Huli Huli Chicken - Recipe and Pron

Besides being fun to say, Huli Huli Chicken is a tasty grilled chicken commonly found at roadside stands in Hawaii. There are tons of recipes out there, and as usual I just kind of read through them all and then develop a recipe based on the most common ingredients I see. Pretty much every recipe had shoyu (soy sauce) and ketchup, and most had pineapple and brown sugar.

If you are going to give this a try, I highly recommend using mesquite as your only wood to get the traditional flavor. In Hawaii they use Kiawe (which some people claim IS mesquite, but I feel it is much milder). Since Kiawe is so hard to get in the mainland, mesquite is close enough.

Ingredients:
1/4 cup shoyu (soy sauce, I use Trader Joe's low sodium)
1/2 cup pureed fresh pineapple
1/4 cup dark brown sugar
1/4 cup ketchup
1 TBSP rice vinegar (I'm using seasoned as it's the only rice vinegar I have)
1" fresh ginger, grated or finely minced
2 cloves garlic finely minced
1/2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
1 whole chicken cut up (I'm using 5 leg quarters)

I haven't tried it, but you could try substituting 1/4 cup pineapple concentrate mixed with 1/4 cup water if you have trouble finding (or paying for) fresh pineapple.

Mix all the marinade ingredients together. Pour about a 1/2 cup in a gallon freezer bag along with the chicken to marinade. Since I'm using soy, I'm keeping the marinade time down to an hour, I feel that soy can take over if left in a marinade too long.

My cooking method is a combination of offset smoking for about an hour and then finishing with high heat grilling (my poor man's version of Moose's reverse sear technique). If you don't feel like dealing with the offset, you can just straight up grill it, but it won't has as much smoke flavor.

Here I have a combination of charcoal and Kiawe embers on one side of the kettle, chicken on the other side. Bottom vents will be only about 1/4 open, top vents wide open. Basting and rotating every 15 minutes. Temps were from 250-275 for this stage. Not using any kind of diffuser cause I don't really care about temps for this cook.





Almost an hour in, thigh temps are around 160 so moving on to the grill stage.




After an hour, spread the coals out and finishing with a sear until thighs are 180 degrees with more basting.




And the finished product. Very tasty! Wifey wants more pineapple taste and less soy, but I like it as is. Give it a shot, if anything you get to say Huli Huli Chicken all day when family asks you whats for dinner. :becky:



If you are interested, my technique for creating a bed of charcoal and hard wood embers in kettle can be found here:
http://www.bbq-brethren.com/forum/showthread.php?t=80529

keale said:

Mark, don't want to hijack your thread, try this basic recipe from here...
Huli Huli means "to turn"...which is what they do...normally they marinate chicken and put in wire racks, and cook like you said over Kiawe wood coals... turning several times, the chicken are about 3 ft above the coals... or you can smoke them or just grill them like usual...
(Local style: we don't put pineapple juice or pineapple)

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Not a hijack at all and I appreciate the feedback. Pineapple purée/concentrate was only in about a third of the recipes I researched, but I also have the "wifey factor". She is not a fan of soy sauce and loves pineapple, so I knew if I didn't have pineapple she probably would't like it. Ya gotta do what you gotta do to keep the better half happy!

Bigmista said:

WE have a guy at one of our markets that makes huli huli on a big rotisserie. I'll take pics and post tomorrow.

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See if you can pry his recipe from him. :-D

I have some pics somewhere I'll try to dig up of the traditional method of cooking Huli Huli, kind of what you are talking about. It's like a large rotisserie over a bed of Kiawe embers, and they turn whole chickens over the embers.