Matt Abergel shares his 2015 MasterClass recipe.

The idea behind my MasterClass is to demonstrate the act of butchering and skewering whole chicken as we do at Yardbird which, in my experience, is one of the more valuable things I can teach to both home and professional cooks. The style of our food is very much based on individual skewers utilising a whole animal.

Teaching how to make tare sauce, which is our universal ‘teriyaki’ sauce, as well as the tsukune recipe, which has multiple uses, will have the most relevance for the class.

Serves 4-6

Ingredients

Tare sauce
900ml sake, flamed off
750ml mirin, flamed off
500ml Yamasa soy sauce
250g Tokyo onion tops
100g ginger
1kg chicken bones
500g zarame sugar
300ml tamari soy

Tsukune
1.5kg chicken wing and drumstick meat
350g soft breastbone *
15g sea salt
300g white onion, finely chopped and
squeezed dry
120g fresh panko breadcrumbs
1g black pepper

* Note Ask your butcher in advance for the soft breastbone cartilage found between the breast of the chicken – it takes quite a few chickens to reach a substantial amount of meat so advance preparation is important.

Method

For the tare sauce
Burn the alcohol from both the sake and the mirin (be careful as this flames up pretty high).

Preheat the grill and, using the Tokyo onion tops and ginger as a bed for the chicken bones, splash everything with sake.

Grill the chicken bones until dark golden brown and the onions are thoroughly wilted.

Drain and discard fat. Heat the sake and mirin at a low temperature, add zarame sugar (a dark, granulated coffee sugar can be used instead), and mix until the sugar is completely dissolved.

Add the chicken bones, ginger and onion and continue to cook at a low temperature for 10 minutes.

Add the regular soy sauce and tamari soy sauce.

Cook on the lowest simmer for about 1.5 hours. Be careful not to boil rapidly as the soy sauce will burn, which will lead to a bitter sauce.

Carefully skim off any fat, strain well and reserve.

For the tsukune
Carefully remove the meat from the drumstick portion of a chicken wing (including skin and small bits of cartilage but not bone).

Place the meat on a tray and freeze for 20-30 minutes, along with the mechanisms of a meat grinder.

Dice the soft breastbone as small as you can.

Remove the drumstick meat from the freezer and immediately grind. Put the drumstick meat back through the
grinder again.

Vigorously mix in the soft breastbone and sea salt by hand until the mixture becomes dense.

Add thoroughly washed and squeezed white onions, panko breadcrumbs and pepper.

Portion the meatball mixture into 50g mini-footballs, thread a 6-inch bamboo skewer inside each ball and keep chilled.

The grill at Yardbird uses two metal bars that suspend our yakitori skewers over Japanese binchotan charcoal – this ensures that the meat never actually touches the grill. The meatball skewers, like all of our
skewers, are sprayed with sake and then slowly grilled. Once a meatball is almost cooked (3-5 minutes of constant turning) it is repeatedly dipped into tare sauce until the meat is cooked all the way through and the outside has a dark and shiny brown glaze.

Tare and egg yolk dipping sauce
Dilute the original tare sauce by 50% with room temperature water.

Drop in separated egg yolks (one per skewer) and let this sit for 2 hours in the refrigerator.

Despite being soaked in tare sauce, the eggs are essentially raw so it’s very important to buy the highest quality eggs that you can find.

After 2 hours, place a semi-cured egg yolk into a small bowl and add 1-2 tablespoons of tare sauce.

We encourage our guests to mix the egg yolk vigorously in the tare sauce and dip the meatball inside.

Each meatball skewer is served with a tare and egg yolk dipping sauce.