Smoked Yogurt Marinated Chicken Thighs

I’m standing in my kitchen at 5pm, wracking my brain on what to cook for dinner. I’m not much of a planner when it comes to dinner. Honestly, for a guy who loves food and cooking, I HATE weeknight cooking. I’m busy, the kids have worn me down, and I’m ready to crash for the day. I guess this is exactly why I should get better at planning my meals for the week….so I don’t have to face this daunting decision and waste my mental bandwidth every night. I need to get better at this.

Anyway. This night, it actually turned into something worth replicating. Slowly, an idea began to unfold before me. Almost as if I was being guided. Maybe God was pulling me. Maybe I entered a “flow state”. Hard to say. It started with a 3.5 pound pack of boneless, skinless chicken thighs. I started out pretty lazy and started scanning the spice cabinet for some kind of premade spice blend that would work well with my protein on a pellet smoker. About 3/4 of the way to the back of the cabinet, through a seemingly endless assortment of herbs and spices, I saw it. The “Western Winged Rub” from Kairos Artisan Blends. I’ve been working with Kairos and sporadically posting videos using some of their other spice blends for a little while now. But, the Western Winged Rub has been one that I haven’t used too often and, honestly, I struggle a bit with. The problem is this blend has sugar in it. I tend to stay away from rubs that have sugar in them. Just not my thing. But, I decided, in my moment of exhausted desperation, to give this one a shot.

I busted open the plastic wrap and began to dust the thighs with the spice blend, right in the plastic tray that Kroger had packaged them in. Some of these commercial spice blends, Kairos included, are a little light when it comes to salt content. So, I added my own Himalayan sea salt to fill in the flavor gap and bump up the sodium levels. With a quick flip I hit the bottom side with the rub and salt combo. As I looked down at these haphazardly-seasoned thighs I thought, “I should have rubbed these with some yellow mustard, like I do with Boston Butts or Brisket”. But, thought began to grow. “What if I throw these in a bag with the yellow mustard AND plain Greek yogurt, like the Arabs do???”. I’ve been doing a lot of Middle Eastern and Levantine cooking lately and they sometimes use yogurt to marinate and tenderize meats. So, I did just that. American style BBQ chicken rub, chicken thighs, yellow mustard, and yogurt all went into a gallon-size ziplock bag for a quick marinade.

Like I said, this is all happening about an hour before dinner should realistically be served. So, an actually “marination period” was pretty limited in this timeframe. Basically, they got about 30-45 minutes while the Pitboss pellet grill heated up. Once the smoker got up to 275° I arranged the thighs on the grate, closed the lid, and let the smoke and heat do its work.

The protein was all sorted out for this meal. But, we needed something to serve with it. As I mentioned before, I have been really into Middle Eastern/Levantine-style cooking recently. One thing that they do a lot of is making a salad of tomato, cucumber, parsley, lemon, and extra virgin olive oil. I decided to add a few other things to this and make a really substantial salad to serve with the chicken. I added pomegranate molasses, red onion, and these really tasty Nablus Olives. These are green olives that are grown in Nablus, a region of Palestine. They are cracked open and then pickled in a brine of salt, lemons, and hot peppers. When these olives are added to the tomato, cucumber and all of the other ingredients mentioned above, the flavor is amazing. The olives have just enough saltiness that you really don’t need to season the salad with any additional salt. Now we have the protein and the veggies. But, I wanted to take it a little further. So, I decided to make some rice.

If you have been to a “Mediterranean” restaurant or any kind of Middle Eastern joint, you have likely seen kabobs and other grilled meats served on some really yellow-looking rice. Turns out, you can just make this stuff at home. As luck would have it, my most recent issue of Cook’s Illustrated had just been delivered and, low and behold, they had a recipe for this yellow turmeric rice. That was it. That’s the rice I would go with.

This rice is made using Basmati rice. But, unlike most rice recipes, this one called for boiling the rice in three quarts of water, much like you would cook pasta. Add a good amount of salt and some turmeric and boil until rice is just tender. Then, drain it off and toss the rice with some avocado oil to prevent clumping. During the boiling process with the turmeric, I discovered that my well water interacts with the turmeric and causes it to turn dark reddish-orange, rather than yellow. I was pretty surprised by the color and had to Google this condition. The alkalinity of the well water causes the color change. I wasn’t thrilled with this, but the color was kind of neat, so I let it slide.

By this point, the chicken was done and I was about to plate it up. I’m pushing into the 8:45pm range and the family is getting antsy to eat. But, there was one more thing that popped into my head. “This needs a lemon yogurt sauce to tie it all together.” So, dolloped out about a cup of yogurt, grated in 2 cloves of garlic with my microplane, and squeezed in the remaining half of the lemon from my “Arabic” salad.

That’s it. Everything is done. What started out as an anxiety-filled decision on what to cook, ended with this elaborate, over-the-top-for-week-night-meal. It’s 9pm and we are all finally eating. Thank god it was good, or else everyone might have been upset with how late we were eating. I decided at that point that this recipe was a keeper and needed to be documented. Family gets fed. Content pipeline stays locked and loaded. Win-win.

Oh! That rice color mishap with my well water turning it orange. Guess what happened when I added the lemon yogurt sauce. IT TURNED THE RICE BACK TO YELLOW! LOL I was thoroughly amused with this little unexpected science project. The acidity of the lemon and yogurt balanced out the alkalinity of my mineral-rich well water and caused the rice to turn bright yellow, right before our eyes. We all had fun with it. Pretty cool little trick. So, if you make this rice, and you have well water, go ahead and squeeze about half a lemon into your boiling water before adding the rice. This will ensure that you get that bright yellow color that you are expecting.