Tuesday, February 7, 2012

This is what happens when I watch Top Chef

I have a new "something" on my 30 by 30 list: Make 30 new meals. I'm really excited about it. I can do a lil' sumn sumn in the kitchen, but I cook the same things all the time. YAWN! So I'm branching out so I can have a decent recipe repertoire.

I was watching Top Chef last week (love that show) and felt inspired to start cooking...right then. It was almost 11:00 PM, and I should have been getting ready for bed. Instead I made my own buttermilk and started a brine for fried chicken. I modified the recipe I found on Smitten Kitchen, which is a great blog (and she's coming out with a recipe book. Yay!) Now I've definitely made fried chicken before, but I've never soaked my chicken in buttermilk brine. I've never used buttermilk. As much as I was raised in Florida, the city where I grew up is more Caribbean island than Dirty South, so maybe that's why? At any rate, peep the recipe:


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Buttermilk Fried Chicken
 
Brine
5 chicken legs (or approximately 1.25 lbs of other chicken pieces)
1 1/2 cups buttermilk (add 1 tbsp vinegar or lemon juice to 1 cup milk to make your own buttermilk)
1/3 cup Kosher salt (I used sea salt...that's all I had)
2 tbsp chicken bullion (the recipe calls for paprika...and that's it? Nah son...)
1/4 cup brown sugar
garlic (to taste)   


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I let the chicken soak almost 24 hours. When I got home from work on Friday, I took the chicken out of the brine, dried it, and then rolled it in some flour mixed with just a pinch of salt and pepper. I fried the chicken until it was a nice brown color (lighter than what you see in the photos above). I was so excited to try it! I'd been thinking about frying that chicken all day at work.

Too bad I had to throw all the chicken away. It was sooooooo salty!!!!! I'd either used WAY too much salt in the brine or let the chicken soak for WAY to long. Regardless, I couldn't eat any of it. I was so disappointed. I forced down one piece because I hate wasting food, but then I realized it would suck more to die from high sodium intake.

Sigh. I think I ended up having peanut butter & jelly for dinner that night. What a disaster. The rest of the recipe was perfect, so I think I'll reduce the amount of salt and use only 1/3 of what I used (so that would be 1/9 a cup? What does that even mean?). I'll try again eventually. I haven't tried anything new since this debacle, which was a few weeks ago now. I'm literally discouraged. Bleh.

Little Miss Knight

5 comments:

  1. Oh my Koos, that really sucks. lol.... but as I said when we were roommates "It bez like dat sometimes" LOL. This happened to me when looking for a new recipe for my cupcakes... but then I went on Epicurious.com and found greatness. So get back in the kitchen and feed that belllyyy!!!!

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    1. LOL it was terrible. People must have really felt bad for me because they started leaving recipes in my Facebook inbox! I have some new things I'm about to blog about (not fried chicken...I'm gonna wait a while for that). Hopefully they turn out to be edible!

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  2. Sorry your recipe didn't work out. The Betty Crocker App on the Iphone has pretty good recipes. They are easy to follow and taste good too. It allows you to input items you have in your kitchen and gives you different dishes based on what you have. It's great!

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    1. Nice! I'll definitely have to download that one. Thanks so much!

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  3. Hi, I stumbled across your blog via Apartment Therapy. Did you rinse the chicken after you took it from the brine? I've done brined poultry before and it tasted fine, but I gave it a good rinse before continuing prep.
    Anyway, love your blog, you have great taste!

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