Sakezuke Miso-Maple Chicken Thighs with Roasted Carrots

When you make sake, what’s left over are the lees – bits of steamed sticky rice mixed with koji, the bacteria used to ferment the rice into alcohol. Like juicing, you end up with tons of this stuff. And like juicing, it’d be a shame to throw it out.

It’s full of all sorts of healthy bacteria (assuming you kept the sake clean during the fermentation process, of course). It’s the Greek yogurt of Japanese food. And it’s similar to nukazuke, a rice bran starter for Japanese pickles that people travel with, like sourdough starter.

The funny thing about all these things is that they’re dirt cheap, but if you try to buy them, they’re ridiculously expensive and hard to find. The nice thing about this recipe is that if you don’t have sake lees, sakezuke, you can just use miso. It won’t have the same texture and sake flavour, but it’ll work. If you do have sakezuke, though, you’ll end up with something closer to crispy fried chicken than a simple roasted bird. For that reason, if you’ve no sakezuke, use chicken thighs with the skin on – it’ll have a better crust.

Sakezuke Miso-Maple Chicken Thighs with Roasted Carrots

4 skinless chicken thighs (I used boneless. You can use bone-in and increase the roasting time by 20 minutes)
1/2 cup sakezuke
1 1/2 tsp soy sauce (if you buy sakezuke and it’s already salted, skip this)
1 tbsp maple syrup
1 tsp miso, optional (I used a light miso, mostly for colour)

6-8 small carrots, peeled
1/2 cup greens, optional (spinach, beet greens, swiss chard, cress, sorrel)
1 tsp sesame or other oil

Combine the sakezuke, soy sauce, maple syrup and miso in a small bowl. Press it into the flesh of the chicken pieces to create a kind of cast or thin shell. Add the sesame oil to the bowl and rub over the carrots and greens. Place the carrots and greens on a baking sheet or in the bottom of a roasting pan and place a rack or the top of the roasting pan above. Place the chicken on top so its juices can drip down onto the carrots. Place a rack in the bottom third of the oven and another up higher so the chicken can broil at the end. Preheat the oven to 325˚F and place the baking sheet on the bottom rack. Roast for 15 minutes.

Remove pan from oven and toss carrots and greens in juices that have fallen down. Turn chicken pieces. Replace in oven as before and roast another 20 minutes.

Move the pan to the top of the oven and broil on high for 3-5 minutes, or until golden brown. Remove from oven and turn chicken one last time. Return to oven and broil other side of chicken for 3 minutes, or until brown (the broiler should be faster this time as it’s already warmed up).

Serve with rice. And some nukazuke pickles, if you’ve got ’em.