Volcano Chicken!

I am not a Thai food expert, but I do love to eat it. Milwaukee has a had, in my opinion, some great Thai restaurant options:

• The King & I (and, formerly, The King & I  II)
• Mekong Café
• Bang Thai Cuisine (now closed)

My favorite dish by far is Volcano Chicken. It features small pieces of fried chicken breast, covered in a sizzling sauce that is both spicy and sweet and is absolutely delicious. I could eat this food once a week (and I practically did for a year or two when I was in college).

With both King & I II and Bang Thai closing, my consumption of Volcano Chicken has had a serious dip. So I thought I'd search for a recipe. And what do you know... another local put one together on his blog: Volcano Chicken - Milwaukee Style.

I put a different spin on it to make it a bit healthier and easier to cook. Specifically I...

• Didn't use cabbage. 
• Used pre-cut carrots
• Used baked chicken; cooked using my previous post

So basically, I made volcano sauce and put it over chicken and carrots. I also added a little broccoli on the side, because that's how I roll.

Here is the sauce ingredients, mostly from the blog's recipe but with a few tweaks of my own:

The sauce just after adding all the ingredients

• 4 cloves of garlic, minced (I used minced garlic in a jar from Spice World... because it's easy)
• 1 cup of water
• 1/2 cup of chicken stock
• 1 tbsp palm sugar
• 2 tbsp brown sugar
• 3 tbsp dark soy sauce
• 1 tbsp of honey
• 1 tbsp tamarind concentrate
• 1 tsp chili garlic sauce (I didn't use this but only because I forgot to buy it)
• 1 Thai chili, chopped (I used two and tried to remove a lot of the seeds)
• I also added some red pepper flakes. I like it hot.

And here are the instructions:

To your sauce pan, add all of the sauce ingredients, bringing to a boil. Once boiled, reduce the heat and cook until it reduces, approximately 25 minutes. Once reduced, remove from the heat and let cool. Now keep in mind this has a good heat to it, not too spicy. If you want more spice, I suggest adding chili flakes, or chili flakes that you can buy in the Asian marts that are in a oil.

For my tastes, this made enough sauce for about two servings; it reduces quite a bit. Use your best judgement for how far to reduce the sauce. From eating it so much in the past, I am quite familiar with the sauce so I shot for a familiar consistency. I'd say it was a little thinner than honey and took a little longer than 25 minutes.

Here is the sauce after I decided it was done. You can see how thick it gets.

I also followed the recipe's instructions for doing a quick sear on the carrots. What he says is:

Next get your large skillet heated on a high heat. Add the olive oil, and toss in the cabbage and carrots. The goal is to let this mixture sear, and become somewhat blackened, but not burnt. The high heat brings out the sweetness of these vegetables, and builds a really killer flavor. Once seared on one side, approximately a few minutes, flip, and get a sear going on the other side.

Chicken ready for sauce.

That leaves the chicken, which was already cooked so was a piece of cake. I took one or two breasts, cut them into smallish pieces, and then just plated it and added the carrots and sauce.

And that's it! This was very tasty... the magic is in the sauce reduction. It gets good and muddled and the 30+ minutes of heating brings out a great flavor.

The finished product