Bobby Flay's Top 10 Chicken Recipe Videos | Food Network

All right, so it's all about mushrooms today. We have our portobello mushrooms stuffed with sweet sausage and some smoked mozzarella. And now we're going to do some grilled chicken with a shiitake mushroom vinaigrette. So the first thing we're going to do is get our chicken breasts on the grill. Just rub them with a little bit of canola oil and then some salt and pepper. And we're going to cook them with the skin on. Whenever you're cooking chicken with the skin on, you want to cook it slowly, which is, I think, the opposite of the way a lot of people think to cook chicken. They think, oh, I want to make the skin crispy, I'm going to put it on the hot part of the grill. You're just going to burn the skin, you're going to have flabby skin that's not crispy, and that's not good. Slow part of the grill, sort of around the edges. Salt and pepper. You can see our mozzarella starting to melt there. And then we're going to take our shiitake mushrooms, little canola oil. We're going to grill our shiitake mushrooms for our shiitake mushroom vinaigrette. Make sure you take the stems off these as well. We're going to cover the grill now. We're going to let our chicken and our shiitake mushrooms cook. We'll let our portobello mushrooms rest. We got some chicken breasts on the grill. All we did with the chicken is put a little salt and pepper and some oil, we let the skin get nice and crispy, slowly, turned it over, put the grill top back on and let it cook through. So that took about, I would say about 15 minutes. And our chicken breasts, nice and thick too, so hopefully they're going to be good and juicy. We have our chicken breasts, and then we have our shiitake mushrooms here that we grilled as well. We're going to make a shiitake mushroom vinaigrette. Let's go do it. All right, shiitake mushrooms that we grilled. When I say a vinaigrette, it's not going to be like a smooth dressing. It's basically going to be, you know, big pieces of the shiitake mushrooms, a little bit of balsamic vinegar, and balsamic vinegar is going to be a little acidic, but it's also going to be kind of sweet. And then we're going to take some olive oil, some salt and pepper, and just a touch of Dijon mustard. Actually, you know what, I'm going to use whole-grain mustard. Okay, I'm just going to mix it together. It's not going to be one of those vinaigrettes that are emulsified. It's actually going to be, the oil and vinegar is going to be a little bit separate, but I think it's going to look really pretty on the plate. I'm going to take some fresh parsley, and I'm just going to tear the parsley, just going to tear the parsley leaves, throw it into the vinaigrette. Now we can plate it. Put the vinaigrette down on the plate. Looks luscious. Cut up our chicken, and I'm going to leave the chicken in fairly large pieces. See how crispy the chicken is? Crispy on the outside and nice and juicy on the inside. Just cooked through. Maybe a little parsley in the middle. And there it is, very simple, shiitake mushroom and balsamic vinaigrette with a crispy chicken breast. I'm going to do some spice-rubbed chicken breast. All right, so some ancho chili powder, a little bit of cumin, some cinnamon, and I'm going to add a little bit of brown sugar, and that's going to be my spice rub. Good contrast, a little sweet, a little spicy. I'm actually going to put my chicken breast on the fire here, and then I have a very, very simple spice rub that I made up. It's just ancho chili, some cinnamon in here, and a little bit of cumin, and just some brown sugar. So actually it's going to get a little bit of a caramelization on the outside because of the sugar. I'm going to put the spice rub side down over a nice hot grill. Let's see what happens here. Here's the simple technique of the day. I put the chicken breast down, leave it alone. Don't start, you know, messing with it, seeing if it's sticking or not, because that's when things start sticking to the grill. We just want to leave it alone, let the grill do its job, let the spice rub not only impart flavor, but also become a crust on the outside of the chicken. And the only way that's going to happen is if you let the grill do its job. That's done. I'm going to take the chicken out. Just let it rest for a little while. When the chicken feels firm, that means, that means that it's cooked all the way through. If it hasn't given it, that means it's still a little rare inside. And the one thing about chicken, it's either done or it's not done. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my tortillas. We're going to heat these up on the grill as we're plating them because we want them to be nice and pliable and just a little bit warm while we're eating them. So I'm going to make you a quick plate here. I'm going to make you guys a couple of open-faced tacos. We're going to start with a little bit of chicken. This is the chicken with the spice rub on it. A little ancho chili, some brown sugar. That made a really nice crust on it. Yeah, it makes a nice crust on it, keep the juices in, hopefully. All right, then we're going to take some of our barbecued onions and just a little bit of every little thing so you can still close up the taco. Some grilled poblanos, avocado. And you know what? I'll just give you a little bit on the side too, just to have it. And then just a touch of coleslaw just on top, just to give it some crunch. That's great. In the dictionary, under the word versatility, there's a picture of a great big chicken. Why? Because it's versatile. You can make tacos with it. OK, so now what we're going to do is we're going to make a grilled tomatillo salsa. We're going to grill all the ingredients. We have some red onions, some tomatillos. They look like green tomatoes, but in fact, they're not. They're actually in the gooseberry family. You want to take the husk off, and that's what you have. And it's really like a giant gooseberry. Here, look inside. OK, so we're going to put all these in a bowl with some serrano chilies and even a little garlic. A little oil. Salt and pepper. Mix them together. Let's get them on the grill. Even the garlic, just a little grill flavor. And then what I'm going to do, just cook them in a pan a little bit more, all these ingredients. Now we're making a salsa, so we're going to need oil anyway, so we're just going to put a little more oil in there. We'll let that cook. All right, now we can make our salsa. Tomatillos, the onion, garlic, and the chilies. Lime juice. All right, so we want a lot of cilantro for this. We want this to be green. A little bit of honey. Now we have salsa verde. So we have our chicken. We're going to put some fresh cilantro on the plate. And then we're going to serve it with some queso fresco, which is like a fresh Mexican-style cheese. We have 2 kinds of tortillas. These are flour tortillas, and actually these are made with red chilies in them. And these are blue corn tortillas. Blue corn is probably my favorite ingredient. Now flour tortillas you can just sort of throw on the grill. Be careful, they go fast. Now the corn tortillas, because they're a little bit firmer, what I like to do is just run them under water for a second, give it some moisture, and then put them on the grill. All right, let's make a taco. It's always important to try out things before your friends come over. Take a little blue corn tortilla, a little bit of chicken, a little tomatillo salsa, a little queso fresco, and a sprig of cilantro. Blue corn is the way to go. Salsa verde means green sauce. Even the little Spanish that I speak or the Italian that I speak, I know that that translates to green sauce, and basically every culture has its own version of a salsa verde or a green sauce. So I'm going to show you sort of a Mediterranean one today. So you just need a few different ingredients. I'm going to use some chicken thighs, skinless and boneless. Again, if you don't like chicken thighs and you want to use chicken breast, be my guest. I just like chicken thighs. I like the flavor. I think they stay juicier. Chicken thighs is actually one of my favorite things to cook and to eat for sure. So I'm going to start with those, but then we're going to have some fresh herbs for the salsa. We have some parsley, some chives. We have some tarragon, and really you can use any kind of fresh green herbs that you find and combine them into this salsa verde. We need some lemon zest, a key ingredient. There's going to be some fresh garlic. I'm going to show you how to crush that. And then the sort of secret ingredient of this whole thing, in my opinion, some anchovies. I know you don't like anchovies. Your friends don't like anchovies. You do like them. You just don't know it. But they're really key to this dish. Now, if you don't want to eat anchovies, if you don't eat fish or anything like that, obviously you can leave them out. But I promise you, you have to definitely give it a try. I'm going to put some crushed red peppers in mine, and then we're going to finish it with some delicious extra virgin olive oil, and that's going to sort of cap it all off. But first, let's get the chicken cooking. And to me, I'm going to teach you some really simple techniques here in terms of how to grill or sauté some chicken. The key is to make sure that you season it really well with salt and pepper to start. And I like to use kosher salt. If you've seen me cook it on the Food Network, you know that I use kosher salt all the time. It's actually, like, it's got big crystals, so what I do is I crush it in my fingers, and I just, as I crush it, I just let it kind of rain on top of the chicken thighs. Then I'm going to take some black pepper, salt and pepper on both sides. And what you can do is, instead of kind of turning them over, you can put them on the grill and then season it while the other side is on the grill. So a little canola oil. And I like to use two kinds of oils in my kitchen for the most part, canola oil to cook with and then extra virgin olive oil not to cook with. I'm just going to, I'm going to actually use this for the salsa verde, and it's not going to touch heat. So we're really going to, you know, we're really going to taste that nice fruity, spicy flavor and the viscosity of the olive oil. All right, so let's go to the grill. First things first, you need a hot grill. I'm cooking indoors at the Food Network kitchen. Hey, wave everybody. And obviously this is an indoor grill, but if you can cook outdoors, you know, be my guest. Same principles, you want a hot grill because we want a really nice crust on the outside of these chicken thighs. So we're going to put the chicken thighs on the grill. You can hear that sizzle right away. Salt and pepper both sides. You can see I'm like salting it while it's on the grill. Let it get nice and crusty on one side for about three or four minutes. And then maybe when you turn it over, it might just take like another minute or so to cook through. So maybe a couple minutes less on chicken breasts versus chicken thighs. But just as important, you want a really good contrast of texture. And the only way to get that is to let the grill do its job. That's really the key, okay? All right, let's take a look at our chicken. See, it's starting to get a little crusty. You can see that, and the salt and pepper is becoming part of the chicken itself. I'm just going to turn them and crosshatch them. But I'm going to keep cooking them on the same side. The key is crusty, well-seasoned, and then cook through. And then we're going to let it rest, and then we're just going to douse with all this amazing salsa verde anyway. So if it doesn't look perfect, don't even worry about it because nobody's going to see it because we're going to put this beautiful green sauce on top of it. All right, let's get to the sauce, all right? So fresh garlic. So when I use garlic, I almost always use it in the crushed form, and I'll show you how I like to do that. So first I take the back of the knife, okay, not this part of it, but this part of it, and I just kind of break up the head of the garlic into cloves, all right? And then I take... Now you have to get the skin of the cloves off of the meat of the garlic, right? So I'm going to take, let's say, five of them. And I take my knife, I put the knife on top of it sideways, okay, and I take the palm of my hand and I just push down onto the garlic. And what it does is it actually helps the skin come away from the meat of the garlic. All right, then you can pick it up and it just makes it a lot easier to get the skin. You see, this is the meat of the garlic, that's the skin of the garlic. You just want to get it to come away. Mmm, chicken smells really good. Here, check this out. See how nice and crusty that's getting? I still want more crust than that. Basically anything I'm cooking, I want to have a nice crust on the outside. So now we have our garlic, and we're going to make a nice... We're going to pulverize the garlic and crush it so that when it goes into the salsa verde or you're cooking with it for some other application, that it basically dissolves into whatever you're making. Because, you know, I've been to a lot of, like, not so great, like, southern Italian restaurants where they have those big chunks of garlic in the sauce, and then you bite into the garlic and it ruins your whole meal. I mean, garlic is a wonderful thing, but, like, too much of it at one time can really kind of just overpower whatever you're cooking or eating. All right, so we're going to just start, like, a coarse chop like this. I would say, like, crushing garlic is probably the thing that I do more than anything else, and it's really important for me to get the garlic crushed and really fine. All right, now I'm going to put a little salt on top of my garlic. No, I'm not seasoning the garlic, although that's going to happen anyway. But I'm using the salt as an abrasive for my garlic, and I'll show you what I'm trying to do. So first I'm just kind of coarsely chopping it, but now I'm going to take the side of my knife and I just crush away. All right, here we go. Crushed garlic, just like that. Right before your very eyes. Let's turn our chicken. That looks beautiful. Here, get in here. See how crusty that is? That's what you want to see. So you can see the heat of the grill on this side was hotter, and this got crustier. This side, not as good, all right? I don't want to see that. Just because there's grill marks on it doesn't mean it's the texture that you want. You know, and you see a lot of chicken that looks like this. This is what you really want. You want this really good contrast of texture. You want that good crust that's formed with the salt and pepper and the high heat of the grill. All right, now we're going to take some anchovies. This is the secret ingredient here, folks. We're going to take a couple of anchovies. I'm going to chop these up as well. I'm going to put these in with our garlic. And I love this sauce because you basically, I call this like a cutting board sauce because everything is just going to be on the cutting board and chopped together, and then we're just going to finish it with a little bit of olive oil in a bowl, and you're done. All right? So we take a whole bunch of herbs. So you need more herbs than you usually think you need because, you know, when you see them in bunches, they look like, they look very voluminous. You know, they look like they have a lot of volume to them. But when you chop them, they really kind of, they kind of melt down. So we have the parsley. I mean, yeah, we have the flat-leaf parsley. We have the tarragon. I love this dish. And then we have the chives, and we're just going to chop these all together. And these can be coarsely chopped. I'm going to put the garlic in there with the herbs. So now we have the crushed garlic. We have the chopped anchovies, and then we have the coarsely chopped herbs all together. All right. So we have, we have all this chopped together. I'm going to put this into a bowl, and then I'm going to take a little bit of lemon zest, a little bit of lemon zest. Now, if I put lemon juice in here, it's going to actually cook the herbs, like, enzymatically. It's going to, it's going to turn them gray. It's going to, they're going to lose a little bit of their freshness, so I don't want to do that. But I want that lemony flavor and the acidity from the lemon zest. And this is a great way to utilize the part of the lemon like a lot of people don't even use. So make sure you utilize it. And then a little bit of crushed pepper. You don't have to do this. I like my food a little spicy almost always, so I'm always going to kind of reach for the chili peppers and stuff like that. And then salt and pepper in here as well. And then we just fold in the olive oil into the herbs until it forms like a, almost like a chimichurri or a, like a very herbaceous vinaigrette. You're just basically dressing the herbs and the garlic and the anchovies with the olive oil. And that's really the kind of consistency that you want. You want it to be very herbaceous, very kind of chunky in a way, and then as you put it on the hot chicken, what's going to happen is the olive oil will kind of spill out and form its own sauce. Now we're going to put it in another bowl. I mean, it looks great, but you don't have to do it, especially if you're just going to put the sauce on top of the chicken. But let's just make believe we're actually going to serve this to the table. If I was at home, I would never do this. I would just serve it right in the bowl because I hate cleaning dishes, and I'm not even, I'm not good at it. So I try to make the least amount of dishes I can. All right, so now we have our chicken. Our chicken is cooked through, and the way I can tell that is that when I touch the chicken like this, you see a lot of chefs and cooks touch it to see what the story is. It's very firm, and it bounces back right away. If there was a lot of give to it, that means it would still be rare in the middle. But I now know this chicken is cooked. I'm going to go right to the plate. And, you know, you want to let the chicken rest before you eat it because you want the juices to stay in when you cut it so they stay intact. And the only way that's going to happen is if they cool down. But I'm going to put the salsa verde on top of the chicken while it's still warm because it's going to just kind of, it's just going to bring out the natural oils and flavors of the herbs themselves. And kind of, you know, because the chicken is still warm, it's going to sort of seep into the pores of the chicken and make the chicken incredibly flavorful. All right, so I'm going to take some of our salsa verde. I mean, this is it. I mean, we're ready to eat this. This is chicken dinner right here. Winner, winner, chicken dinner. Mmm. That smells good. There you go. We have the grilled chicken with the salsa verde. Mmm. The first word that comes to mind is bright. It's, you know, the herbs make it incredibly bright and fresh, very refreshing, and it's got crazy flavor. I mean, don't forget, you have the garlic and the anchovies in there running through this mixture of all the fresh herbs. And it's a classic Italian green sauce for a reason. It just kind of lights up any protein that you cook. We're not frying chicken today, but I'm going to try to emulate those exact flavors but on the grill. When I make fried chicken, one of the first things I do is I make a brine out of buttermilk. Now, the buttermilk is in there to create tenderness and moisture in the chicken itself. I'm going to put in a couple different chili powders. We have some ancho chilies, fruity with a little bit of heat. New Mexico chili. It's a little bit brighter, and it has a little more heat to it. And then some chili de arbol powder. I like to say it's cayenne with flavor, so it's definitely going to have some heat to it. And then some cascabel chili. It almost tastes like if tea was spicy. It has sort of an herbal flavor to it, but with some heat. And then we have some other spices in here as well. We have some smoked paprika, some ground coriander, granulated garlic and onion powder, and then we have a little bit of cinnamon. Lots of layers of flavor in there. Smokiness, fruitiness. We have some sweet spices like cinnamon. All right, so we're going to pour some of the marinade over the chicken. I cut the chicken into pieces. So that's the white meat, and then we have the dark meat, the thighs, which is my favorite, by the way. They always are the moistest part of the chicken. Just love the chicken thighs. We're going to let this sit for at least four hours or overnight. It's totally fine. Let me show you what I've done here. I've patted it dry, and then what I do is I sort of air dry it. I take the cover off and leave it in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes so that the marinade actually becomes part of the skin. It actually dries right onto the skin. And now we can grill. And while that's happening, I can actually start my sauce or my glaze. It's going to be mangoes and honey. I'm going to take the skin off the mango first. So I'm just going to dice up my mangoes. They don't have to be perfectly diced because I'm going to cook them, and then I'm going to puree them anyway. So let's make this mango glaze. A little bit of canola oil, some onion, a little bit of garlic. Okay, then we're going to take our mangoes and some orange juice and some pineapple juice. The pineapple juice has a nice flavor to it, but you know what, if you don't have pineapple juice, orange juice will be just fine. A little ancho chili in there, and a little bit of white wine. We're actually using a pinot grigio. Let that cook down, cook out the alcohol, save the flavor of the grape. So you just want to make sure that the mangoes, the onions, and garlic are nice and soft. I'm going to puree this in a blender. Brush the mango glaze right on the chicken. You want to glaze the chicken just about when it's done because there's honey and there's the natural sugars from the mango in here. Those sugars will actually cook and caramelize very quickly. Just a couple more minutes of cooking, and then it'll be chicken time. So I'm just going to grab a piece of chicken. I'll start with a drumstick. Mmm, tons of flavor here. You can taste the spices, and I just love the mango. I'm a huge mango fan. The mango and the honey glaze just works so well with those big spices, and you can actually taste a little bit of the buttermilk. Gives it that sort of tangy flavor underneath. Thighs are my favorite for sure. Let's grill some chicken. I have the chicken cut into parts. I have the chicken breast and the chicken thigh. The thigh is actually my favorite part of the chicken. I love the flavor of it. It's also the moistest part of the chicken as well. A lot of people like chicken breast. I totally understand that, so we're going to use both. There's an Italian technique of cooking chicken called alla mattone, which means under the brick. And so we're going to take a brick, and we're going to cover it with some tinfoil. If you don't have a brick, you can always use something heavy like a cast iron pan, you know, something like this. A cast iron pan might actually work as well. Sometimes what I do is I take the cast iron pan, and I put the brick on top of it so it's nice and even. Let's just put a little salt and pepper down here, right on the skin side. Let's go to the grill. Really going to put this at the slow part of the grill. We're going to keep the thighs and the breast separate because the thighs will take a little bit longer to cook because the meat is darker. Now we're going to season the other side with salt and pepper. And if you notice, I didn't put any oil on the chicken breast because I fear that if we put oil on the chicken skin that we're really going to create flare-ups. I'm going to take a little more foil, just to protect the chicken. Then we're going to take our cast iron pan. Just balance it just like that. Then we can take our bricks, just for some extra weight. And this really ensures a nice, crisp skin, which is really the key for good chicken. Ta-da! All right, now we're going to make the salsa verde. So salsa verde, you know, obviously the translation is green sauce, and that can mean lots of different things. But in our case, we're going to use some Italian flat-leaf parsley, some fresh tarragon, which has sort of that licorice flavor, some cornichon, which are like baby pickles, and some capers for a nice sort of salty, briny flavor. I'm going to put some garlic in there as well. And the secret ingredient, anchovies. Just don't tell anybody they're in there. They'll love it. So we're going to put the herbs in our food processor. And you always want more herbs than you think you need. Once you start cutting them in the food processor, the amount is really going to dissipate. Some garlic cloves, some capers, to take most of the brine out of there. And some cornichon, a little white wine vinegar. Some salt and pepper. And then just a couple of anchovies. All right, so we're going to start the food processor, and we're going to add some olive oil. And we'll have salsa verde. Beautiful sauce. See how easy that is? Let's just check on our chicken. See what's happening is the fat is rendering nice and slowly, and that's what you want. We close the grill, and we're going to let the chicken cook all the way through. So here's our chicken breast. Just going to cut this right through the bone. And the thigh, we can just kind of keep intact. Then we can take some of our salsa verde. This is really just going to wake up the flavor of the chicken. All right, so we'll take some of the breast, some of the thigh. That's the magic. I'm actually going to do a little French-inspired thing. It's a play on chicken cordon bleu, which is usually ham and cheese inside a chicken and then fried. What I'm going to do is take some of that inspiration, but I'm going to grill it. What I'm going to do is I'm going to pound this chicken, and I just put a little bit of water on both sides of the chicken so it doesn't stick to the plastic wrap. I'm just going to carefully pound it out. And this will actually help the chicken cook very evenly. I don't want to pound it too thinly. A lot of times, like a classic chicken pie art is really, really paper thin. I want to have a little bit of texture to my chicken. When I bite into it, I actually want to be able to taste the chicken as well. As you can see, it's going to be nice and even here. All right, so I'm going to put my chicken breast on the grill here. I season this with a little bit of canola oil and salt and pepper, and that's it. Just going to make sure they're nice and even, high heat. You just want to get a nice sort of sear on top of the chicken breast. Wow, you got that nice and thin. Oh, yeah. And you can see how quickly the chicken is going to cook here. It's almost cooked all the way through. I mean, when I turn it over, it's going to just be a couple more minutes. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to move it to the indirect part of the grill. Okay, I got a nice crust on the outside there, which is exactly what I want. The other thing I'm going to do is actually put some lemons on the grill because I love when you grill citrus. It gives it that sort of nice roasted citrus flavor, and I'm going to make a vinaigrette out of this. Oh, that sounds great. You get that smokiness and the juice comes out easier, right? Exactly right. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take just a very thin slice of prosciutto, and actually, you know, they'll slice it very nice and thin for you. I'm just going to just put a layer of prosciutto on top, and then I'm going to take my triple creme cheese. Now, this stuff is really strong. It has fantastic flavor. Is it kind of like a brie? It's like a brie with a lot more flavor. It actually has the texture of brie. Here, taste a little bit. But it's, uh... Wow, yeah, that's got some kick. It's definitely pungent. Oh, that's beautiful. That's going to be great on that chicken, Bobby. Yeah, I mean, come on. Ham and cheese on chicken, you know? It's a classic combo, but you've done it up in a new way. Exactly. All right, so I'm just going to put our cheese on top. As you can see, I have it on the indirect heat, okay? I started on the direct heat, got a nice sear. Now I'm going to let it cook through and let the cheese and the prosciutto melt. Take a look at our lemons. Starting to get nicely grilled. I'm going to take a little bit of arugula and just put a little bit of arugula on top. It's kind of like a salad on top of your entree. Extra virgin olive oil. And just squeeze some of this roasted lemon on top. Okay, and a little salt and pepper. I'm going to let Mark give this a try. All right, Mark. Oh, man, Bobby, that looks beautiful. This is all you. Now, it's a pretty strong-flavored cheese. I don't know if that's, like, to your liking, or would you rather something a little bit more mild? No, it's perfect, Bobby. It adds some richness and earthiness, and with that little peppery arugula on top, it's beautiful. That cheese is good. I'm not taking credit for the cheese, so I did not make the cheese, but it is good on that chicken. We're making some baseball food today. Chicken wings with a chipotle hot sauce and a blue cheese yogurt dipping sauce. Sometimes they use sour cream. We're going to use yogurt just so we feel like we're being healthy. Okay, we need a pot. There we go. We have some red wine vinegar. Now, this is the sauce that we're going to actually baste the chicken wings in after we grill them. Some honey. A little Dijon mustard. Some Dijon. And then chipotle peppers. Now, this is what chipotles look like in a can. They're smoked jalapenos, and they come in this sort of adobo sauce, which is like a red vinegar sort of tomato-y marinade, and they sit in there, and then you can puree them up, like I did right here, and we can just put these right into the sauce. Remember, smoky and fiery. But the first thing we're going to do is heat it up right on the grill. So make sure your grill is hot. All right, while that's working, we're going to make sort of the dipping sauce. When you go to a bar and you eat Buffalo chicken wings, you know, you get sort of like this Tabasco-y kind of sauce, you know, very spicy, and then they serve it with like a blue cheese dressing usually, and usually it's like sour cream and lots of blue cheese. Instead of that, we're going to use yogurt, and you know I love to use that thick Greek yogurt because it has fantastic texture. Let's make a lot of this because we've got a lot of chicken wings. We're going to dice up a little red onion. Red onion is obviously going to add a lot of flavor to it, but also I want that crunch, you know, that sort of crispy crunch that you get with really nice, fresh red onions. And we're going to cut them rather fine, actually. Dice them up. Next up, some green onions. Paper thin if you can get them. OK, red and the green. A little salt and pepper. And then the blue cheese. Now, this is a crumbled blue cheese. This is an American blue cheese, like a Maytag. If you notice, I haven't mixed it all together yet. I'm going to make one fold so that the blue cheese stays nice and crumbled and it doesn't get messed up. OK, that's done. OK, let's go over to the sauce over here because it's boiling, which is exactly what we want to happen. So now we're going to add the butter right to the sauce. You can see this has actually come to a boil, and that's a good thing because we want to add the butter and not separate it. This is going to make a nice glaze for the chicken wings. Just melt the butter, whole butter, unsalted whole butter. We'll add it to the spicy sauce. OK. Well, we're cooking some chicken wings here, and obviously you want to get them nice and crispy. You know, it starts getting a little crispy like this. You might want to turn it over. These are definitely ready. I'm going to cook the chicken wings right in the sauce. That's enough to start with. Hey, look, check that out. Now we have the wings in the sauce, and basically you just want to kind of toss them around a little bit. Just kind of glaze them in the spicy sauce. Wing time. Anybody hungry? All right, so we're going to brine our chicken first. Buttermilk, salt, and sugar. Since we're going up against Gillian, who's got some apparently dynamite fried chicken, we decided we wanted to do something different this time. We're going to come up with a batter to dip the fried chicken in. Flour, cornstarch, equal parts. And then we're going to add smoked paprika and some cayenne, some chili de arbol. I'm just afraid that you're going to add too many spices. Oh. Hey, Bobby, you need some help? Anytime. Then I'm going to add some water to thin it out. Don't want it to be too thin, don't want it to be too thick. Are you making a batter? Yeah, you know, we tried something new for you. You're bringing it. I'm looking forward to it. Gillian definitely has the swagger of a chicken master. I don't crowd the pan. I get that edge of brown going. I cook 1,100, 1,200 pieces of chicken a week. Let's pat it dry, and then I'm going to season it, and then we'll start frying. Do you do a lot of fried chicken at home? I do fried chicken at home and in restaurants. Oh, okay. Monday night at Bar Americana is fried chicken night. Oh. But it's not this recipe. Will you consider changing it based on the results of tonight? Everything's always a work in progress. I agree. After a dip in our batter, we're able to start frying some of our chicken. But the oil in most of our pots just isn't cooperating. We're almost at 340. That's funny. I turned it off, and it still keeps going up. I know. That oil's too hot, and that oil's too cold. It's really hard to deep fry like that. That's very challenging. It's hard for that to stay hot. Is this on? No, it's not. Let me do it. Let me do it, please. Can I come on that side? Can you believe it? I can't believe this. Why did the fried chicken cross the road? But we've isolated the problem so we can finally get frying. We have five pieces done. How many people here? A lot. We're going to pull it together. We always do. Team play will prevail. Chef, what are you looking for in color and texture? To me, that seems like a good color. It's a little crispy on the outside. Now the question is, is it cooked through? Is it overcooked? Is it undercooked? Hopefully it's just cooked. I'm really excited to taste this fried chicken. I'm always on the quest for really good fried chicken that I don't have to cook. We finally get into a groove. Looks good. But before we feed the masses, it's time to trade chickens and see if I stand a chance. I can hear you crunching. That's a good sign. This is delicious. So well seasoned. Perfectly cooked. This is very good, too. I think I may have found the other fried chicken that I'm not cooking. It's got a really light, kind of crunchy batter. It's very tender and has a lot of juiciness, and I think it can taste the buttermilk a whole lot. We're going to take our chicken tenders and let it marinate or tenderize with some buttermilk. And that's one of the things that buttermilk does. It tenderizes meats. It obviously gives it a little bit of that sort of tangy flavor as well. It's also going to promote a nice, juicy chicken. So we're just going to let this marinate for about 30 minutes or so. Now we're going to move on to our waffle mixture. I have a classic buttermilk waffle recipe that I use. 1 3 quarters cup of all-purpose flour, 2 teaspoons of baking powder, 1 1⁄4 teaspoon of baking soda, and then a little bit of salt, 3 tablespoons of sugar. All right, those are our dry ingredients. Then we need 3 eggs, a little bit of melted, unsalted butter, and 1 1⁄2 cups of buttermilk. I find that buttermilk, first of all, you taste a little bit of that sort of tang running through the buttermilk, but also it makes a very, very tender waffle. Okay, so we have all our ingredients, and then I'm just going to fold in the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients, and then we'll have our waffle batter. We're going to let the waffle batter sit for 30 minutes or so as well. We can start frying our chicken and making our waffles. So we have some chicken tenders in here that we were marinating in some buttermilk, and I like to dip my chicken twice into the seasoned flour. So we're going to make basically 2 dredges of the flour mixture. Obviously we're going to start with all-purpose flour, and then we're going to season it. A little bit of cayenne, whoops. A little bit of garlic powder and some onion powder, and salt and pepper. All right, so then we're going to take some buttermilk. We need a wet dredge and a dry dredge. Man, we got a lot of buttermilk today. And then some hot sauce for some flavor. And if you notice, I season every layer, no matter what it is. Salt and pepper, and we're going to start by putting the chicken in the flour, then back into the buttermilk, and then back into the flour. I mean, you can put all kinds of different seasonings in here if you want. To me, the most important thing is that it actually has, you know, seasoning and it's flavored. Because otherwise, you're going to get some bland chicken. All right, here we go. You know, this is just the white meat. There's no skin on it. There's no bones in it, and they're not that thick. So this is going to cook pretty quickly. When these get golden, they're done. So while those are cooking, let's get our waffles going. I want to make sure that our waffle iron is on high. I'm going to paint these with a little bit of butter. And I don't like to make perfect waffles in terms of shape. I like them to be misshapen just because then they look like they're homemade. All right, so we're going to let those cook. All right, we got our fried chicken ready to go. Now all we need is some waffles. And then we can take some of our chicken. This is a pretty simple presentation. And then a little bit of honey, a little bit of hot sauce. A little salt and pepper. All right, let's give it a try. So good. You can taste the tanginess of the buttermilk. So you have the crispiness on the outside, the tender, light, and fluffy waffle on the inside. I think the buttermilk has a lot to do with that. And then you have the crispy fried chicken with lots of flavor. And to me, this is actually one of the most perfect dishes in America, period.