Skip to content
Cape Braai
DE
← All recipes

Poultry · In Afrikaans: Peri-peri hoender

Peri-peri chicken

A spatchcocked chicken, marinated overnight in chilli, garlic, lemon and vinegar and cooked for the best part of an hour over medium coals. The hottest dish on this site.

Peri-peri is Portuguese-Mozambican inheritance. The small bird's eye chilli reached East Africa from South America with Portuguese traders, naturalised there and was passed on to South Africa via Mozambique. The name goes back to the Swahili word pilipili, which simply means pepper.

Prep
25 min
Marinating
10 hr
On the fire
55 min
Serves
4
Spatchcocked peri-peri chicken, straight off the grid
Kolforn (Kolforn) · CC BY-SA 4.0

How hot

Medium

You can hold your hand over the grid for 6 seconds · ≈ 175–200 °C

Every coal stage explained →

Which wood

Sekelbos

sweet, aromatic

More on this wood →

When it goes on

The main round

The actual food: wors, chicken, fish, skewers.

Equipment: Hinged grid

This line

Portuguese-Mozambicanfrom the 1970s

Peri-peri, the flattened chicken, seafood over open coals.

Method

  1. Spatchcock the chicken

    Cut down both sides of the backbone with strong shears and remove it. Turn the bird over and press down on the breastbone with the heel of your hand until it audibly gives. Flat, it is the same thickness everywhere and cooks evenly.

  2. Blitz the marinade

    Blend all the marinade ingredients smooth. Take a third out and refrigerate it — that becomes the basting sauce, and it has never touched raw meat.

  3. Marinate

    Rub the chicken all over with the rest, including under the skin of the breast and thighs. Cover and refrigerate for eight to twelve hours.

  4. Bring it up to temperature

    Out of the fridge an hour before you cook. A cold chicken goes dark outside before anything happens inside.

  5. Bone side down first

    Clamp it into the hinged grid and lay it bone side down over medium coals — six seconds on the hand test. 30 to 35 minutes. The bones shield the meat through the longest stretch of heat.

  6. Turn and crisp

    Turn it and give it another 20 to 25 minutes skin side to the coals. In the last ten minutes baste with the reserved marinade, two or three times.

  7. Check it

    Pierce the thickest part of the thigh — the juices must run clear and the middle should read about 74 °C. Chicken is the one case where you measure rather than guess.

  8. Rest

    Ten minutes on the board, then cut into eight. What is left of the marinade goes to the table as sauce.

Tips

  • Splitting the marinade is not fussiness. What was on the raw bird does not belong on the cooked one — and boiled, it tastes flatter.
  • Spatchcocked, a chicken cooks in a good half of the time and far more evenly. It is the single handling change that really matters with whole poultry.
  • No hinged grid? Straight on the grid works, but turning it becomes an exercise in patience.

Peri-peri is the connection South Africa shares with Mozambique, and in both places it belongs to chicken. The chilli is small, very hot, and rarely arrives alone: garlic, vinegar, lemon and paprika temper it far enough that it seasons rather than merely burns.

The most important step has nothing to do with heat. A spatchcocked chicken lies the same thickness across the grid and is therefore done everywhere at the same time. A whole bird over coals is a compromise between dry breast and raw thigh.

And the coals stay medium. The sugar and oil in the marinade catch over full heat long before an hour of cooking is up.

Watch this

Linked, not embedded — opening this page contacts no outside server. The time marks jump straight to the moment.

After recipes by

Goes with this

Snack · Braaipastei

Braai pie

Total time
40 min
Serves
6
Heat of the coals
medium
Equipment
Hinged grid