I decided to make lunch today using some giant on-the-bone chicken breasts we picked up at People’s Meat Market out towards Amherst. I found a recipe on Amazon of all places, as a sample to a cookbook I was looking at and decided to try it. The book is recipes from Ad Hoc, Thomas Keller’s restaurant, so I figured it had to be pretty good, and it definitely met expectations. The recipe took time, and it definitely wasn’t hard, but planning ahead is necessary. Since it was just the two pieces of chicken, I quartered the recipe. The first step involved making the brine yesterday and letting it cool all afternoon. The chicken got put in before we went to bed last night and spent the night soaking in the brine in the fridge. Today after church I made the breading, Julie cut the breasts off of the bones to make them manageable, and then I dredged them, soaked them in buttermilk and dredged them again before deep frying. Once the chicken was cooked, which took a lot longer than the recipe said (mainly because of the size of the chicken breasts), we took it out to let it rest on a paper bag and used the hot oil to fry up some potato chips that I had cut with the mandolin. The end result was crazy, amazingly good. This is definitely a “keeper” and we will use the correct size chickens next time, instead of the godzilla chicken these pieces came from. That will give a better ratio of breading / fried goodness to chicken that will make it even better. Now time to buy the book so I have more access to recipes like these.
On an unrelated camera note – Julie sent our batteries down to Houston to our friend Emily to try in her charger for the exact same camera. They charged just fine, so we now know that the charger was the problem, and a new one is one the way, so we will hopefully be taking better pictures soon!
The chicken and chips draining and cooling
So good....
