Grilled Chicken Legs with Peach Molasses

Phil Anderson: Hi! I am Chef Phil Anderson, Harris Teeter's executive chef. I am going to show you how to make grilled chicken legs with peach molasses, fantastic recipie. The ingredients are, 5-6 chicken legs, a quarter cup of yellow mustard, a half a tablespoon of brown sugar, one teaspoon kosher salt, one teaspoon of garlic powder, one teaspoon of freshly ground pepper, we've got a half a cup of peach preserves, a half a tablespoon of molasses, a half a tablespoon of soy sauce and finally a half a tablespoon of Dijon mustard.

So how we did this, we started with the spice blend. We took the spice blend and mixed it all together and then we took the mustard and the chicken and massaged the mustard into the chicken, put the spice blend over and we're going to set this on the grill.

While we're, doing the grilling, we're going to paint some of this peach molasses over the top of the peach preserves and soy sauce, the molasses and Dijon mustard. That's all here. And we mixed that up and blended it very nicely. Now it's got a lot of sugar in it. So we want to do that -- we want to give it a good cook on it first. So we have a direct heat right here and that's where the heat is on full and we have full flame coming up and it's pretty hot. So we're going to put the chicken directly on that direct heat. Now this surprisingly cooks pretty fast.

When you have a bone in product, it cooks twice as fast as if it didn't have a bone. So these drumsticks are going to cook pretty quickly. So when the proteins have relaxed enough to not stick to the grill bars, that's when we know it's ready to get turned. If it sticks to it, it's not ready. So they're still sticking and they're still cooking good and we want to just leave them undisturbed. Let's see if they are ready to go now. Okay. He looks ready to turn. Now that's pretty obvious. Yeah, that's stuck a little bit. There's more heat towards the back. So this might -- That's still stuck. It's close though. Okay, now is a good time to put this molasses on our chicken drums. And again we have to get those grill marks underneath the other side of the drumstick. And you might get some flare-ups, I'm not too worried about the flare-ups, it's the chicken fat dripping down. What happens is that it discolors the meat. So if you get a lot of flare-ups, you want to remove it. You want to just take it and put it in a different place. This one has got to go here.

So what we're going to do, is we're going to turn this over and that's where the molasses is and it's going to brown up really nice. I'm going to put some peach molasses over the top of this. This is indirect heat. There's no direct heat. These are off. So there's no heat here. It's only the carry over heat from the direct. I'm going to put a little bit more of the peach molasses on this, and I am going to move it over to the indirect heat and I am going to cover it. We're going to leave these in about 7-8 minutes and we are going check them in about 7-8 minutes. And I think that they are going to be really perfect at that time. Every grill is different, so you really have to keep an eye on your products. So we'll be back in about seven minutes.

Beautiful! Aren't they? That's the secret of the grill. Direct first, indirect second and there you have it, grilled chicken legs with peach molasses. Enjoy!