cybercat wrote:
> After asking for, and receiving many lovely recipes for chicken thighs, I
> studied them all carefully and proceeded to create my own.
>
>
>
> What was in my mind was that kind of lovely sweetish, spicy morselly dark
> meat we find in some Chinese dishes ... which required a bit of sweetness I
> did not see in the other recipes. (I did not realize this is what I wanted
> until after I asked for recipes, of course!)
>
> While washing the thighs I removed the skin and then discovered that
> deboning required only a couple of cuts with a sharp paring knife. So I
> deboned them.
>
> In a rectangular medium-large pyrex baking dish I poured most of a bottle
> of dark soy sauce, a splash of cider vinegar, a half cup of sugar, four
> large crushed and chopped cloves of garlic, and a generous shake of Goya
> adobo seasoning.
>
> I put the thighs in and covered and refrigerated them.
>
> I plan to cook them tomorrow.
>
> I want to slow cook them until the marinade thickens to make a sticky brown
> coating, and serve them with broccolli and rice.
>
> Question: is it actually safe to marinate them for 12-15 hours in the fridge
> then cook them in the marinade?

You can, but what I would do is either pour off the marinade (or toss
it and make new), cook it separately in a pan to reduce/thicken, and
add it at the last 15 minutes to finish the dish. The problem is you
have a lot of soy which, when reduced gets extremely salty.

>
> If so, should I slow cook them via simmer or just bake them in the pyrex on
> a fairly low temp?

Personally, I'd bake them at 300-350 until done and finish with the
sauce later. They are already marinated, so they have the flavor.
Cooking the sauce down and browning it on the chicken will be tasty.

>
> If it is not safe to cook them in the marinade, I can drain is and add new
> liquid and cook them that way.

You can, but you might not want to. I personally don't eat my
marinades (cooked or not) because of Salmonella and other potential
nasties. But I'm pretty anal about food hygiene because DH is very
sensitive.

>
> Thanks in advance for any help.

FWIW, I use soy sauce sparingly due to the salt factor. One trick to
getting that "Chinese" BBQ/sweet/hot taste is Sriracha sauce. It's
hot, but there is flavor to it that I cannot reproduce any other way.
I also sometimes use pineapple and plum preserves as sweeteners when
cooking chinese. It gives a sweetness with a fruity undertone, which
is common in some types of Chinese cooking.

I just scored an old book on Chinese cooking - over 1000 pages. It has
all sorts of recipes from the simple to the elaborate. I can't wait
to get some time to do some major reading of it...

-L.