Grilled Chicken & Peaches with Chipotle Sauce and Fried Chick Peas
Today, June 25th will be the last June 25th where Siobhan and I aren’t out celebrating our anniversary. We are getting married exactly one year from today and we both made a pact to start eating and living healthier lifestyles. It’s not like we eat bad to begin with, because most of our meals are prepared with the freshest, local ingredients we can find. We eat tons of seafood and exercise regularly (as well as beginning to train for the 2011 Boston Marathon), but it’s the snacking in between meals that kills me.
Recently Siobhan mentioned that I should start eating more fruit so I went out to the store to pick some up. While I was there, I had a great idea for dinner and my mission to load up on fruit got sidetracked.
I did happen to buy a dozen fresh peaches because they looked amazing sitting there, but I wasn’t planning on snacking on them. I couldn’t remember the last time I had a peach, so I picked one up and bit right into it. It was so ripe and juicy that we had to call for a clean up in Aisle 5. My entire forearm was dripping wet with the tart, sweet juices that ran from the bright orange flesh.
I finished my shopping while brainstorming, and headed back to the kitchen to put together this interesting idea of mine. In the past, I have grilled stone fruits and topped them with vanilla ice cream as a dessert, but I have never used them in a savory dish.
I figured that if I balanced the sweet flavors of the grilled peaches with something else, equally as bold and that had contrasting flavors, the dish just might work. The smoky, and spicy flavors of Chipotle peppers in Adobo sauce was the perfect compliment. Chipotle peppers are Jalapeno peppers that have been smoked and submerged into this creamy, brick red, Adobo sauce.
I spooned a few of the shriveled up chilies into the blender along with three whole fresh peaches, some lime juice, salt, pepper, and a healthy squirt of honey. After tasting, re-seasoning, tasting, and re-seasoning some more, the sauce was finally perfect. From the start, you could clearly taste the fresh peach puree, quickly followed by a burst of heat and then an underlying smokiness that lingered on your palate.
I transferred the creation into a squeeze bottle a la Bobby Flay where it waited to adorn my dish. I had been marinating a few chicken breasts in what I like to call a Margarita bath.
Tons of fresh lime juice, cilantro, jalapenos, salt, and pepper. I only use this combination for quick marinades because the acidity in the lime juice begins to “cook” the chicken and it can get kind of nasty. A few hours at most and all of those flavors get injected into the meat perfectly. Halving peaches was alot harder than I expected, especially since the fruit was extremely ripe. I didn’t have the patience to slice down the bias, and softly twist the two halves open so Siobhan took over.
My peaches looked like silly putty, while hers came out completely symmetrical. I simply coated the inner flesh in some vegetable oil and fired up the grill.
As soon as the chicken breasts hit the grates, the fresh citrus from the lime and the heat from the jalapeno filled the air. I oiled down the left side of the grill and carefully placed my fruit down to achieve beautiful grill marks. As long as your grill is super hot, the fruit only takes a few minutes to get soft. All of the natural sugars in the fruit start to caramelize and a sticky crust starts to form. This is when you take the fruit off and cover it in tin foil or plastic wrap to finish cooking. I plated the grilled chicken and peaches together and sprinkled them with some shaved green onion and drizzled my peachy-chipotle sauce on top.
To give the dish some texture, I deep fried a can of chick peas and violently tossed the warm beans in salt and ancho chile powder. The outer skins get nice and crispy while the warm center still melts in your mouth like rich hummus. I sprinkled the fried chick peas all over the dish and it looked sporadically enticing. The sweet and spicy combination turned out to be a huge hit. Siobhan rarely eats chicken because she says that it doesn’t have much flavor but she was licking her plate clean and popping the extra fried Garbanzos like it was popcorn.
The seductive peach, especially once it was grilled, melted in your mouth and then was interrupted by a burst of smoky heat from the complex sauce. I opened a bottle of the 2006 Penner-Ash Syrah from Oregon to bounce off this unique dish. Penner-Ash is known for their high end Pinot Noir, but I felt that this bold recipe deserved something with a little more “UMPH”. The wine was loaded with flavors of blackberry jam, cherry, and plum along with undertones of white pepper and smoky cedar. It was a perfect balance of Barossa Valley Shiraz style and French Croze-Hermitage style. Massive and abrasive at times, knocking you back in your seat and double-clutching your glass but gentle and balanced at other times, allowing the food to be the star.
The structure and mouthfeel of the wine was dense and quite smooth, as was the peachy-chipotle sauce. The two played terrifically with each other. Now that all of the peaches were gone after dinner, I had no choice but to snack on a box of Cheez-Its like I normally do. Oh well… at least I got my daily serving of fruit.
