healthy, Hungry, and Happy

It’s been a little over a week since we’ve been back and we’re already craving the foods we left behind. During our stay in Chiang Mai, we took a cooking course. Cliff and I each cooked 4 different dishes. One of the dishes Cliff cooked was chicken satay with peanut sauce. The sauce was amazing! It had such great texture and the flavors were unlike any chicken satay we’ve had in the states. The chicken was somehow cooked to perfection. It was grilled but managed to keep all the juices in tact. I find this near impossible when cooking chicken. It always tastes dry and overcooked to me even when it’s marinated…I don’t know how they did it!

We busted out the cook book we received from the class and decided to try our hand at chicken satay. One thing I learned about thai cooking is that it’s really very simple: few ingredients and easy cooking. On the other hand, some of these few ingredients are actually hard to find in the US. For example, bird’s eye chili’s (really tiny, red, super hot chili’s) and kaffir lime leaves. I’m sure they are somewhere out there, but where? I have no idea.

Luckily, for this recipe, we actually found almost all of the ingredients. Here are the ingredients:

Chicken Satay with Peanut Sauce

1.5 pound of chicken, cut in strips
Bamboo skewers, soaked in water for a few minutes

Chicken Marinade:

2 teaspoons curry powder
pinch of pepper
pinch of salt
1 tbsp sweet condensed milk
1/2 cup coconut cream- you can find this in cans. Just make sure the can says ” first pressed” or “first squeezed” that means it’s cream. Otherwise, it could be coconut milk which is more diluted.
2 tbsp cooking oil

Peanut Sauce:

1 tbsp cooking oil
1 tbsp panang curry paste- We could only find red curry paste so we just added nutmeg to it to give more of a panang curry flavor.
1/4 cup ground peanuts (very fine)
2 teaspoons palm sugar- We found this in Whole Foods. If you don’t have palm sugar or can’t find it, you can use honey, it tastes very similar.
1/2 tbsp fish sauce
1/4 cup coconut cream
1 cup coconut cream
1 tbsp tamarind paste- We randomly found this at an Indian market. We looked at Whole Foods, but they didn’t have it.

*We multiplied this recipe by 4

First, we marinated the sliced up chicken for about 30 minutes.

While the chicken was marinating, we soaked the skewers in water. I think the skewers are pretty easy to find. I believe we found these a while back at a regular grocery store.

Once the chicken was done, we skewered each piece and threw it on the grill.

While the chicken was cooking, we mixed together the peanut sauce.

We used the coffee grinder to grind up the peanuts! Good thing since I never grind actual coffee.

First, I heated up the cooking oil in the wok. Once it was nice and hot, I added the panang curry paste and fried it until it was fragrant.

Next, I added the ground up peanuts, stirring for about 5 seconds, then the coconut cream. You can definitely tell a difference between coconut cream and coconut milk. The cream looks a lot like yogurt, whereas the milk is a liquid.

Finally, I added the remaining ingredients and stirred until it thickened a bit. Our sauce was a little more liquidy than the sauce he made in Thailand, but it still tasted awesome!