A Korean staple flavors perfect-for-winter Gochujang Chicken and Cauliflower

Gochujang—a readily available Korean pepper paste—teams up with ginger, garlic and lime juice to create a lively sauce for roasted chicken and cauliflower. Recipe below.

TO US, THE BEST WAY TO ROAST A WHOLE CHICKEN is to not roast a whole chicken, but to roast chicken parts. So when Marion came across a promising recipe for a slow-roasted whole chicken featuring a gochujang sauce, we broke it down to thighs and drumsticks.

Why chicken parts instead of a whole chicken? First, it cooks faster. More important, it cooks evenly—no breast meat drying out as you wait for the thighs to finish roasting. And if we’re being honest, you have the option of no breast meat period. We’re big fans of thighs and drumsticks that cook up more flavorful and juicy.

Gochujang, the star of this dish, is a Korean fermented pepper paste described alternately as delivering spicy-sweet umami or funky-spicy-sweet. It is so fundamental to Korean cuisine that it has its own annual festival in Gochujang Village. It is also increasingly available from mainstream sources; we found ours at a local supermarket chain store on the shelf in the aisle with various Asian foodstuffs. It is thick, but fluid—like ketchup or mustard—easy to use and to mix with other ingredients.

In this recipe, the gochujang teams up with ginger, garlic and lime juice to create a lively flavored, not-too-spicy sauce for roasting the chicken and cauliflower. As much as we love roasted chicken and cauliflower on their own, this made them so much more.

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Gochujang Chicken and Cauliflower

Gochujang (a readily available Korean pepper paste), ginger, garlic and lime juice create a lively sauce for roasted chicken and cauliflower.

Servings 6 or more

Ingredients

• 5 tablespoons gochujang
• 1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 3 large cloves garlic, minced
• 1 inch fresh ginger, peeled and minced
• 8 pieces of skin-on, bone-in chicken (we used thighs and drumsticks)
• salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 1 very large head of cauliflower or 2 medium (see Kitchen Notes)
• the juice of 1 lime
• 3 scallions sliced on the diagonal

Instructions

• Place a large oven-safe sauté pan on the center rack in the oven. Preheat oven to 375ºF.
• Whisk gochujang, 1/4 cup olive oil, garlic and ginger together in a measuring cup or bowl. Set aside. Trim chicken pieces of excess fat and season with salt and pepper. Brush liberally on all sides with half of the gochujang mixture. Set aside.
• Cut cauliflower into florets. Toss in a large bowl with remaining 2 tablespoons of oil, then add remaining gochujang mixture, season with salt and pepper, and toss to thoroughly combine everything and coat florets.
• Remove the sauté pan from the oven—careful, the handle is hot! Add cauliflower to the pan. Add chicken pieces to the pan, resting them on top of the cauliflower. As the dish roasts, the chicken fat will deliciously flavor the cauliflower.
• Return pan to oven and roast until chicken is cooked through to a temperature of at least 165ºF, about 30 to 40 minutes. When chicken is done, drizzle the lime juice over everything. Transfer the chicken to a platter and the cauliflower to a serving dish. Sprinkle both with scallions and serve.

Kitchen Notes

Bring on the cauliflower. You want a lot of cauliflower for this dish. First, it shrinks during roasting. Second, it is so delicious cooked this way. As it happened, we had too little cauliflower when we made this. So when we did leftovers, we tossed a can of drained chickpeas with a tablespoon each of gochujang and olive oil, then heated them briefly before adding the leftover chicken and cauliflower to the pan and reheating it. Also seriously delicious.

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