Miso Braised Chicken, How to Cook One and Done

The best dishes for cozy season are the ones, like Miso Braised Chicken, you can make by throwing just a handful of ingredients into one pot then simmering on the stovetop, which heats up the kitchen in the meantime. One and done, and then some! This braised chicken in a savory, subtly sweet, garlicky sauce is soft and tender, it melts into the bowl you serve it in. Shall we?

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• Ingredients You Need for Miso Braised Chicken
• What Kind of Miso Should I Use for Miso Braised Chicken
• Miso Braised Chicken Recipe

Ingredients You Need for Miso Braised Chicken

Fresh/refrigerator ingredients:

• Chicken thighs, 8 bone-in, skin-on
• Miso, ¼ cup
• Onion, 1
• Garlic, 3-4 cloves minced
• Baby bok choy, 6 heads
• Shiitake mushrooms, 6-8
• Green onions, 1 stalk

Dry/pantry ingredients:

• Avocado or other neutral cooking oil, 2 tablespoons
• Chicken bone broth or water, 1 cup plus more as needed
• Sake or white wine, ½ cup
• Sesame seeds for garnish
• Sea salt and black pepper, ¼ teaspoon plus more to taste

The beauty of Miso Braised Chicken is that once you get the chicken and braising liquid down, you can add any other vegetable that will cook in about 10 minutes.

What Kind of Miso Should I Use for Miso Braised Chicken

tl;dr: Use any light-colored white or yellow miso that is labeled "organic" or "non-gmo."

My favorite brands are all organic-this brand, this brand (pictured above), and this brand-and I have been able to find them in Whole Foods Markets in southern California. If you are able to get to an Asian market or specialty store, check out the miso section. It's huge! And you'll probably find these brands there too.

There are a few different types of miso that range in flavor, color, saltiness, and most importantly (to me) intensity of funk. No surprise here, but the funkier, the better. Miso can be labeled and categorized in a number of different ways, e.g. by ingredients, fermenting agent, city of origin, "style," but the easiest way for most people is to simply refer to the color.

Generally, the lighter in color the miso, those labeled "white" and "yellow," sometimes "shiro", the milder the flavor and saltiness. Sometimes, the lighter colored misos are described as sweet, though they are not actually sweetened with any kind of sugar. They are just less salty.

Darker miso, labeled "red" or "aka miso," is stronger in flavor and is usually saltier. I love darker red miso for soups and making dips for vegetables. Red miso definitely works for this recipe if you want a deeper flavor.

Additional Ingredients Notes and Resources

Sake or White Wine. Sake, aka Japanese rice wine, is a type of alcohol made by fermenting rice. Just like regular wine made from grapes, sake comprises a wide variety of styles, brands, quality, and price points. As with any wine in cooking, use sake that you would be happy to drink. Sake is now fairly widely available in grocery stores in the wine section or in liquor stores. The organic sake I use is available here. You can also use a dry, light, somewhat fruity wine like a Sauvignon Blanc.

Avocado Oil. Avocado oil is a very neutral flavored oil with a high smoked point that's generally a little less processed than other refined oils like conventional seed oils. This is the brand I use. You can use any neutral oil with a high smoked point.

Chicken stock. I will always recommend that you make your own bone broth, but like the Barefoot Contessa says, store-bought is fine. Read the ingredients list and find one with chicken as the first ingredient, and without added sugar.

Sesame seeds. Use toasted sesame seeds.

Food for Afterthoughts

Foodis Blogitis is a physical condition, and should not to be confused with Obsessive Compulsive Food Blogging (OCFB), a mental case.

Er...mental condition.

Top Ten Symptoms of Foodis Blogitis

One. The phrase "the night is young," previously used as an indication that you still have energy to go on, has been replaced in its entirety by "Oh! My camera still has battery life! Let's go somewhere else!" The (bi) polar condition would be "Ohph, my camera battery's dead. Let's go home." But that rarely, if ever, happens because you always carry an extra battery that is fully charged. Sometimes two extra. You could go until 6 am.

Two. Your options for the rest of the evening after dinner are dance clubs, but you're secretly relieved that Fluid Ultra Lounge had a very long line because then you can go to a bar where you can order more blog-worthy cocktails rather than Red Bull/vodka, even though you'd blog about Genius of Love pumping out of the front door of 111 Minna as you passed it for its long line too, anyway.

Three. Your host picks the next place based on what he thinks you will like for your blog. He says, "You'll like Ozumo. You can write about it on your blog." You are mildly offended when you realize that he never reads your blog because Ozumo is "Contemporary Asian Cuisine." You would never like it.

Four. You get mad when the lighting is "sexy" or "romantic" because washed out pictures from the use of flash can't be fixed very well in Photoshop, or if they can, you haven't learned how to use that function yet - what are you, some sort of digital photo manipulation expert?! If the people around you aren't already wondering, they will wonder now why the candle at your table keeps shifting from one end to the other, and back again.

Five. You're not really thirsty, and after wine before before-dinner and cocktails before and during dinner, you certainly don't need any more alcohol. You order a drink anyway because water is boring. Okay, so you ordered a Diet Coke, but that's still more interesting that water. Besides, your companions order martinis.

Six. No one can eat nor drink until you've taken pictures. No one can even touch their stuff until you take pictures. In fact, no one can eat or drink until you have scrolled back through and reviewed the pictures you just took to make sure they are "okay."

Seven. Your purse is stuffed full of copies of menus of every place you've been in the last three days. Many of the menus have handwriting on them. The handwriting is yours. You get mad when the menu is permanently bound into something you can't stuff into your purse.

Eight. You walk through the restaurant's empty dining room even though it's closed just "to take a peek" and so that you can say later that you "saw the dining room."

Nine. You're so happily buzzed you can barely walk out of the place, but as soon as you step outside, you're suddenly sober enough to spin around and snap a blurry photo of the sign to "set the context" in your post.

Ten. You don't remember how or when you got to the restaurant (did we walk?), how you got back to your hotel (no, I'm positive we didn't walk back), how you got up to the room, and in fact, you don't remember a lot of the night after dessert. You do, however, very vividly remember that a lychee martini was rather bland, and that they had absolutely no right to charge up the yin yang for something that tasted more like Del Monte canned peaches than any sort of exotic, "contemporary Asian" fruit; the ambience in the sake lounge had a mature, yet energetic vibe, and the dining room was sleekly zen.