Sriacha Honey Pot

Welcome to the first Slowcooker Sunday post.  On account of the fact that I'm super paranoid about burning down my apartment building, I typically will only use my crockpot on days when I'm home.  This has led to me typically using it on Sundays, which has the added benefit of providing several meals for the rest of the week.  I wound up working from home this Thursday, so this will be Slowcooker Sunday Took ill on Thursday edition.  Maybe it's not the best idea to use Solomon Grundy as the naming convention for this, particularly for days past Wednesday.

Anyhoo, since I was going to be around for most of the day I decided that there was no time like the present to try a slowcooker recipe that had been on my list of things to try for a few weeks.  The recipe in question is Honey Sriracha Chicken.  

To start things off is the chicken itself.  You'll want to get this started firs, and since it's the main component of the meal I figured it'd be best to start here, moving on to the drizzle later.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 lb chicken breasts

1/4-1/2 cup sriracha

1/4-1/2 cup honey

1 tablespoon lime juice

1 tablespoon soy sauce

Instructions:

Cut the chicken into chunks and place in pot

Mix everything else together

NOTE: I say 1/4-1/2 because the measuring cup I was using has at some point lost it's lines and my attempt at eyeballing it resulted in the cup being mostly full by the time I was done)

Cook on Low for 5-7 hours

The Drizzle

Ingredients:

1/2 cup of Greek yogurt

The remainder of a bottle of sweet chili sauce

2 tablespoons honey

2 tablespoons hot sauce

Instructions:

Stir until evenly mixed

NOTE: You can apparently replace half or all of the Greek yogurt with mayo, but I didn't feel like buying two things for this

NOTE 2: It's supposed to use 1/4 cup of the sweet chili sauce, but I knew I had an indeterminate amount in my fridge so I skipped buying any and went all in to get rid of it

NOTE 3: It's supposed to take 2 teaspoons of hot sauce, but I either wasn't paying attention or wanted more heat (I shouldn't wait so long to write these)

I have mixed feelings about this recipe.  On the one hand, the flavor of this was very good.  The honey-sriracha-lime flavor works incredibly well.  I'd been hesitant about it before eating this, but combination works better than I'd been expecting.  The combination in the drizzle also works out better than I'd been expecting, providing a sweet heat that also can work as either an impromptu salad dressing or sandwich spread (see below).

On the other hand, the chicken was dry.  Really dry.  I had to double check that there were still juices in the pot (there were) after I tried it.  I'm not sure if this was due to me using flash frozen chicken breasts, or if it's just that the breast meat doesn't have enough fat on it to survive for extended periods in a crockpot without drying out.

I would like to try this again, but if I do I'd do one of several things differently:
Option A: Use leg meat instead of breast meat.  Dark meat tends to be a bit fattier which might keep it from drying out quite so much.  

Option B: Increase the amount of meat and sauce.  After I'd added everything to the pot it was probably less than a third of the way full.  I have no evidence for this but I feel like slowcookers work better when they are more full.

Option C: Instead of chunking the chicken breasts, leave them whole, then shred them and return them to the sauce.  Even with the rather dry chunks this already works decently for sandwiches, especially with the sauce as a spread.  Shredding it might both draw attention away from the dryness (I've never noticed other meals I've made with chicken breasts in the crockpot to be dry after I've shredded them) and make it easier to put on a sandwich.  This can be combined with Option B.

Option D: Cook this on the stove rather than in a crockpot.  Cooking this on the stove (potentially marinating in the sauce before starting) should keep the chicken from drying out so drastically.  It also has the advantage of taking less time to cook if you either run out of time or don't trust leaving a crockpot running while you're away.