Keto-Friendly Indonesian Ginger Chicken

This keto-friendly Indonesian Ginger Chicken is an extremely tasty recipe for chicken from Ina Garten’s first cookbook The Barefoot Contessa. I’ve been making it for years, it’s so easy and good. 

Basically, you marinate your chicken overnight in Asian seasonings and then put it in the oven and bake the next day. The results are great hot, warm, or cold. It makes an easy dish for entertaining – everyone seems to like it. 

I haven’t made it much recently because we’re trying to follow a keto-type diet and when looking at most nutritional analyses online, it appeared to be very heavy in carbohydrates and sodium. 

But, then I realized that most of those nutritional analyses were including the marinade in the final recipe analysis. And you’re not actually eating the marinade, it’s just being used to impart flavor while your chicken is sitting in your refrigerator overnight. So, the entire amount of marinade shouldn’t really be used in the nutritional analysis calculation. 

If you input the recipe into a common on-line nutritional calculator without realizing that you’re not actually eating all the marinade, the analysis comes back something like this:

That’s a lot of carbohydrates and sodium for a single serving! However, if you understand that you’re not actually eating all that marinade and reduce the amount of marinade to about a 1/4  cup, then the analysis comes back looking a lot more reasonable:

Anyway, after thinking about it and running the recipe through the calculator a few times, I decided that it’s a great keto-friendly Indonesian ginger chicken recipe that we should be enjoying rather than avoiding. Prior to trying to follow a keto diet, I would serve this with Easy Curried Couscous; however, lately, I’ve been making RightRice to go with it. 

This is so easy (marinate overnight and then bake), and it tastes so good hot or cold (great for picnics), it’s nearly ridiculous. I love to make it ahead of time, and then relax as I serve it. If there’s any leftover (and that’s not probable), it’s great to cut up on a salad the next day too. 

Keto-Friendly Indonesian Ginger Chicken

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Prep Time 30 mins

Cook Time 1 hr 10 mins

Total Time 1 hr 40 mins

Course Main Course

Cuisine Asian

Servings 8 people

Ingredients

  

• 1 cup honey
• 3/4 cup soy sauce
• 1/2 cup peeled and grated ginger root
• 8 -12 cloves minced garlic (optional)
• 2 skin-on chickens 3 1/2 - 4 lbs. each, backs removed, quartered

Instructions

 

• Combine the honey, soy sauce, garlic, and ginger in a small pan and cook over low heat until the honey is dissolved.
• Arrange the chicken in a 9" x 13" x 3" (or other size that comfortably holds the chicken) pan with the skin side down and the meatier portions (usually breasts) on the outer edges. Pour the sauce over the chicken, cover the pan with aluminum foil, and marinate overnight in the refrigerator.
  
• The next day, preheat the oven to 350°F, place the baking pan in the oven, and bake for 40 minutes. Uncover the pan, turn the chicken skin side up, and raise the temperature to 375°F. Bake for another 30 minutes or until the chicken looks like the picture below and the juices run clear when cutting between the thigh and leg.