Eat Like a Geek: Huli Huli Chicken!

This week's installment of Eat Like a Geek travels far from last week's tour of England and France, and goes all the way across the world to Hawai'i! GeekMom Patricia shares one of her favorite dishes, and gives us a look at its intriguing history and creator.

by Patricia Vollmer

(Note: my mother’s recipe adapted from one printed in the Honolulu Advertiser’s food column in the 1970s)

Ingredients:
¾ c. soy sauce
¼ c. white wine
2 Tbsp. sugar
1 ½ tsp. grated fresh ginger
1 clove garlic, minced
3 lbs. chicken, cut into leg quarters, breast halves and wings

Cooking Directions: At least 6, preferably 24 hours before cooking, combine all ingredients except chicken and pour into a zip-top bag. Fill the bag with the chicken pieces and seal the bag, attempting to evacuate as much air as possible. Allow to marinate, turning the bag occasionally.

Grill the chicken according to your favorite method, basting the exterior with marinade as you see fit.

For a less-stressful grilling experience, I recommend buying a package of like-sized parts, such as only thighs or only breasts.

History of Huli Huli Chicken

Huli huli chicken is one of my first culinary memories of living in Hawaii from 1977-1980. My dad would hear about the local high school holding huli huli chicken barbeque fundraisers. You simply drove over to the high school parking lot, where dozens of rotisseries were spinning over kiawe (pronounced “key-ah-vay”) wood charcoal, and cotton mops were dunked into metal garbage cans full of the marinade to baste them en masse. For $5 you got a whole chicken wrapped in newspaper. It was delicious! You know how they say the sense of smell triggers the most memory? The smell of the marinated chicken cooking on my grill floods my brains with memories of my childhood in Hawaii.

The fundraisers were commonplace throughout the islands but are no longer seen in church and school parking lots. Probably due to stricter health codes, many of the huli huli chicken stands now offer fundraising in the form of offering their profits for a week to the organization.

From the Honolulu Advertiser 2002 obituary of the dish’s inventor, Ernest Morgado:

Morgado was the head of Pacific Poultry when he barbecued his first chickens at a farmer's meeting. The gathering expected to be fed and Morgado decided to broil some chickens that had been marinated in special teriyaki sauce. The farmers loved the chicken and asked for more. Morgado quickly realized he had a hit and began to market the teriyaki chicken.

"He just started doing it as fund-raisers. It was a recipe that my grandmother used to make and it just went from there," said Kathy Vest, Morgado's daughter.

With the idea hatched, Morgado needed to come up with a name for his new product other than teriyaki chicken. "Huli-Huli," he said, came quite by accident. Morgado barbecued the mass quantities of chickens between two grills. When one side of the chicken halves was cooked, someone would shout, "huli," Hawaiian for "turn."

Morgado liked the name "huli-huli" so much that he registered the trademark with the Territory of Hawai'i in 1958 and the federal government in 1965.

Over the years, schools, charities and other nonprofit organizations have sold Huli-Huli chicken as a way to raise money.

Jaren Hancock, Pacific Poultry vice president of marketing and Morgado's stepson, said he could not guess how much has been raised selling Huli-Huli chicken. "As far as the numbers are concerned, I really don't know. But I guarantee you that it's in the millions," Hancock said.

Many competitors have come and gone, but Huli-Huli chicken has withstood the test of time. In 1986, Morgado began selling the sauce in local stores.

"People kept saying, 'We want to buy the sauce,' so that's when he finally decided to sell the sauce," Vest said. "Even on the Mainland I talk to people who have been here and they say, 'I know Huli-Huli.' "

In 1981, Morgado entered the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest chicken barbecue ever. His company cooked 46,386 chicken halves at a fund-raiser for Iolani School.