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I'm starting a new semi-regular feature here at Table for Two, in which I will try to offer some tips and tricks on eating well without breaking the bank, especially when cooking for a small number of people.
A Lot From A Little Series 1, Post 1: How to Smoke a Chicken
A Lot From A Little Series 1, Post 2: Grilled BBQ Smoked Chicken Pizza
A Lot From A Little Series 1, Post 3: Smoked Chicken Salad Over Greens
My final offering to you in this smoked chicken series is something you might not consider when trying to decide how to use up what's left of your beautiful mahogany-skinned bird. I've mentioned many more-commonplace ideas if you're looking for something comforting and simple, but if you'd like to be a bit more adventurous, well, you ought to give this a try.
Crepes are one of those things that are so damnably versatile, I sometimes wonder why we don't use them more often. They can be savory or sweet, flavored with all manner of additives in the form of herbs and spices, and can be filled and topped with almost anything you can imagine. Sure, they can be a little fussy to make, but I gotta tell ya: my first ever attempt at making crepes was a pretty solid success (though admittedly imperfect) and I can't imagine why I was ever afraid of them.
I'll take my cue, once again, from the great Alton Brown (can you tell he's my hero?) and say that the key is really to have the right pan.
I suppose I'm lucky in that we just happen to have the perfect pan for making crepes in our cupboard. Its shallow and nonstick, with a gradual curve at the sides that allows for easy turning and removal of the crepes and ensures even cooking and shape. I don't actually know where this particular pan came from - I suspect its a hand-me-down either from J's parents, or from his ex's. Either way, I'm grateful to have it, because that's one less kitchen implement I need to buy.
Seriously though, I definitely think that the pan is essential to turning out great crepes. A deeper pan with higher sides and a steeper wall would make it awfully difficult to get a spatula under the thin, delicate crepes without tearing or folding them, and lord help you if its not nonstick. You'll need a lot of butter to make that work. And its certainly not a unitasker (which AB would frown upon) - it can easily be used for omelets or pancakes, and has frequently stepped in as a perfect sautee pan for small amounts of food, which is especially useful on the rare occasion that I'm cooking for myself alone.
Aside from that, I'd recommend trying out AB's crepe recipe first, if you're a crepe n00b. Its simple and straightforward and practically idiot-proof - the only thing that can be tricky is learning the correct amount of batter to use for each crepe, but you'll get the hang of that with practice.
For this particular recipe I used some savory crepes flavored with thyme that I'd made awhile back and frozen for just such an occasion. I reheated them (2 for each of us) in a low-temp oven while preparing the filling and sauce, and they worked just fine - a bit too crisp around the edges, perhaps, but it didn't really hurt anything, so I'd say there's no reason why you shouldn't make your crepes ahead of time. If you've got the idle hours, though, by all means, make them fresh. They'll always be better immediately after cooking.
The filling was incredibly simple - I took a handful of cremini mushrooms and half a white onion and sliced them all thinly, then sauteed them until they were soft and golden. Then I added in the remainder of our shredded smoked chicken with some fresh thyme leaves, a squeeze of lemon juice, and a fair amount of fresh-cracked black pepper. When everything was hot and slightly browned and crisp in places, I removed the mix from the heat to let it cool slightly.
The sauce was a simple basic bechamel with some shredded cheddar and smoked gouda thrown in, along with a goodly amount of black pepper. I made it while the filling was cooking, because I happen to enjoy multi-tasking.
To assemble, I just rolled up a few tablespoons of the chicken and mushroom filling in each crepe, then spooned the bechamel over top. That's it. Done. Simple, right?
It sure didn't taste it, though. And it looked darn fancy to boot. You'd never believe you could have such a seemingly gourmet meal on a weeknight, but believe me, you can. This didn't take more than half an hour from start to finish.
This is one of those recipes that is definitely more than the sum of its parts. The filling was smokey (obviously), earthy, bright from the lemon and slightly sweet thanks to the slight caramelization on the onions. The crepes themselves were woodsy and savory, and the cheesy bechamel was rich, tangy, and highly flavorful without being overly heavy, thanks to the 2% milk I used in place of whole milk or cream. It was perhaps a touch to thick, but I'm still perfecting my bechamel-fu.
Served with a simple green salad, this was a decadent and satisfying meal that made us feel oh-so-special on a Thursday evening, and was the perfect last meal for our wonderful smoked chicken. I'm not sure it'd be quite as good with regular old roast chicken, but it was good enough that, well, I'm willing to try.
This concludes my first "A Lot from A Little" series! There'll be more where that came from in the future, so stay tuned!
I'm starting a new semi-regular feature here at Table for Two, in which I will try to offer some tips and tricks on eating well without breaking the bank, especially when cooking for a small number of people.
A Lot From A Little Series 1, Post 1: How to Smoke a Chicken
A Lot From A Little Series 1, Post 2: Grilled BBQ Smoked Chicken Pizza
Now, I'm going to admit something right off the bat here: this didn't come out all that good. And that's a tragedy to me, because it ended up being a waste of a lot of really tasty chicken. However, I'm going to post about it anyway, partly because despite our failure this is still a perfectly valid way to use up that chicken, but mostly because I'm hoping someone might be able to give us some ideas of how better to execute this dish. Because honestly, it SHOULD have been awesome.
The idea was to make a standard mayo-dressed chicken salad more interesting by using the smoked chicken in place of the usual poached chicken, and eat it over some mixed greens for a somewhat healthier lunch than sandwiches. It didn't seem like it ought to be difficult, so we followed our usual method for salads like this: mix up some light mayo and mustard with chopped red onion, celery, and carrots; lighten it up with a splash of red wine vinegar and balance it out with a bit of salt, few grinds of black pepper and a drizzle of honey; add in the shredded chicken, mix it up, and eat. Simple right?
Well, I'm not sure what went wrong, but it just didn't work this time.
Part of the problem was that it was overdressed, I think - the salad was on the runny side and that generally kinda grosses me out when it comes to mayo-based salads. I also think we made a mistake by salting the dressing, as the chicken itself had a fair amount of saltiness from the brining step. And we decided to toss in some finely chopped fresh parsley this time around as well, which really didn't work at all for me. I'm a little picky about parsley, admittedly, but I think it was overpowering here.
Regardless, neither of us was thrilled with it. We each took it for lunch one day out of the week, and the rest went in the trash... heartbreaking, when I think of how good that chicken was, and also embarrassing as I'm trying to write about getting the most for your money here, and I just threw out a third of a chicken's worth of meat. Sigh. Unfortunately, there was just no rescuing it.
This marks the third time, now, that we have attempted to make chicken salad with smoked chicken, and while the previous attempts were better than this one, none have been exactly stellar. It makes me wonder if we need to try a completely different approach, because I feel certain that there must be a way to make this work. Perhaps a mayo-based salad would work if it was VERY lightly dressed, and the dressing was VERY simple. Or perhaps we need to play with seasonings or explore other options for a creamy salad base (Greek yogurt, perhaps?). Or maybe we should abandon the creamy salad idea completely and go a different direction, using perhaps a vinaigrette dressing instead.
Anyway, aside from this being a disaster from a taste perspective, it was a success from a stretching-your-ingredients perspective - using about a third of the meat (mostly white meat) that was left from our bird, we had easily enough salad for us both to have lunch for 3 days or so. Its a shame we couldn't actually follow through with that plan.
So folks, anyone have any brilliant ideas to make a smoked chicken salad that actually works?
Next up in this series: Smoked Chicken and Cremini Crepes with Two-Cheese Bechamel
I'm starting a new semi-regular feature here at Table for Two, in which I will try to offer some tips and tricks on eating well without breaking the bank, especially when cooking for a small number of people.
A Lot From A Little Series 1, Post 1: How to Smoke a Chicken
Now that you've smoked your chicken and broken it down, you've got this big pile of delicious, moist, smoky chicken meat staring you in the face and begging to be used. So, you might ask, what exactly do I do with this stuff?
Well, for starters, you could eat it, just as it is. Whip up a batch of cole slaw, boil or grill some corn on the cob, slice a few tomatoes and drizzle with EVOO and sprinkle with salt, and you've got yourself one hell of a tasty and healthy end-of-summer dinner. We've done meals like this with subtle variations many times in the past, and its always delicious.
Or, you can just use it wherever you might otherwise use roasted chicken. It'd make a killer chicken noodle soup, or be a really interesting riff on chicken parm if mixed with a light and acidic tomato sauce and baked with a bit of fresh mozzarell and basil on top. (In fact, I think I'll be trying that next time...) Throw it in your favorite chicken pot pie or stew recipe, or sautee it in chili sauce for chicken enchiladas, burritos, or tacos. The light hickory smokiness would complement all of those things, and probably with very little recipe alteration.
However, if you're looking for something perhaps a little more creative or interesting than standard comfort food, let me tell you what we did with ours.
The day we smoked it (which, btw, was a Sunday, and I absolutely recommend making this a weekend project so you can take your time with it and relax a bit while the bird takes its smoke bath - perhaps by sitting outside with a beer and a good book) we used some of the meat to make grilled pizza for dinner. We've been trying to perfect our grilled pizza method all summer and wanted to get one more attempt in before the weather gets too cool and the days too short for grilled dinners. And I have to say that this time around was the absolute best yet - still not quite perfect, but we're close. So very, very close.
BBQ Chicken Pizza is hardly an original concept, and I have to admit that when its done right, I like it even better than regular tomato-and-mozzarella style pizza. I'm a sucker for sweet bbq sauce on just about anything, but when you throw in chicken and lots of cheese, well lets just say I'm not terribly proud of the lack of self-control I exhibit. Its downright shameful, it is. But I can't help it.
But when we made up our minds to smoke this chicken, and decided to give the grilled pizza another shot, it was just a natural jump from there to realize that the smoked chicken would be a perfect topping for a slightly charred and crispy crust off the grill. And if we were going for smokey and charred, the next logical step was bbq.
I pulled my beloved Williams-Sonoma Essentials of Baking off the shelf and thumbed over to the Pizza Margherita recipe, whose dough has been the basis of my experiments so far. This time around I halved the recipe, and used half bread flour and half semolina flour instead of all bread flour. Who knew semolina would make such a difference? The dough was softer, silkier, and stretchier, and rolled out to a perfect thin-but-stable round for the pizzas. And when it went on the grill, it bubbled and puffed and charred just like it would in a real pizza oven. I can't even describe how satisfying that was to watch - as soon as it started developing those big tell-tale bubbles, I knew I'd gotten it right.
Unfortunately our grill isn't big enough to make the pizzas completely outdoors, as you need to be able to move them away from direct heat in order to top them on the grill without burning the bottoms, so we grilled both sides and then brought them inside to finish them off. The crusts were topped with a thin layer of J's best-yet homemade sweet bbq sauce, followed by a generous amount of the shredded smoked chicken, some thin sliced red onions, a few slices of fresh mozzarella, and a generous sprinkling of an equal blend of shredded sharp cheddar and smoked gouda. The topped pizzas went on a baking sheet and under the broiler for just a few minutes until the cheese was melty and everything was hot, and the crust had taken on a bit more char around the edges.
When we took them out, this is what we got.
Looks pretty amazing, doesn't it? Almost like real pizza. And it damn near was.
I know we'll never achieve real pizzeria pizza at home without a brick oven - a standard kitchen oven will just never get hot enough. But I'm now a believer in grilled pizza as the best possible alternative - the high direct heat helps the dough to actually get crispy and to rise quickly enough to develop those big airy bubbles that I see as the hallmark of a real pizzeria pizza. And the crust this time was so, SO close to what I've been looking for in a homemade pizza crust. It was a bit on the dry side, perhaps, which I think I can remedy by adding more olive oil to the dough, and still a bit too dense and chewy in places, which I think could be fixed by letting it rise a bit longer than I did (which was almost not at all) to let the gluten develop. But I'm making progress, and I think next time I just might get it right.
But, I know, what you really want to know is how was the chicken on this pizza?
It was delicious. Perfect, really. The smokiness mellowed a bit among the sweet sauce, sharp onions, and creamy cheese, but was kept at the fore with the help of the smoked gouda. Everything melded into a near-perfect synchronous whole, all sitting atop that glorious crust... it was our best pizza effort to date.
And as a bonus, it was equally good the next day for lunch. Who says brown-bagging it has to be boring?
Next up in this series: Smoked Chicken Salad Over Greens.
I'm starting a new semi-regular feature here at Table for Two, in which I will try to offer some tips and tricks on eating well without breaking the bank, especially when cooking for a small number of people.
J and I are hardly poor. We both make decent salaries and we don't have a lot of the expenses that other people our age do, since we don't have children and live in an apartment where all of our utilities are paid for. However, we're not exactly rich, either - J's got his car payment and insurance, I've got train tickets to buy every month, and we both have credit card debt and cellphone bills. And, well, we live in NY, which isn't exactly famous for its low cost of living. Add to that the rising food costs and the failing economy, and our budget for cooking and eating at home becomes a pretty important one.
Consequently, although we are generally able to afford plenty of high-quality cooking ingredients and can even occasionally buy something special, like a nice artisan cheese or imported olive oil, quite often our meal planning revolves around getting the absolute most that we can out of everything we buy so that we know we're getting our money's worth.
One method we use constantly is to buy a large cut of meat, say a london broil or a pork roast or a whole chicken or bone-in turkey breast, and then portion it out (either before or after cooking depending on our meal plan) to get 2-3 dinners out of it, and sometimes even lunch for a couple days, since we both bring lunch to work most of the time. Usually the price per pound of these types of meats will be less than pre-trimmed, pre-portioned versions, and if you're clever you can have meat for a week off of a single cut, especially if, like us, you're only cooking for two.
This also has the added bonus of allowing us to occasionally enjoy a roast beef or turkey dinner with all the trimmings, without succumbing to Turkey Day Syndrome where we end up eating that same meal over and over again for the rest of the week. Repurposing leftovers is the best way to get the most out of your food without getting bored, and opens up a ton of options that might not have been there before.
The example I'd like to walk you through today involves not roasting, but outdoor cooking - smoking, to be exact. Big cuts of meat and whole birds are ideal for smoking, since the long, slow cooking process tends to bring out the best in even the cheapest cuts. J has an electric smoker for these sorts of things, but it possible to smoke food in a charcoal grill as well - all you need is some heavy duty tin foil.
We started with a lovely Bell & Evans roaster chicken - we recently discovered this brand and fell in love with their chicken, always tender and moist and very flavorful.
The day before we planned to put it in the smoker, I mixed up a quick brine of equal parts sugar and kosher salt in filtered water, with a few bay leaves and whole peppercorns tossed in for good measure. The chicken went into a large ziploc bag, which then went into a second bag (insurance against leaks) and the brine was poured in, enough to submerge the chicken. I sealed up both bags and placed the whole thing in a big bowl just for a little added security, then slid it into the fridge to soak for the next 24 hours.
On smoking day I removed the chicken from its salt water bath and rinsed it quickly, then trussed it up with some butcher's twine. After a quick rub down with a bit more salt and a lot of black pepper, it was ready for some heat.
While I was doing that, J set some hickory chunks to soaking for about half an hour.
J set up the smoker with a layer of lava rocks around the heating coil, with the hickory chunks on top of that. Its taken a lot of trial and error for him to figure out how much wood and rocks to use depending on what he's smoking, as the smoker doesn't have anything resembling temperature control (hey, I bought the one I could afford at the time) so I'm not sure I can give too many specifics for how YOU should do this. Mostly I would just advise paying attention to the directions that came with your smoker if you're using one.
Also, if you don't have a smoker, all you need to do is build up a fire in your charcoal grill, and toss in a perforated, double-wrapped foil packet with your soaked wood chips or chunks once the flames die down. Keep the lid closed while you're cooking and it'll work just fine.
Anyway, once the smoker was assembled and ready to go, in went Mr. Chicken and on went the lid, not to be seen again for another 2 and a half hours.
J used just the right amount of lava rocks and wood chunks to keep a steady supply of low heat and smoke for the entire cooking cycle, but I'd advise checking on your smoking rig every 30-45 minutes or so to be sure you've still got both. You may need to add more wood or, if you're using charcoal, relight you fire at some point during the cooking process.
Use a meat thermometer to monitor how the chicken cooks - when it reaches 160-165 degrees in the thickest part of the breast or thigh, its time to pull it off the smoke and let it rest.
If you did it right, your chicken will now have this beautiful mahogany coat and a delicious aroma.
The most important thing to do now is to leave that bird alone for at least 15 minutes - it needs to come up a bit more in temperature, closer to 170, and the carryover heat will accomplish that. Plus, since its been brined, there'll be a lot of juices in the meat, and cutting it now would let all that yummy flavor escape. As the great Alton Brown would say, your patience will be rewarded.
Once the 15 minutes are up and the bird is cool enough to handle, grab your knife. Not that you'll need it much - it'll help you get through the skin, but if your bird is properly cooked you should be able to just pull it apart at the joints with very little help from tools, and slip the bones right out of the meat. Feel free to lick your fingers while you're doing this, because the juices will be delicious.
When I broke down our bird, I separated the legs and wings from the body and just pulled apart that meat with my hands, then carefully cut away the two breasts from the ribcage and sliced them into manageable pieces. Then I just picked off whatever meat I could find by hand. I removed all the skin at the beginning, and saved it to make something akin to cracklings in the oven later - sounds weird, but I tasted a piece while working with the meat and was struck by how much it tasted like bacon, smoky and salty. I just had to crisp it up and see if I could really make it like bacon. And it worked! The fat in the skin acted just like the fat in bacon and rendered out under the broiler to create a crispy, salty, and amazingly bacon-y snack.
This was, hands down, the best chicken that either of us has ever tasted. We've smoked chickens before, but often the smoke flavor was too strong - this time it was perfect, savory and aromatic, and the meat was tender and juicy and perfectly seasoned thanks to the brining step. It was addictive in a way I've never known chicken to be, and I kept sneaking little bites because I couldn't get enough of the flavor. Its a good thing we had plans for all that meat, or I doubt it would've lasted long.
Once you've broken down your bird, you can bag and freeze the meat for use at some later date (it'll last months in the freezer) or keep it in the fridge and use it within a week.
Next up in this series: BBQ Smoked Chicken Pizza, on the grill!
