Ultimate Barbecued Chicken

To quote my friend Joe, let’s get into the meat and potatoes of this.

My first meal here is going to be taken directly from celebrity chef Tyler Florence, who’s delicious recipes I have been gleefully ripping off for some time now. Not sure how he stacks up as a cook, but whatever. I like his stuff. What I’m attempting here is some southern style cooking; barbecued chicken, cornbread, and coleslaw with pecans and a spicy sauce. The recipes are all being taken directly from the food network website. This is my first attempt to blog my cooking, and so here goes!

Dramatis Personae:

Tracy - My girlfriend, budding food photographer, and partner in crime.
Judy - Tracy’s adorable mother, who joyfully downs pretty much anything I cook.
Dave – Me.

Scene:

We open in Tracy’s mother’s kitchen. I’m usually over at Judy’s place on the weekend as she’s always happy for the company, and she has a HUGE, very well stocked kitchen with nice equipment. Much better than the little rathole I generally cook out of. Nice autumn day, a little rainy, and we have a lot of shopping to do. Judy has to stock up pretty much everything, and I need to buy most of what I need for these recipes. On the way, I pick up a new kind of beer. Killer Bee Dark Honey Ale. This will be my reward for a day of hard work.

So after SEVERAL hours of shopping we stagger into Judy’s kitchen and get to work. First off, I need to make a brine for the chicken. This turned out to braindead simple. Water, kosher salt, spices (I only had a handful of fresh thyme and so substituted powdered), and some garlic. Yay! Plopped in the legs and thighs, fridged it all, and started on the coleslaw.

The coleslaw recipe was also brain dead since it was just regular slaw with a bunch of fancy stuff added in. I bought two huge granny smiths and so only chopped up one, and likewise skimped on the mint leaves a little bit since ‘bunch’ confused me. I just threw in ’several’.

The pecans were tricky since I wasn’t sure what temperature to toast them in the oven at. I ended up putting them under the broiler, and promptly burned a cup of pecans. Luckily, when Judy likes something, she makes sure that she has a decade’s supply worth at all times. Another cup of pecans under the broiler, and they toasted nicely. After that, it was a simple case of mayo, mustard, and OHHH MY GOD.

The chipotle spice I bought was some of the most delicious smelling stuff I’ve ever encountered. I love it love it love it. From now on, every single thing I cook is going to have dried chipotle in it. Even ice cream. If they can throw weird shit like squid and seaweed into ice cream on Iron Chef, I can make chipotle ice cream goddamnit. Slaw looks like this:

Incidentally, for a dollar I got (at a rough estimate) forty billion pounds of fresh mint. For those keeping track, this is more mint than GOD has. And God has a lot of mint. How the hell am I going to use all this mint before it goes bad? Looks like I’m going to be chowing on mintwiches for the next week. At least I won’t stink.

Anyways, coleslaw in fridge. We fast forward, and it’s barbecue sauce time! The recipe called for bacon wrapped around thyme. I had a good handful of fresh thyme and some -amazing- thick bacon from a produce market. I rolled this far too loosely and it started to come apart in the sauce, but whatever. I picked the thyme out later. After a bit in came the onions and my garlic which I ONCE AGAIN failed to chop finely enough for my tastes.

After adjusting the heat to avoid browning the garions (onlick?), I tossed in the wet and dry ingredients. Ketchup, molasses, red wine vinegar, a few spices, and – for the hell of it, more of that AWESOME chipotle powder. Soon my sauce was bubbling merrily away. Continual taste tests from pretty much everyone lead me to believe this is a pretty great little recipe. Cumin was sadly absent, probably for the better, as it is a sore point for Tracy.

Now we get into the issue of timing. This is not my strongest skill in the kitchen. I’m not BAD at it. But I had two hot dishes to prepare, one of which requiring around forty-five minutes or so, the other requiring around twenty. So, start with the chicken. I grab the chicken, toss out the brine, pat it dry, and now it’s grilling time. By this time, it’s around seven-thirty and it’s pitch black outside and cold. Tracy’s mom recommends her little electric indoor grill. I normally hate these things as they don’t impart any real flavour to the meat… but whatever. Crispy skin is what I want. So we get this:

Not bad. While this is going, it’s time to prepare the cornbread! For those who don’t know me, I’m from northern Canada. Corn bread is NOT something I’ve grown up knowing intimately, and all I know about it is vague memories of it being tasty, and assurance from a smiling Tyler Florence that cornbread is the shit. Okay Tyler, I’ll do it for you. So his recipe calls for the batter to be poured over top of hot bacon fat in a cast iron pan and then baked.

Problem. My cast iron pan is in storage as I just moved, and Tracy’s mom has none. So, we decide to use a casserole dish thingy – cooking the bacon in a nonstick pan, and then transferring the fat to the dish. We cook up the rest of that very nice bacon, shown below:

And I get to work on the cornbread. Now… I’m not a baker. Tracy and Judy are bakers. I’m a cook. I don’t get this science thing. I want to just throw ingredients at each other without rhyme, reason, or any real attention to measurements and hope it tastes good. So, I do just that. Eggs in, cornmeal overtop, flour on that, various powders… and I screw up. Recipe calls for eggs to be whipped to frothy goodness, and then mixed with milk. Dry ingredients mixed separately. So… well, I can’t really get the cornmeal out of the eggs, so I just go for gusto. Toss EVERYTHING in, and then just mix like a madman. Everything said and done the batter seems okay… I mixed everything pretty well so I don’t THINK I’ll run into issue.

Now, sauce is all done. Foil on cookie sheet, chicken on foil, sauce on chicken. The oven is being strange and doesn’t seem to want to preheat to 375 – I figure the light is broken and toss the chicken in. Shortly thereafter, I fold bacon bits and chives into the batter, pour it in the casserole dish, and plop it in. I think my timing is great, the coleslaw is done, I blink, and I see this:

Again, I’m messy. While I’m sipping at some juice, Judy has rushed in, tidied up nearly EVERYTHING and the kitchen is almost spotless! She was also cleaning behind me as I went, and although I was trying my best… yeah. This is what I need to learn to do. Lousy tidy people. Oh well, baby steps.

I then suddenly realize that, being the genius I am, I forgot to put salt in the cornbread. Tracy once gave me a lecture about how salt is vital in all baking for the chemical whatsits to do their thing with the chromosomes or something. Either way, it’s important. So I yank the cornbread out, which is already showing to be half cooked on the top (I ignore this like a quailtard) and I boldly toss in far more kosher salt than is necessary, give it a good stir with a fork, and pray it’s not ruined. It goes back in, and we wait and talk about how nobody loves us.

So, after a while, I pull out the chicken which seems… to not have cooked very much at all. Oh well, I baste it some more and toss it back in. Then… I look at the cornbread, which is completely browned over top and has risen a minute amount. Looks like this:

Ohhhkay. This is not how ovens work. I look in the oven… and only the top element is on. Apparently I’ve been trying to broil my cornbread. A toothpick test shows me that the top is perfectly done, a longer toothpick shows everything else is raw dough. The chicken is only lightly warmed. See, I had the broiler on for the pecans. I then switched the dial to 375. Turns out this changed nothing, and it just kept merrily broiling away. This was fixed by turning the dial off, and then returning to my desired temperature.

Now, on the TV show I glimpsed this recipe, both cornbread and chicken merrily cohabited in the oven. Finding where to put what where was tricky. I was trying for the chicken on the bottom, corn bread on top. But then I got scared of burning my chicken since it was so close to the element. It took me around fifteen minutes of screwing around with these damn racks to get everything sorted out properly. I sigh, sit down, and seconds later, I hear a loud bang. The cookie sheet the chicken is on has warped strangely and the left support for the oven racks has collapsed.

I’m, of course, thoroughly convinced at this point that Judy’s oven is posessesed by the cat of Beelzebub, Beelzebubbles. Beelzebubbles is an asshole.

So after several minutes of fighting with it, Judy intervenes and skillfully repairs the oven, I slide everything back in, put it 375, and watch it properly heat up. By now, I’m convinced my cornbread is ruined and the chicken is going to be dry. I think dry meat is proof God exists, hates us, and wants us to be unhappy. After twenty minutes, the chicken is as done as far I can tell (pricking to look for red juices, oven thermometer is showing 170 or so), and the cornbread hates me. At Tracy’s urging, I slice the now burned top off of the cornbread to reveal the sides are completely browned, and the middle is liquid. It’s like a giant brandy chocolate without the chocolate or the brandy. So I sigh, throw the damn thing back in the oven, and let the chicken rest for ten minutes.

Quick shot of Judy and I working feverishly at whatever it is we’re doing, and a shot of a bunch of random ingredients before Judy sneakily put them away.

Success! The cornbread is now done and has the consistency of brick sparsely populated with bacon bits and a few lonely bits of green onion that sit at home all day playing World of Wacraft, not bathing, and salivating over pictures of that stupid chick from Heavenly Sword.

The chicken, however, smells heavenly, and the coleslaw is as ready as coleslaw gets. So we plate! Tracy had some issues snapping a good shot of our completed meal, so here’s one with funny lighting. You’ll note that there’s not much here for presentation, to be fair – the plates were pretty crowded with the meal and I was very worn down at this point. Ideas for a better way to present this would be very welcome.

Verdict:

The Cornbread:

Tracy and Judy seemed to enjoy it but I found it dense, somewhat grainy, and WAY too salty. The bacons bits made up for it though. In the end, we only had a small piece each. This? This I call a FAILURE.

The Coleslaw:

This is one hell of a coleslaw recipe and I recommend it to everyone. In afterthought, the extra granny smith apple and mint leaves would have benefited it – the flavour could have been a little more lively. More chipotle too. I also now realize the mint was meant as a garnish, but whatever. It tasted fine with the mint mixed in and Tracy – who’s normally not a fan of whole nuts, loved the toasted pecans. The textures all worked out well, it was a great deal more interesting than typical coleslaw, and it was pretty slack to make. Especially because I cheated and used a bag pre-shredded cabbage and carrots. >.>

The Chicken:

Chicken legs&thighs are a staple of my cooking as they’re dirt cheap and flavourful, and this is easily the best recipe I’ve ever done for them. At first bite, I was scared they were underdone because it was so unbelievably succulent. But no, not a hint of pink. Perfectly cooked, the barbecue sauce was sweet, spicy, smoky, and just amazing all round. This is one of the best chicken recipes I’ve ever encountered and I want to brine everything from now on. Tomorrow, I’m going to brine my cat.

The Beer:

My reward for a day’s hard work was tasty, but underwhelming. It poured pretty damn dark for what’s supposedly a pale ale, with a little bit of head that went away quickly. The nose was pleasant, with an overall honey…ness to it, heavy chocolate malts, and some subdued hops. Mostly smelling roasted malts. First sip was nice, but it is very thinly carbonated and does not have a creamy enough body to warrant it. This needed more carbonation, or a fuller, creamier body to really be great. Great deal of chocolate with an aftertaste of honey and a little bit of hops to round it out – but the flavour and the mouthfeel just did not pair up well with this beer. It matched the chicken nicely, but I don’t think I’ll have it again.

In Conclusion:

A day well spent, I went on too long and this might bore some people, but whatever. I’m writing this for me as much as anyone else. Hopefully we’ll have more end result pictures next time I do this. The recipes were great, I still love Tyler Florence’s stuff, and everyone enjoyed themselves. Hurray for me! Maybe next time I won’t destroy the corn bread. Somewhere, a grandmother in South Carolina is crying after hearing what I’ve done to this American classic.