Monday, November 13, 2006

Barbecuing Precautions - Three Alarm Chicken

So some advice I received and a lesson. When Barbecuing in general; or particularly later in the evening & when marinates are heavy on oil; give the fire department a friendly warning before they show up to your house inquiring about the smoke.

I asked around and supposedly this is much too common. I am thinking there must have been a car that drove by whose headlights lit up some of the smoke in the street (it kinda goes everywhere) and grabbed for the cell phone. What ever happened to nosy people trying to get a view of the excitement, or at least some rubber-necking.

I will say that the chicken had a particularly delicious smokey flavor, and the somewhat crispy burgers had the perfect texture once given a little ketchup.

As for recipes:

Chicken: I like tender chicken. I understand why restaurants need to burn the hell out of it, but why do that at home? Risks with home cooking are much fewer than with day long line-cooking.

But many people are wary when the chicken has a little pink in the middle, or even thoroughly cooked with some signs of blood, so decided to do something a little different.

The trick with deep frying chicken is to boil it first, flash fry, and get crispy but not over-cooked batter. I opted for something a little different. Marinate the chicken in spicy oil at medium-low heat for an hour.

This was a quick fix that maybe should have had some more thought put into it, but this was an idea I had after I realized I had allowed the chicken to freeze in the freezer. (It was supposed to have gone in the refrigerator.)

So the chicken cooked well in the oil on the stove before giving them a high-flame on the barbecue to burn off the oil and give it the great flavor that only comes from barbecue.

The marinate came out weird and burned on the bottom of the pan. Also, when I went to remove the chicken from the pot to take to the barbecue, all the meat fell off. I am going to assume it got stuck to the bottom of the pan. But by the time it was dried out, relatively, on the barbecue, it was excellent.

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