Nick Bramham’s Chicken Thighs with Molho Leitão and Coriander Rice
This rich, peppery, rendered pork fat sauce perfectly complements chicken and is ready in under forty-five minutes. Words and images by Nick Bramham.
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Today in Vittles Cooking, Nick Bramham (whose guide to throwing the perfect dinner party is in Issue 1) shares his recipe for molho leitão – a Portuguese sauce made from rendered pork fat – which he reverse-engineered after encountering it in a Lisbon taberna.
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Chicken Thighs with Molho Leitão and Coriander Rice
This rich, peppery, rendered pork fat sauce perfectly complements chicken and is ready in under forty-five minutes. Words and images by Nick Bramham.
Bairrada, which hugs a stretch of coastline between Porto and Lisbon, is one of Portugal’s lesser-celebrated wine regions. It is also home to some of the most esteemed suckling pig roasters in the country, where acorn-fed piglets are seasoned with salt, pepper, garlic, and bay, then slowly roasted over eucalyptus wood until their flesh is tender and their skin shatters like glass.
The meat is expertly chopped up and served on platters with a simple selection of sides: crisp batatas fritas, lettuce dressed with vinegar and olive oil, and sliced oranges, alongside stubby, unassuming bowls of a sacred sauce, a heady mix of the collected fat and roasting juices, bolstered with extra pepper, known as molho leitão.
I first came across this sensational condiment at Sal Grosso, a neo-taberna that sits on the curve of a cobbled street in the hilly Alfama district of Lisbon. Below a line of laundry buffeted by a lazy sea breeze, faded wooden doors lead into a small dining room with a huge chalkboard menu that spans almost an entire wall.
As we’re trying to whittle down our order from the many enticing options – lingua bacalhau (cod tongue), pica-pau (fried tuna with white wine and garlic), rabo de boi (oxtail) – we’re given warm bread, olives, and soft local cheese, along with a jug of cool vinho branco. We’re quietly debating whether or not this kind offering is gratis (turns out there’s a small cover charge, fine), when frango con molho leitão leaps out at me from the chalkboard. Roast chicken with suckling pig sauce. How could it not!?
Three crisp-skinned thighs come smothered in a sauce of deep complexity the colour of an old penny. Rich, redolent of roast pig, and with an abundance of cracked white and black peppercorns that explode like popping candy, the molho leitão is an indulgent, thrilling, and fun counterpoint to the deftly roasted chicken, and the coriander rice it’s served with is the perfect vehicle for soaking it all up. I’m pretty sure that there was some serious cheffy business going on behind the scenes at Sal Grosso (see also their implausibly diaphanous salt cod fritters), but as in all restaurants of a similarly rarefied ilk that serve traditional, ostensibly rustic dishes to an extremely high standard, it wore its technique lightly. It had soul.
When I got back to London, I immediately got to work on trying to recreate the dish, and hit-up a Portuguese chef pal who enlightened me on the ins and outs of molho leitão. His wisdom, along with a powerful sense memory and a few happy nights of trial and error in the kitchen at home, led to the following reverse-engineered recipe, which I reckon is almost as good as the one I enjoyed back in Lisbon in 2022.
Chicken Thighs with Molho Leitão
Serves 2
Time 40 mins