“REAL” Piri Piri is made with Piri Piri Peppers that are also called African Bird’s Eye Chilli(s). Most piri piri is red in color and I noticed some people actually add red food coloring to their recipes. I’ve never noticed real piri piri peppers being sold anywhere I shop and that’s why any recipe you find uses other various red peppers.

Many variations of Piri Piri are made but they all should have some sort of ground chili, lemon, oil and red bell pepper. Piri Piri is usually chicken that’s marinated in the spicy red pepper sauce with citrus.

Ingredients This will feed about 11 people If you use dark meat any leftovers will reheat very moist.

About 8 Lbs. Of Chicken (I used about 4 lbs. that were 3 whole legs and about another 4lbs. that were 8 boneless thighs) Thought I pulled out white meat but forking screwed up.

12 roasted Red Peppers seeds, skin and stem removed and then roughly chopped and the liquid released from the red peppers

7 cloves of garlic chopped

4 red Thai Chilli(s) depending on how strong they are and your spice tolerance. The 4 in mine were spicy but not too spicy I might do 5 next time.

1 Meyer Lemon – The juice and grate about 1/4 of the rhine

1/4 large sweet onion chopped

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

About an inch Fresh Ginger grated

1/2 teaspoon aleppo ground red pepper (pinch of cayenne if you don’t have aleppo, the aleppo is milder and fruitier in taste and I like it very much with red peppers)

1 teaspoon ground black pepper

1 Tablespoon + 1 teaspoon Kosher Salt

1 teaspoon Paprika

1 Tablespoon Basil

1 Tablespoon Oregano

4 Bay Leaves

Directions

Split up your chicken into two 1 gallon zip lock bags and place two whole bay leaves in each bag.

Blend up all the ingredients except the lemon rhine. After smooth add the lemon peel.

Pour one cup of sauce/marinade into each bag. Close up bag and let sit in refrigerator over night. You will have around 24 oz. of sauce/marinade to use over the chicken dinners.

Set oven at 350 degrees to roast. For the whole legs I lined two lightly oiled baking pans and sat some thick onions on them. Then I pulled out the chicken legs and sat them on the pan.

The legs absorbed almost all the sauce but I did wind up with maybe a 1/4 cup and basted them in the oven a few times with the leftover marinade. These took about two hours at 350 and came out like this.

To the boneless thighs I shook off whatever sauce stuck to them and rolled them in mung bean flour but really most of your flours would work for this. I like mung bean flour, it’s healthy and doesn’t add any weird taste or raw flour taste to what you cook. You can find mung bean flour at any Indian Market and at most Asian Markets.

I put the boneless thighs in a medium high fry pan that was sprayed with oil and cooked them 6 minutes on the first side and 5 minutes on the second side. If yours are smaller they will need maybe a minute less.

Put the boneless piri piri chicken together like this.

They came out nicely flavored and super forking  juicy.  The added sauce mellowed a little the next day but was still delicious. 2nd day you might want to adjust seasonings to the sauce slightly. The Whole legs came out super tender and ultra moist too.