Nici Wickes: Butterflied BBQ Chicken with Mango Salsa

There’s nothing like a butterflied chicken sizzling on the BBQ – it’s juicy, full of flavour, and cooks evenly every time. Pair it with warm tortilla, fresh salsas, limes, and chilli and you’ve got yourself a fiesta of flavour!   

Ingredients

• 1 free range chicken, butterflied (ask your butcher or do it yourself) & brined (optional, see note)  
• 3 tbsps. olive oil  
• 2 tsp sea salt   
• 3 tbsps. tomato chutney   
• 2 limes – zest and juice of one, the other cut into wedges  
• 3 garlic cloves, crushed  
• 1 tbsp cumin seeds, toasted  
• 1 tsp smoked paprika  
• ½ tsp chilli flakes   
• 2 tsp sea salt and ½ tsp pepper to season  
• 1-2 tortilla per person  
• Salsa – see below   
• Limes, lettuce, guacamole to serve   

 

Mango salsa   

• 1 ripe mango, diced finely   
• ½ red onion, diced very finely   
• Small handful of fresh coriander, chopped  
• 1 tsp cumin seeds, toasted  
• Juice of one lime  
• ¼ tsp salt   

  

Method 

1. Heat BBQ to medium-high. Rub chicken with 1 tbsp olive oil and liberally sprinkle with salt.  
2. Place chicken on the grill, skin side down, with the BBQ hood down if you have one on your BBQ, or cover with foil or a large roasting dish if not. Cook for 15-20 minutes then flip.  
3. Reduce temperature to medium and finish cooking – about another 30 minutes. I rely on a thermometer reaching 85-88 C, stuck into the thickest part of the thigh to tell me it’s cooked, but the old ‘tear the drumstick away’ method will do the trick too – it ought to come away easily.  
4. Mix remaining olive oil, chutney, limes zest and juice, garlic, cumin, paprika and seasoning. Brush this all over the chicken once cooked and return to the BBQ for 2-3 minutes more. Rest the chook.   
5. Combine salsa ingredients in a bowl. 
6. Warm the tortilla on the grill, set out lettuce, salsa, guacamole, lime wedges and other ingredients and invite everyone to build their own taco!  

 

LISTEN ABOVE 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack team podcast
from News Talks.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
That'd be cook. Nikki Wix is here this morning. Nikki,
do you have a big chunky wallet?

Speaker 3 (00:18):
I listened to your intro this morning, Jack, and I thought, oh, no,
if we reached peak wallet.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Yeah no, I think I think we're well passed peak wallet.
I think, I think, I think, I sincerely think. Look,
let's put down the date. Okay, I reckon, So here
we go. There is Mid November twenty twenty six is
going to be significant for a couple of reasons, as
we've learned this morning. Number one, it's when the spacecraft
Voyager will be a full light day away from Earth,

(00:44):
which will mean it's the furthest the furthest distance that
any human made object has ever traveled. And as well
as that, it will be a time at which Jack
Tame no longer needs to carry a wallet. That's my prediction.
Betweenty twenty six. Which one of those things is more well, well,
you know, in terms of human achievement.

Speaker 3 (01:02):
Yeah, yeah, I know. I would write here with you, Jack,
and the end when you mentioned a word that I
almost abhore. If that's the words, I think you awards,
and that is convenient. I think we have to be
extremely careful when we go down the line of convenience
because to me, that is the root of all ills
in our current society, particularly with food. Yes, once you

(01:25):
start going convenience, then an actual fact, you start you
start not eating as well as you could for your health.
So I was thinking this as I was listening to you,
and I was doing righteous about it. And then suddenly
I realized that this morning, I'm suggesting that people buy
one free range butterflied chicken from the supermarket because they
are already brined generally and that makes them succulent and fantastic.

(01:49):
And I thought, well, that's a convenience food. To be honest,
in the old days, you would have had to Brian.
Of course, of course, so you see these things, sneak.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
Can I just take a middle ground on this? Can
I say that you're in principle? Yes? I look, And
this is why I was trying to own, you know,
my the the in the seduction that I've kind of
fallen for. Like, yes, convenience I think has many downsides,
but I think there's probably a happy middle ground. You know,
if we if we have if I go one hundred

(02:23):
percent digital, but we still have physical cards for people
who don't want to go one hundred percent digital. That
seems like a good middle ground for me. And maybe
if I want to make a butterfly chicken but actually
I don't want to have to brand it myself, that's
a good thing as well.

Speaker 3 (02:36):
Okay, all right, we're there, all right. I guess everything
else in my recipe this morning as well in terms
of you know, we're not we're not throwing our own garlic,
many of us, what actually I do, We're not. We're
not throwing our own lives, you know. To some extent,
all of those things are convenient to go and purchase,
so I get that. Yeah. Anyway, I'm not really here
to talk about wallet's all chicken this morning, in a
funny way, I'm here to talk about mangoes.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:58):
So We've got this beautiful butterfly chicken, spicy and delicious
that I'm going to do on the barbecue. But the
hero in actual fact is the mango sulsa that I'm
serving it with and mangoes. At the moment, the Australian
ones are in. They have a shortish season in New Zealand.
They're prohibitively expensive. They're a good eight dollars ninety when
I've broch just one, you know, earlier in the week,

(03:20):
which is outrageous. But they're massive. They don't have a
huge pip in them, so you get plenty of mango
out of them. And they are divine, they honestly are,
and they're sort of everyone's a winner kind of thing.
You don't get some, and then you find they're all
stringing a bit brown inside. So look, whip up this
little mango sulsa. You'll probably only need half of the
beautiful big ossi mango. Dice it really. Finally, take half

(03:43):
a red onion and dice that very finely as well.
If you're a little bit h if you're a little
bit sensitive to a raw onion, then just pop it
in a little bit of water the diced onion with
a little bit of lemon juice and that'll take some
of the kind of string out of it, if you like,
and then drain it off well to use it. If
you're into red up your raw onion, go for it.
Just use it as it is a nice small handful

(04:05):
of fresh chopped corry one teaspoon of cuman seeds toasted,
so heading kind of towards the Mexican flavor. Here, nice
big juice of one lime or lemons if you've got those,
and a good quarter of a teaspoon of salt, and
be prepared after fifteen minutes to add a little bit
more salt or a little bit more lime juice if
you need to jack So always with a salta. You

(04:27):
want to make that first and leave it for at
least fifteen minutes for the flavors to really kind of
open up to each other. And then you taste it
and you say, oh, now what does it need. If
you taste it straight away, you'll go, oh, not very flavorful,
So just leave it to kind of marry up there.
So make the salcer first, and then rack a beautiful big,
free range, convenient butterflies already brined chicken on the barbecue

(04:50):
with a bit of olive oil and salt all over it.
Cook that off. And I'm not a big one for
marinating things and then putting them on the barbecue because
I think you just burn it all off. So I
insacked cook my protein first, and then you want to
smother it in the following mix, and then while it's warm,
pop it back on the barbecue for a very short time,
and then you've got this beautiful marinated chicken. I use

(05:13):
a bit of tomato chutney, maybe three tablespoons of that,
the zest and juice of two limes or lemon, some
cut up into wedges, perhaps to serve as well. Three
garlic clothes, crush those up, one tablespoon of human seeds,
one teaspoon of smoked paprika that'll give you a beautiful flavor.
Half a teaspoon of chili flakes or more if you
like this really spicy. Two teaspoons. That's a lot. But

(05:36):
we've got a big chicken here. Of sea salt, that's
the flakes, and half a teaspoon of pepper. Mix all
of that together, and then once your chicken is sort
of fully cooked, smother it in this on both sides,
and then cook it off for a little bit longer
on your barbecue, and then bring it off the barbecue
and rest it. You tear all of that chicken off
the bone and serve this with the salsa, with some

(05:57):
beautiful warm tortilla. You could also have on the side
some guacamole, some lettuce, that kind of thing. And you've
just got a lovely big sheer me ill and you've
splashed out on the now Goo, which was expensive. But
let me tell you, this chicken, we'll go around. It'll
go around twelve twelve forty people this value.

Speaker 1 (06:15):
Yeah, thank you for more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame.
Listen live to News Talks ed B from nine am Saturday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio