Chicken thigh donburi

Thanks to this post over at Nihon no Ryori, I realized that though I have loved chicken donburi for a long time, I've never made it with chicken thighs; I've always used breast meat. That seemed like a challenge, so the other night I gave it a go.

I used my usual method for making chicken donburi (or oyakodon), with the exception of using chicken thigh meat and turkey broth rather than dashi for the stock (no dashi in the house; I need to do something about that). When all was said and done, it was surprisingly different in flavor from my usual chicken donburi. Where the chicken breast version is sweet to the point of blandness (the flavor seems to concentrate itself in the broth-soaked rice), here the meat was as flavorful as the sauce. The strong flavor had a strong salty component, too, which I didn't expect. It wasn't bad, by any means, but it was so different from what I'm used to that I think I'll need to get used to it.

It was a worthy experiment, however. It's always good to see an old favorite dish through new eyes, and often hard to do because a cook (this cook, anyway) tends to get into a routine.