The Meatwave

When I decided to try my hand at cochinita pibil at Carne-val this past summer, I went down a rabbit hole of reading and watching videos of food from the Yucatán peninsula. It's a place I've always wanted to visit, but haven't yet—so take any recipe from me as more aspiration than truly knowledgable—and seeing all of the spicy and grilled dishes only further piqued my interest in visiting one day. One common recipe I kept coming across was for pollo Yucateco asado, or Yucatán grilled chicken. Like many recipes from this region, sour orange and achiote featured heavily, and with past positive experiences marrying sour orange with chicken, I knew this was one dish I needed to try out.

I'll also often jump on recipes that utilize sour oranges because one of the closest groceries to my house almost always has this citrus in stock, so I like being able to take advantage of that connivance that I know is not common. Luckily, a decent replica of sour orange juice can be made with either a 50/50 mixture of orange and line juice, or even better, equal parts orange, lime, and grapefruit juice.

Like with cochinita pibil, sour orange and achiote paste both have heavy representation in the marinade, starting it out with a strong acidic and earthy character. For Yucateco Asado though, spices played less of a role, with only oregano and cumin getting tossed into the mix. Instead, a good amount of onion and garlic got pureed in, which gave the marinade a bit of sharpness that I was interested to see how it would translate after being cooked.

Almost all of my wings recipe go for crispy skins, which means no marinating since adding surface moisture is the opposite of what you want when trying to achieve that goal. However, there's some recipes that really require marinating, and this is one of them since you want the flavor of marinade to penetrate into the meat. A high acidity marinade usually means that happens quite effectively in just an hour or two, although I prepped these wings the day before for time management reasons.

The next afternoon I got these on the grill, and when setting them in place I felt like the large amount of sauce clinging to the wings would certainly translate to flabby skin.

So I was pleasantly surprised that when I checked on them after 45 minutes of indirect, high heat cooking, they not only browned quite nicely, but had some light crispness to them as well. I thought I was going to have the set these over direct heat to get my ideal coloring, but most all the wings had charred or darkened in spots well over indirect heat, and I only needed to give a few wings the direct heat treatment.

Now I can't say for sure what pollo Yucateco asado is supposed to taste like, but from what was in the marinade, these delivered what I was expecting. Actually, the way the sour orange gave the meat an embedded acidity went beyond what I originally imagined since that component was not quite as prominent in the sour orange marinated Mojo wings I've made before. These also differed quite a lot from those wings with a strong earthy flavor and garlicky bite that lost its sharp edge after being cooked. These wings were really like nothing I've cooked before, which just whet my appetite even more to one day get down to the Yucatán and experience first hand all the great cooking that I've only viewed from afar.

Published on Thu Jan 16, 2025 by Joshua Bousel

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