Exotic Pomegranate Chicken – Hey, Nice Legs!

Pomegranate juice makes an excellent marinade for chicken. It’s sweet, tart flavor works really well, especially with the middle-eastern spices you’ll see me add in this demo. I marinated mine overnight for 12 hours, but a full 24 would be even better. The most common requests I get via email are new things to do with chicken and salmon. Everyone realizes that they should be eating more of these “healthier” proteins, but they get bored with the same old, same old. This is a great way to turn those boring BBQ chicken drumsticks into something exciting and delicious.

Almost every grocery store these days carries pomegranate juice. Due to its incredibly high content of anti-oxidants, millions of people are drinking this stuff on a regular basis, which of course is why it’s so expensive. But, here we only need one 16oz. bottle, so it shouldn’t be too hard on the budget.

The spice mixture I describe below its very versatile and I suggest making a big batch and keeping it for future “exotic” recipes I’ll be demonstrating. Also, the saffron rice dish you see these beautiful legs resting upon will be shown in a future video recipe demo. Another neat trick to notice is reducing the marinating liquid down to use as a sauce at the end of the dish. If I roasted the legs in the marinade, they still would have come out nice, but it would have been more of a braised dish, and the drumsticks would not have browned up like I wanted them. Enjoy!

Ingredients:
12 chicken drumsticks
16 oz. bottle of pomegranate juice
1 1/2 tsp salt
2 tbl olive oil
2 cloves garlic
NOTE: I added 2/3 of the spice mixture to the chicken when I marinated it, and then used the rest before roasting as you’ll see.

Exotic middle-eastern spice mix:
3 tbl cumin
3 tbl coriander
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tbl black pepper
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tbl herb de Provence