Many of the world’s famous sauces were born in a home kitchen — and so it was with the gorgeous teriyaki-style sauce that inspired this recipe. In 1955, Ernest Morgado, a Hawaiian businessman and co-founder of Pacific Poultry Co., was barbecuing up a bunch of chicken for a farm-bureau meeting and used his mother’s sauce recipe to marinate it. According to family lore, the chicken was such a crowd-pleaser, Morgado started serving it at fundraising barbecues, raising millions of dollars for Honolulu charities. (One of his fundraisers even made the Guinness Book of World Records for largest chicken barbecue with 46,386 chicken halves!)

Morgado famously barbecued the chicken on a kind of spit made with two grill grates. As the story goes, when one side of the meat was nicely charred, hungry onlookers would shout, “Huli!,” the Hawaiian word for “turn.” Morgado trademarked the name Huli-Huli Sauce in 1958 and then, after many, many requests, started bottling it in 1986. All these years later, huli-huli chicken is made throughout Hawaii and the sauce is sold all over the world. The original recipe, of course, is triple top secret, but the internet is abound with copycats.

In this version, we whisk up ketchup, soy sauce, brown sugar, vinegar, ginger, and garlic — and let the chicken marinate in it overnight. Once the chicken is on the grill, you turn it every five minutes (huli, huli!), marinating it with the rich sauce after every turn. The result is tantalizing! The chicken comes off the grill deeply charred in a wonderful caramelized-brown-sugar way. The skin is crispy and the meat is super juicy and redolent with the tangy, smoky-sweet glaze.

Like Morgado, we like to make huli-huli grilled chicken for a big cookout crowd, but it’s also fantastic for midweek meals because it’s so easy to throw together. We grill ours with pineapple, which tastes amazing with huli-huli sauce. And leftovers of both the pineapple and the chicken are fantastic served over a rice bowl and garnished with a fistful of fresh cilantro.