Sticky Chicken + Skillet Peach Cake - No. 296
Two recipes that beg for substitutions
MY SON-IN-LAW WAS IN TOWN and asked me to make Sticky Chicken for his birthday dinner. It’s his favorite recipe of mine, and you’d think I would know that recipe backwards and forwards with my eyes closed.
But I forgot I didn’t have any honey—one of only four ingredients in the sauce. It was after 5, and I wasn’t dashing to the store.
So without creating a lot of fanfare, I opened the overhead cabinet and pulled down agave syrup. It worked great in lieu of the honey. And it’s still a keeper of a recipe, cooked in a cast iron skillet in the oven and finished on top of the stove until sticky and syrupy, no matter how you sweeten it.
But making last-minute substitutions in recipes hasn’t always been successful. I recall a cake I baked for a Labor Day family get-together decades back when supermarkets were closed on holidays. I was much younger and put off baking until the morning of and realized I had no bananas to go in the Hummingbird cake I had promised to bring.
But I did have an acorn squash in the fridge. Desperate and yet hopeful, I cooked and mashed the squash until it was the consistency of ripe bananas. And that cake—boy, people loved it. What with the distraction of deviled eggs, Jell-O salads, racks of ribs, and fried chicken on the table, no one noticed a Hummingbird sans bananas.
Or they were too nice to say anything. And I left before anyone could ask me for the recipe.
Maybe it’s just me, but I go into most every recipe with plans to substitute. It’s like planning a trip already knowing I’m going to veer off course.
No doubt, I’m comfortable with being flexible after so many years of baking, cooking, and understanding basic rules of food chemistry.
But it’s a little reckless, too.
A big part of the situation is that I like to use up what’s in my fridge before restocking, and I resist buying one-off ingredients I’ll never use again.
My most recent test of substituting came with a peach skillet cake recipe from Lodge Cast Iron. I had stopped at their test kitchen in South Pittsburg, Tennessee, on the drive home from Atlanta last week, and was offered a slice of freshly baked peach cake. Fabulous! I knew I’d be baking that cake at home within the week, and when I did heat the oven to make it, I realized I had no sour cream.
But I did have an unopened carton of ricotta.
And this is how it went: I squeezed the one lemon in the fridge to yield a tablespoon fresh juice to add acidity to the ricotta and make up for what the sour cream might have offered. That acidity would react with the baking soda in the recipe.
Just for flavor, I decided to use a mixture of brown sugar and white sugar as well as a handful of blueberries. And my peach and blueberry skillet cake was lovely!