Chicken Satay is a delicious alternative to your standard saucy Thai curries, with chicken marinated in a positively potent mixture of red curry paste and coconut. We sear the skewers to perfection, and serve them up with a tasty peanut sauce.
It’s a great flavorful weeknight dinner or party appetizer (cook the chicken pieces individually, add toothpicks, and voila!). However you serve it, people will clamor for more of these flavorful little bites.
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A lot of recipes call for an elaborate—and I’m sure, more authentic—blend of ginger, lemongrass, garlic, shallots, and spices. For the average cook, we find it’s easier to use a good Thai red curry paste to do the heavy lifting in the taste department.
We always use Maesri—you probably recognize the little red can from some of our other favorites like 15-minute Coconut Curry Noodle Soup!
Nagi over at Recipe Tin Eats gave us the idea to lean hard on red curry paste for the chicken marinade. This frees you up to worry about other important add-ins like fish sauce and lime juice, for extra goodness.
One other modification on this recipe is that while “satay” is a fun thing to eat and say, you can also cut the chicken thighs into larger chunks and just sear those—without skewers.
It would make this recipe a whole lot easier for weeknight dinners, but still pack all that good chicken satay flavah.
What Is Chicken Satay? Where does Chicken Satay come from?
Chicken Satay is a street food dish from Southeast Asia, which usually consists of grilled chicken skewers, served with a dipping sauce.
It is one of those dishes that many countries claim to make the best version of. But where does this delicious stick of chicken and sauce actually come from?
Well it’s originally from Indonesia, and sate can be made from many different kinds of meat, not just the standard chicken that your average American knows and loves.
However, like most good things, other Southeast Asian countries have adopted it, and it’s also much loved in Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore.
We originally thought Chicken Satay hailed from Thailand (which is perhaps because Thai restaurants more easily found in America than Indonesian restaurants). But while this Chicken Satay is influenced by Thai flavors (we use Thai red curry paste in the marinade), Indonesia is where the dish originated.
