This dish is a revisited version of a recipe I made a few years ago, but as a more composed plated dish. The dish itself was what I made for a collaboration dinner at Mader Lao in Oklahoma, with my friends Gabriel and Dara(from season 12 of Masterchef!). I offered to do the entree, which is actually a major curveball for I think everyone involved, since I am so well-known for dessert(hilariously, we also had another collaboration dinner earlier that week, and I did a savory dish for that dinner as well). Truthfully, I used to love cooking savory, but I kind of fell into the dessert pigeon hole because of season 12 – it was really traumatic and awkward to be told that you served up bland savory food/to get eliminated on that, especially when I never really got criticized for my seasoning in my first go at Masterchef. So after season 12, I kind of slowed down on doing the savory and focused on sweet. That is, until these two collaboration dinners, when I decided that it has been over two years, and you should just try doing it again. Since the second dinner was only for 60 seats, I knew I could do something a little more complex and fun. That and mole is one thing I know I could fall back on, and one thing I felt comfortable doing. In terms of what I wanted to pair with it, I had really just two options I felt would be good: sweetbreads or chicken thighs. As cool as it would be to do sweetbreads, I also know that procuring them would be a nightmare, and I would have to prep my dish day-of, when sweetbreads are very laborious to prep. Although I did a practice plate with the sweetbreads just because I could:

So for the sake of time, I went with chicken thighs. Between not beign able to procure sweetbreads, and them taking 2-3 days to prep, this was a blessing in disguise. I wanted to include a starch element, and since mole already acts like a puree, I went ahead and made dango instead. Dango are a Japanese rice dumpling, similar to mochi, but poached instead. I made mine using tofu and mochiko for an optimally chewy texture. I wanted to use dango so that the dish would be a fun play on chicken and dumplings. Now I won’t lie, but I did not realize that the dinner was meant to be a South East Asian dinner until basically a day before I was set to fly out to Oklahoma. So my last-minute changes to the recipe were mainly on the mole, which I added peanuts and coconut to for a more Thai curry-kind of feel, and using lime in my pickles instead of yuzu. That was really all I could pivot on, since I was already so committed to doing this dish. With the chicken/sweetbreads, I used koji, which is a type of rice bacteria that is used to make miso, to give them a juicier texture. Fun fact, but koji-fried anything will inherently look darker than anything not marinated in it, so my sweetbreads and chicken thighs look burnt, but they surprisingly weren’t. Another fun fact, but I learned the hard way that chicken thighs only need 3 to 3 1/2 minutes in the deep fryer if you are using an industrial-grade, temperature-controlled deep fryer instead of a pot with 2 inches of oil. I wound up serving 30 portions of 5-minute fried chicken thighs before I realized my mistake, but everyone kept reassuring me that the mole made up for the slightly overcooked thighs. But either way, I was able to adjust that, the second batches of chicken went out juicy and delicious, and I learned from that point on, 3 1/2 minutes was the magic number for chicken thighs!

Makes enough for 8 portions:
For the koji-marinated mochiko chicken:
2 cloves garlic, smashed and minced
27ml shio koji
50ml mirin
45ml rice wine vinegar
22ml soy sauce
8 chicken thighs, deboned and cut in half
60g mochiko
canola oil for frying

In a bowl, mix together the garlic, shio koji, mirin, rice wine vinegar, and soy sauce. Allow the chicken to marinate in that mixture for at least 2 hours. Dust the chicken, with the marinade still on, in mochiko, making sure that the thighs are generously coated in it on both sides. In a pot, heat up 3 inches of oil to 350 degrees F. Or use a portable deep fryer. Fry for 3 1/2 minutes in the oil. Rest the chicken either on paper towels or a drying rack to let the excess oil come off.

For the peanut-sesame mole:
2 dried pasilla chilies
1 dried ancho chili
1 dried guajillo chili
2 tomatoes, cut in half
1 shallot, peeled and halved
38g raisins
75g white sesame seeds
75g peanuts
.6g ground cloves
.8g ground cinnamon
.6g ground cumin
.4g ground allspice
1g dried oregano
1g dried thyme
.5g aniseed
280ml chicken stock
13g granulated sugar
20g dark chocolate
55ml coconut milk

Remove half of the seeds from the dried chilies. Toast the chilies in a dry pan on medium heat until crunchy in texture. Then sear the tomatoes and shallots in a pan until charred on one side. Transfer the tomatoes and shallots into a blender with the toasted chili husks and puree first. Pass that mixture through a sieve into a pot. In a dry pan, toast off the sesame seeds, peanuts, half of the chili seeds, and the spices until fragrant. Transfer those into a blender with the chicken stock and puree until smooth, passing that through a sieve as well into the same pot as the tomato-chili puree. Mix everything on low heat together with the sugar, chocolate, and coconut milk until everything is melted together and becomes dark in color, similar to the color of coffee.

For the lime pickles:
80ml rice wine vinegar
15ml lime juice
1g salt
4g sugar
1 shallot, cut into petals
2 breakfast radishes, sliced thinly on a mandolin
1 Persian cucumber, sliced thinly on a mandolin

In a pot, bring rice wine vinegar, lime, salt, and sugar to a simmer. Place the shallot into the liquid first while it is still warm and allow everything to cool down together before adding in the other ingredients. Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes before attempting to use.

For the dango:
145g mochiko
160g silken tofu
a pinch of salt

Mix everything together to form a smooth dough. Divide the dough into 10g pieces. Poach the dango in salted water prior to serving.

For assembly:
Toasted sesame seeds

Start with the mole in the center of the plate. To the side, place down to pieces of chicken thigh. Around the other side of the mole, start with 4 pieces of dango, spaced apart. Place between the spaces your three kinds of pickles. Garnish the top of the mole with toasted sesame to finish.