Nicholas Gavin is the Culinary Creative Director of ChefSteps, where he develops recipes and is responsible for making all the food look beautiful. Nick has worked at ChefSteps for over a decade; he and ChefSteps co-founder Grant Crilly worked together at Modernist Cuisine. Nick has worked in professional kitchens both in the United States and abroad, most notably at Mugaritz in San Sebastian, Spain.

Nicholas Gavin

Every good yakitori shop takes pride in their tsukune, or chicken meatballs, because they test the limits of a cook’s creativity and ingenuity. You have to transform a humdrum food, often made with scraps, into something extraordinary.Yakitori chefs dial in the proportions of lean and fatty meat to skin and cartilage in order to produce the most texturally interesting meatball they can. Then, they figure out a cooking process that complements those choices. Some meatballs are steamed before skewering and grilling; others are formed into fat logs on two skewers and all the cooking is done over the coals.We ultimately settled on a mix of finely hand-chopped knee cartilage, blitzed skin pieces, and ground leg meat, which we season minimally with scallions and sansho pepper for a little grassy, floral heat. Bound with egg yolks and panko and then chilled, the mixture can be formed into smooth, perfectly spherical balls and cooked hot and fast over a <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/diy-hibachi-grill-konro">hibachi grill</a>. When cooked, they have a tender, falling apart texture, and the bits of skin and cartilage provide a little crunch and pops of juiciness with every bite.Tsukune are often dipped in a sauce, or tare, that’s fortified by all the grilled chicken and vegetables that get dipped into it. To replicate that flavor profile, we grill the leg bones of the bird and a scallion and steep them into the sauce. Thickened slightly with cornstarch to mimic the gelatinous viscosity of a yakitori shop’s tare, the sauce is easy to glaze onto the tsukune right at the end of cooking.

Tsukune (Yakitori-Style Chicken Meatballs)