Honey Soy Chicken Marinade For Boneless Thighs And Breast

For chicken wings, use the Honey Soy Wings recipe. For drumsticks and bone-in thighs, use the Honey Soy Baked Chicken recipe.

Honey Soy Chicken – marinade and sauce

This is a Honey Soy chicken marinade I’ve been using for most of my adult life which is direct copycat of the store bought bottled marinades. Except unlike store bought where a quick inspection of the label reveals it contains a mere 0.5% of honey (I felt so indignant when I saw this!!), this is actually made with plenty of honey!!! (In case you are wondering, most of the sweetness comes from cheap syrups like glucose or golden syrup) This is my Rolls Royce of Honey Soy Chicken recipes. For midweek, I use my quick no-marinade stove and baked versions.

What you need for Honey Soy Chicken

Here’s what you need for this Honey Soy Chicken. I feel like there’s a good chance you already have all these ingredients!!

Chinese cooking wine (“shoaxing wine”) is the secret ingredient here. Without it, you will really notice that the flavour is a bit too one dimensional, especially the sauce. Used in practically all cooked Chinese recipes – such as stir fries and noodles. Substitutes in order of preference (best first) – dry sherry, Mirin, cooking sake. Best non alcoholic substitute is chicken stock. Some Recipe Trivia! You don’t need cooking wine when making Honey Soy Chicken on the stove or in the oven because you cook the chicken in the sauce and this gives the sauce greater depth of flavour. But when cooking on the BBQ, we don’t have that option so both the sauce and the marinade needs an extra dash of flavour which we get from the Chinese cooking wine. Though this recipe particularly caters to grilled chicken, it’s still excellent for stovetop cooking when you want a premium version of the stove or oven version (this has more sauce and marinating adds flavour).

How to make Honey Soy Chicken

And here’s how it’s made –

mix up a batch of the sauce save some for basting (so it’s not tainted by uncooked chicken) save some to make the sauce use the rest for marinating

Do not use residual marinade to make the sauce or for basting. For basting, we need clean sauce for hygiene purposes (because we do frequent basting in this recipe). For the Sauce, if you boil the used marinade the sauce comes out murky – just not pleasant.

What to serve with Honey Soy Chicken

The rice you spy in the photo above is Pineapple Fried Rice! is coming on Wednesday! It’s a dead set perfect match with this chicken. 🙂 But don’t fret! This is a chicken dish that’s highly versatile – it’s semi Asian but also totally Western, so it’s the sort of dish that will go with anything from Fried Rice to Macaroni Salad, the Greek Chickpea Salad I shared a couple of weeks go, or even an Asian Vermicelli Noodle Salad. You get the drift – it will suit many many sides! Here are some ideas:

SIDE DISH SUGGESTIONS

SIDE SALAD SUGGESTIONS

Also, if you’re considering this recipe for a BBQ feast, you’ll find all my favourite things to grill right here in my BBQ Recipes collection. Note: the batch depicted in the photos and video is a bit less than what the recipe calls for – I had to sacrifice some for Dozer 🐶 having forgotten to get food for HIS dinner. 😂 – Nagi x