Honey Garlic Chicken Thighs

In a Slow Cooker, with Broccoli and Wild Rice

You’ll be amazed at how delicious this is, yet how easy it is to make.

Honey Garlic Chicken

Makes

8

servings

Basically, it’s just a matter of throwing everything into the pot, and adding the broccoli at the end. Cooking the rice and prepping the garnishes do require some attention, but not much.

Ingredients

  • 8 garlic cloves, minced

  • 1 cup soy sauce

  • 2/3 cup honey

  • 3 Tbs cornstarch

  • 6 Tbs ketchup

  • 2 Tbs apple cider vinegar

  • 1 tsp dried oregano

  • 2-3 lbs boneless, skinless chicken thighs

  • Florets cut from 4 large heads of broccoli

  • 2 Tbs toasted sesame seeds

  • 1 bunch scallions, thinly sliced

  • Wild rice, for serving

Directions

  • Place garlic, soy sauce, honey, ketchup, cornstarch, vinegar, and oregano into a slow cooker. Whisk to blend. Add the chicken; toss to coat. Distribute the chicken evenly, then cover and cook on high for 3 hours. 
  • Two hours in, add broccoli.
  • Serve with rice, garnished with sesame seeds and scallions. 
  • Once it’s done, if the sauce isn’t thick enough for your preferences, strain it out, and whisk in a teaspoon of cornstarch as you boil it down. If in a few minutes it hasn’t reached your preference, continue to whisk in cornstarch, one teaspoon at a time, boiling for at least a minute in between each addition. It should be thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, but if you prefer, you could have it be more like a sticky glaze.

Notes

  • Once it’s done, if you let it rest on “warm,” in about an hour, the chicken will start to dry out – not prohibitively, though.
  • Beautiful left over.

This recipe is a modification of one from Food 52. It’s a great recipe, but the instructions seemed unnecessarily inefficient, and the sauce needed a thickener. That’s what my modifications address.

The Backstory

It seems that for many, the slow cooker is a winter gadget – but I tend to use mine almost exclusively in summer. I love that it doesn’t heat up the kitchen. I also love that I can set it, take a short nap out on the hammock under the shade of a couple tremendous maple trees, then head out for a nice, long bike ride – swinging by the local beekeeper to pick up some mead on the way back – and dinner will be ready when I return.

This honey garlic chicken is definitely guest-worthy. I photographed the leftovers – which were ridiculously delicious. Freshly made, the broccoli is a much brighter green. I paired this dish with a combination of wild and brown rice, but white rice would be just as nice.

Social Learning

I usually cook rice in a rice cooker – which is actually just as useful for steaming vegetables as it is for cooking rice. But when I sometimes cook rice on the stovetop, I’m reminded of what it’s like to learn to play the guitar: at first, it seems so simple, but if you really want to get good at it, it’s incredibly difficult. It’s easy to make a pot of decent rice. If you want perfect rice, you’re going to have to work at it. I don’t take stovetop rice much further beyond “it seems so simple,” except with these modest tricks:

  1. If you can see liquid boiling through the rice, it’s not done yet.
  2. If you dig through the rice and find no liquid, it’s done … unless you taste the rice and find it not tender enough, in which case you can add some water and keep cooking.
  3. After the rice is done, it needs to rest.

Mead goes great with Honey Garlic Chicken. Hell, it goes great with so many things. If there is any secret to mead drinking, it is this: it must be as cold as you can possibly get it. The refrigerator won’t get it cold enough. You need to keep a couple of heavy glass root beer mugs in the freezer, with about an inch of water in the bottom. This will provide a frosty mug with built-in ice. This will put your fridge-temperature mead right over the top, making it so deliciously cold. You’ll be swilling it down so greedily that you just might not want anyone to witness it.

Honey Garlic Chicken

Credit for images on this page: Make It Like a Man! Thank you, Kesor. This content was not solicited by anyone, nor was it written in exchange for anything.

Did you know that mead is the world’s oldest alcoholic beverage? Technically, what I’ve been drinking is “cyzer,” which is a blend of mead and hard cider. Locally made by local people, local bees, and local apples … and locally tossed off by me. My local summer house has a septic system, so I guess it all goes full circle…

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42 thoughts on “Honey Garlic Chicken Thighs

    • That’s a new one, Ron! I didn’t know an insta-pot could double as a slow cooker. That makes me more interested in getting one.

  1. Hmmmm… I will have to work on a garlic substitute for this one, Jeff – not sure shallots would work. Any thoughts? Otherwise, I have everything on hand. Let me know what you think. If you think it isn’t worth doing without the garlic, I will take your word for it. Some recipes just don’t hold up to substitutions. Thanks!
    David Scott Allen recently posted…Straightening Things Out

    • That’s a really tough one, David. I’d try the shallots. Maybe along with a hit of powdered garlic, if you have it?

      • Thanks, Jeff – sadly, I am allergic to garlic and powdered is worse than fresh! Go figure. I will give the shallots a go – I am sure it will be tasty – just not like yours!

    • You know, that’s something I think about a lot. I realize that certain kinds of cakes seem easy to me, because I’ve been baking for a long time. And I often think that, back when the only cake I had ever baked was a box cake, even the simplest from-scratch layer cake would’ve seemed daunting. But trust me when I say that this chicken dish is really easy. I mean, you practically just dump the whole thing in the slow cooker, and then waltz off to the beach.

  2. I don’t eat chicken (being vegan) but even I can tell that this is a great recipe that my grown kids would love , and the ease of just throwing everything into the slow cooker is a huge plus for busy families. I’ll be passing this one on .. thanks
    Judee recently posted…A Peek at My Week 7/17

  3. You know, I’ve tried to get into mead, but I often find it be overly sweet. Meaderies are popping up often these days, and I just heard about a new one in our area. Perhaps I need to rethink mead after seeing this post and your recommendations. Also, chicken thighs are delicious! I love all of the flavors in this one – and I love that it’s made in the slow cooker!
    David @ Spiced recently posted…Grilled Vegetable Flatbreads

    • It’s true, meads are sweet. The ones I’ve been drinking are blended with cider, which can be dry, and the result is still on the sweet side, but not too much.

  4. Definitely my kind of dish. No fuss no muss. And sounds delicious. Glad you use thighs, they’re so much tastier than breasts, in my opinion

  5. Honey garlic chicken was one of the very first recipes that I copied from a cookbook in the library many moons ago (indeed, I was too cheap to spend $0.25 on a photo copy). I made it for JT when we fist started dating! I had forgotten how delicious it was. I too like using the slow cooker (or any small appliace) in the summer for the same reason, I may even put it outside to cook!
    Eva Taylor recently posted…Ikea Gravy

    • It must be good, then, if it saw you through the dating phase and into marriage!

  6. We don’t use our slow cooker much, but now that I think about it, we usually use it during warmer weather. Just for that heating kitchen thingy. Love how simple this recipe is. And every time I drink mead I always think of Beowulf — go figure. 🙂
    John / Kitchen Riffs recently posted…Margarita Cheesecake Mousse

  7. PERFECT! We cook a ton of chicken and I need to shake things up a bit. Besides the scallions, I’m set!

    • You know, it’s so funny that you mention the scallions. I’m not normally a fan, but they work in this dish!

    • In that case, we really do need to have dinner together sometime!

  8. Like you, I find the slow cooker of greatest value in the summer when I want to keep the kitchen cool. This looks delicious. Now I’m wishing I would have added broccoli to my last grocery order. Next week! Thanks, Jeff.
    Pattie recently posted…Fried Green Tomatoes

  9. what a delicious meal — such incredible flavors! makes sense to not be heating up the kitchen right now. my 14 yr old son is learning guitar so i appreciate that analogy. 🙂 Valentina

    • Cool! I hope he good luck with it. I especially love acoustic guitar playing.

  10. Hey Jeff, this is a meal we would all love. I make something similar, it’s my version of a teriyaki chicken. The ketchup and apple cider vinegar you use here make this new to me. Broccoli is such a great accompaniment to sweet Asian style meats. Now I’m hungry! 🙂
    Marcelle recently posted…Old-Fashioned Ham and Potato Chowder

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