Posted April 01, 2015
ZenWan: Fortunately the simple local Portuguese food is always good - grilled fish or chicken with fries and salad and great bread, not to mention great wine. And my favourite is chicken piri-piri, chicken with hot sauce - if they know you, they'll make the sauce extra hot - yum!
Hmmmm I'm getting hungry!
moonshineshadow: That sounds really tasty! Do you have a recipe for the chicken piri-piri that you can recommend? If not I'll just go searching on the internet, since it sounds great. Hmmmm I'm getting hungry!
The chickens are always small ones, and barbecued over an open fire - a long distance from the heat, so they cook long and slow. You can do that at home (using either chicken pieces or halved chickens) under an overhead grill, if you keep the chicken some distance from the grill and keep basting it with sauce. As for the sauce, there are thousands of recipes - I always keep a bottle of whiskey filled with dried chiles that I either grow or buy here. I add a few lemon and bay leaves to that, and then when I come to do the chicken, I use that as a base, with some olive oil lots of crushed garlic because I love garlic, and extra lemon juice. I salt the chicken, then marinate it in that sauce for at least a few hours, and then grill for a few hours more, until the chicken is very tender. Turn it from time to time and keep basting.
How hot you make the chicken depends, of course, on how many chiles you put in the sauce, and what type they are. Here it is easy to buy the tiny African ones, dried, that are really hot, but you can add any type you like, and you don't have to prepare that whiskey mix in advance, of course. Just add a few chiles to your sauce before you marinate the chicken.
I did a quick search, and this looked like a good site
http://www.emmashouseinportugal.com/food/portuguese-chicken-how-to-make-piri-piri/
Enjoy!