This recipe comes from Avanzade Mehmed Suleyman's Sihhat Matbahi, a cookbook published in 1917 in Arabic letters. It is a simple yet very effective way of creating a very tasty chicken dish.

Unlike the American barbeque, no sauces are used in Turkish barbeque cooking. Instead, the meat is left in a marinate for several hours. In this recipe, the marinate consists of pure onion juice, which softens the meat in addition to giving it a basic yet delicious flavor. In fact, this is the standard marinade for all barbeques in the book.

For the marinate, thinly slice the onions and then use your hands to squeeze the juice out of them. You can use a medium mesh strainer for this purpose. Please do not use a food processor to create an onion puree. The pureed onion sticks to the meat and burns during the barbeque and worse, it significantly alters the taste.

Add the paprika and the red pepper to the onion juice and marinate the chicken thighs for at least 2 hours in the refrigerator. Longer the better!

When you are ready to cook, add the olive oil to the marinate and use your hands to turn the thighs in the marinate. The oil will prevent the thighs from sticking to the grill. It is added in the end so that the thighs can soak the onion juice more effectively.

Every barbeque is different but if you have a good fire going, you should not have to cook either side of the thighs for more than six minutes. This is plenty of cooking since we are using boneless thighs.

Sprinkle the thighs with salt when they are ready to serve.