Huli Huli Chicken

Generally traced to 1955 on Oʻahu. In 1954, Ernest Morgado and a chicken farmer, Mike Asagi, founded the Pacific Poultry Company in ʻEwa; the following year Morgado grilled chickens marinated in a teriyaki-like sauce — his mother's recipe — over coals for a farm-bureau gathering. The birds were cooked between two wire racks, and when one side was done the whole rack had to be flipped; onlookers shouted "huli" (Hawaiian for "turn"), and the shout became the name. Morgado later trademarked "huli-huli" (reportedly with the Territory of Hawaiʻi around 1958 and federally circa 1965–1967); others kept making it anyway, mostly avoiding the name. It became a beloved fundraiser dish — churches, schools, softball teams, and hula hālau set up roadside charcoal grills to sell it, raising untold sums for charity over the decades — and from 1986 Morgado bottled and sold the sauce commercially.

Invented 1955 by Ernest Morgado on Oahu, grilling marinated halves between two wire-mesh racks. 'Huli' means turn — the cook would shout it and a row of fundraisers all flipped at once. Pineapple bromelain limits the marinade to four hours before the meat goes mushy.

Half a chicken, skin lacquered mahogany, cooked over open kiawe-wood charcoal and turned every few minutes. The marinade reads sweet-soy-and-pineapple but caramelizes dark on the grill, almost like a glazed ham. Sold from roadside stands in Hawaiʻi, served with two scoops of white rice and a scoop of macaroni salad — the standard plate-lunch geometry.

Pineapple juice in the marinade contains bromelain — a protease that tenderizes the meat but turns it mushy if left more than four hours. The two-mesh "flipper" rack is mechanical: it lets a single cook tend twenty halves at once and prevents the sugary glaze from sticking and tearing. Without the rack the skin breaks every flip.