$268 vs $24 Hot Chicken: Pro Chef & Home Cook Swap Ingredients

Everything is gonna be fine guys.

Everyone stop panicking.

[suspenseful quirky music]

Hi, I'm Eric.

I'm a professional chef

and these are my $268 hot chicken ingredients.

[suspenseful quirky music]

Hi, I'm Emily.

I'm a home cook,

and these are my $24 hot chicken ingredients.

[suspenseful quirky music]

All right, here we go.

Right, okay

Nice.

We got chicken.

It's a good start.

Okay.

[suspenseful quirky music]

So I was planning on making double fried hot chicken

with Tianjin chilies and duck fat,

and a side of dirty fried rice.

Great hot chicken has all the same quality

and characteristics of a great fried chicken, obviously,

with the overlay of this really spicy,

violently red looking sauce.

And I think this will be fun

to kind of do a different version of it.

I had a whole heritage chicken.

I was going to butcher it into ten parts.

So I'm gonna have to butcher a whole chicken, huh?

Cool.

[Eric] Marinated in buttermilk and mustard and spices.

What is this?

Rice wine vinegar powder?

And then we were gonna double fry it with EverCrisp,

which is a little trick that keeps things crispy forever.

So the hot in my hot chicken

was going to be Tianjin chili paste.

It's gonna have Sichuan peppercorns, rice vinegar powder,

and it was all gonna be bound together with duck fat

because duck fat makes everything better.

How many ducks was this?

Like three?

[Eric] All served with dirty fried rice

made from stir fried chicken livers,

Which I am not at all afraid of.

And a side of pickled daikon radish.

I've fried something like 20,000 chickens in my life,

so I feel pretty confident it was gonna be good.

Oh, with Emily's recipe,

we got some stuff you probably have hanging

around your pantry or you can get at the local market.

These might be on the simpler side,

but with a little technique

I think we can make this really spectacular.

So if I had to guess,

I think this probably costs around $25.

[cashier rings] All right.

Pretty close, pretty close.

If I had to guess, this would all cost $234.

[cashier rings] Oh, so too expensive.

Cool, got it.

So here's Chef Eric's recipe book.

Double fried hot chicken with Tianjin chilies,

duck fat, and dirty fried rice.

So when Emily's butchering her chicken,

she's gonna be doing a 10 piece country cut.

So it's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 on each side.

It's like what you'd see in like a bucket of chicken.

I'm very passionate about using whole chickens

because when you get chicken parts,

they get messed up and thrown into a bag,

and then all the skin gets messed up and then waterlogged.

I'm going to start by taking the wings off.

Pretty good, actually.

You know, I mean that's a wing.

[Eric] You need to make an incision inside the leg

between the breast and the thigh.

Those are the oysters on the chicken.

I wanna make sure that those are intact,

so I'm gonna cut above them.

It's just like a little nugget,

it's really enjoyable.

All these little details are important.

To me, the skin is the most important part.

Must protect the skin.

[Eric] So when you're butchering a chicken

you have to be very careful

to take care of the skin and keeping it intact.

All right, thigh and drumstick

with the oyster and skin intact.

[Eric] Then you're going to take your knife

and put it at the articulation of the knee.

You should be be able to cut cleanly through.

[Emily] Drumstick and thigh.

[Eric] And then you're gonna cut the spine off.

Good enough.

And then you're gonna split the breast into four,

so you should have four pieces of breast meat.

You're not gonna cut it directly in half.

You're gonna cut it kind of like on the 40 yard line.

That's not basketball or hockey,

so I don't know what it means.

[Eric] Because that'll make the pieces a little more even.

What's special about this recipe

is that you cut through bone.

Yeah, that looks about right, I think.

[Eric] Keeping the bone on

obviously helps to stay juicier.

It helps anchor the skin to it.

There.

That is a 10 piece country cut heritage chicken.

So Emily was gonna make a pretty standard,

a Nashville style hot chicken sandwich.

I decided to up it a little bit,

and we're doing a smoke paprika hot chicken

with pickle sauce and charred cabbage slaw.

Okay, so we have some chicken thighs here.

First step is we're going to de-bone them,

but we're going to keep the skin on

because that has a really nice textural

and crispy component to it.

You're using your opposite hand

to open the chicken thigh like a book.

That will keep exposing more parts of the bone

for you to cut around.

You can get your boning tip under the bone,

and then ideally kind of free it

by scraping along and pulling it off.

This is the oyster, we want that.

So we just cut around it,

and then you should have a clean bone.

Chicken thighs have a really nice ratio

of skin, fat, and protein.

They're incredibly forgiving to cook.

They remain juicy.

All right, so we got two de-boned chicken thighs

with the skin on.

Not very common for sandwiches,

but I think it's really nice and it adds a lot of texture.

I'm gonna make my seasoning mix for my chicken.

It's salt, sugar, and MSG.

I'm gonna give that a stir and that's seasoning mix made.

The next thing I need to do is make my marinade.

So Emily's marinade,

I think was gonna be a little more traditional,

had buttermilk, onion powder, garlic powder.

I'm gonna add a few more things.

I'm gonna add some buttermilk here,

couple dashes of hot sauce, a little squeeze of mustard,

onion powder, a little bit of garlic powder,

a little bit sugar, just enough to balance out

everything else going on.

Obviously we want some salt.

Just a little bit of flour, you don't need a lot.

Just something to thicken it up

and just whisk it all together here.

I'll go with like a tablespoon of my seasoning mix.

I'm gonna do onion powder, garlic powder,

five spice powder, flour.

Come on.

I'm gonna give this little mix

and then I'll start adding my wet ingredients.

This may come as a surprise, but I also love mustard.

This is a very fancy buttermilk,

and then I'm gonna give this a little whisk.

I have been told I can only make one whisking pun.

I have an idea, but it's a little too whisky to share.

[drum rolls]

Ready to marinate.

I'm gonna wash my hand,

and then I'm gonna cover this up and put it in the fridge.

And then we're gonna pop our chicken in there

and let them hang out for, oh, at least you know, an hour.

But ideally you could do this upwards of 24 hours.

Buttermilks are really weak acid,

so it's going to help denature

some of the proteins in the chicken,

which register as tenderness.

Okay, our chicken is marinating.

So the next thing I need to do is make my chili mix.

And to make my chili mix, I need to toast my chilies.

So now for the hot part of hot chicken,

she's going to be using Sichuan peppercorns,

which have a flavor profile called mala.

It's a tingly feeling.

It literally causes your mouth and your nerves

to vibrate at 50 hertz.

So I sent Emily Tianjin chilies.

It's something I grew up with and I really love.

I considered them to be like a medium heat.

I've got my oven at 300 degrees

and I'm just gonna pop these in there for a few minutes.

So Emily was going to use paprika.

So we're going to boost the smoke flavor in this paprika

by smoking it ourselves.

Giving a little extra touch here with this smoking gun.

We're gonna use applewood chips.

I really like applewood.

It has kind of a light sweet and fruitiness to it

as you can imagine.

We are gonna put our paprika into our bowl here.

This is gonna be our smoking chamber if you will.

We're gonna add our applewood chips,

and we're gonna turn it on, give it a light.

I won't comment on what this may remind you of.

And we are just gonna let this guy smoke up our paprika.

All right, that's really it.

As long as you tightly seal it

and allow it to sit like this,

the smoke will permeate over time.

So my peppers are out of the oven, they're cooled down,

they're properly toasted, and now I'm going to grind them.

Emily, listen to me very carefully.

You need to allow your chilies

to cool down to room temperature.

Otherwise, they're gonna throw a ton of pepper

and capsaicin into the air.

You're gonna be miserable

because you'll have been pepper sprayed.

This is pretty much

what I have for breakfast every single day.

Everything's fine.

Everything's fine, guys.

Don't worry about it.

[blender whirring]

So now I'm just gonna move this carefully into my bowl.

And we're gonna make our hot oil.

It's usually the fryer oil with cayenne pepper.

That's a little one-dimensional,

so we're gonna add some other stuff to it.

Don't come after me, Nashville.

Sorry about that.

Half a cup of cayenne, freshly smoked paprika,

pinch of salt, and like just a little bit of sugar.

Now whisk that together,

and then we're gonna combine it with our oil.

So it should be loose like this.

It should be concerningly red.

When we brush it onto hot chicken

a lot of the oil will run off,

and what will be left is this brilliant red crust.

And that's what makes Nashville hot Chicken,

Nashville hot chicken.

So I have my chili mixed powder here.

And then I have rice wine vinegar powder, sugar,

just a little bit of my seasoning mix from earlier

and I'm just gonna mix these together.

This is probably the whiskiest whisking I've done.

[drum rolls] [audience laughing]

I think that's really good.

Chili mix is done.

So Emily was gonna serve some hot sauce on the side.

So I'm gonna take this hot sauce

and make a chili butter sauce, kind of like a buffalo sauce.

The idea here is to add a little bit of fat,

and richness, and acidity,

which I think the dish is really gonna need.

Now I'm going to take my chili mix

and turn it into a chili paste for my chicken.

All right, so cup of vegetable oil.

And I've got one cup of duck fat.

Trust me, duck fat makes everything better.

So what we're doing is making an emulsion.

Emulsions are a little finicky.

You have to add a little bit at a time

to kind of tease the water and the fat to get along.

You'll see the color of the sauce start to change.

Adding fat makes, it's gonna make it a little lighter.

And you're gonna see the viscosity change,

it's going to get thicker.

Okay, everything's emulsified in.

I'm just gonna add a little bit more heat,

so we're just gonna add a touch of sugar to smooth it out.

Okay, whisk that in.

Okay, chili butter sauce.

And now I'm gonna add my chili mix into the hot oil,

and I'm just gonna whisk it to combine.

Okay, I think our chili paste is ready to go.

Okay, so Emily left me

some sliced bread and butter pickles.

So I think I'm gonna make a bread and butter pickle sauce.

Everyone's had a bread and butter pickle sauce

whether they've known it or not.

The certain golden arches

and their certain signature sandwich have produced it, but.

First step towards making bread and butter pickle sauce,

we gotta make a mayo.

The lecithin in egg yolks helps to form

a bridge between water and fat because they don't get along.

There's emulsifying properties in mustards,

and I'm gonna add a little bit of pickle juice.

So we're gonna add our salt at this stage as well.

Couple twists of black pepper.

Mayonnaise,

just like the chili butter sauce we made earlier,

is an emulsion.

You're just combining water and fat,

and we're gonna slowly start adding oil.

A few drops at a time.

You can do this in about 15 seconds

with an immersion blender.

Better than just buying mayonnaise.

Voila, mayonnaise.

I'm going to chop up some bread and butter pickles

and add them in for crunch, and texture, and flavor.

Nice and chunky, has texture.

Needs a little salt, needs a little pepper.

Touch of pickle brine.

Mix it all up.

Bread and butter pickle sauce.

The next thing I'm gonna do is make my dirty fried rice.

Dirty rice is a really traditional Cajun dish,

which is made from chicken livers.

The first thing I need to do is put them in the blender.

[blender whirring] Ooh. [chuckles]

What a noise.

[blender whirring]

That seems pretty liver smoothie-esque.

So Emily gave me this really beautiful cabbage here.

I think her idea was to make a coleslaw with it.

I'm gonna make a coleslaw also,

but I'm gonna add a few extra touches to it.

Make it a little special.

All right, we got it.

So typically there's a core in the middle here

and then we just kind of cut a triangle out.

I'm gonna use this cabbage to do two things.

I'm gonna julienne the more tender leaves to make a slaw,

and then we're gonna use the tougher parts

to char and make a vinaigrette.

Coleslaw, typically the cabbage is julienne.

Julienne is just cutting something into thin strips.

Put it in our bowl,

and then we're gonna julienne our carrot.

So you're gonna cut it on a angle

to create these long planks,

and then we're gonna line these up and julienne.

We're gonna marinate a little bit at this phase

to kind of break it down a little bit.

Obviously the cabbage is very tough right now,

but adding a little bit of salt, sugar,

and vinegar will help you break it down.

And then you're actually gonna want

to get physically in there and help macerate a little bit.

I'm gonna let this sit

for about 10 to 15 minutes to soften up.

And in the meanwhile, I'm gonna take that trim, the cores,

and char them to make our charred cabbage vinegarette.

I'm going to put oil in here.

[Eric] You're gonna fry them in a really hot skillet,

and you're gonna allow them to char in one side.

That's what they call in Cajun cooking a scrape.

Chef Eric said to char this,

so I'm gonna like just try and kind of spread it out

and let one side of it cook.

All right, well, I feel good about this.

I'm gonna start just like pushing it around a little.

And then you're gonna fold it up,

chop it into little bits.

What am I?

Chopped liver.

[audience laughing]

[Eric] And then you're gonna reserve it

to fold inside your rice.

All right, so liver cooked.

Now I'm gonna make fried rice with it.

All right, now it's time to char our cabbage.

So normally this would go

right into a compost bin or a trash bin,

but there's a lot of flavor in here,

and this is a good way to use it.

A little bit of oil.

Nothing crazy, you don't want any flareups.

Just a little bit of salt,

trying to build flavor at every step.

Give it a little toss, toss, toss.

All right, we're just gonna let this char,

burn, grill, cook all the way through.

All right, first things first,

I'm gonna put lots of oil on here.

I'm gonna add my trinity vegetables.

Trinity veg is a mixture of onion,

green bell pepper, and celery,

and it's basically what they built the entire foundation

of the cuisine on.

All right, rice time.

So the best type of rice to use for fried rice

is day old rice.

I'm gifting you some day old rice.

Thank you again, Chef Eric.

[Eric] You are welcome, Emily.

All right, next up, I'm gonna add my liver.

It's called dirty rice because the chicken livers

that are folding into it, I mean, yeah, it looks like dirt.

They're brown and they cause all these speckles

and stuff like that.

But it's delicious and it's about down home country

as you can get.

Okay, so it's been about 10 minutes, I would say.

After we juice it,

it's gonna have a lot of nice smokey flavor.

I'm gonna remove these from the grill pan

and let them rest for a second.

Okay, it's juicing time.

[juicer whirring] This is a.

Oh my god, all right.

[juicer whirring]

Oh god.

[juicer whirring]

This thing is [beeps] badass.

Okay, so our grilled cabbage juice.

Obviously, not a lot, but it's very intense.

It's very flavorful.

This is more than enough to season our coleslaw with.

All right, that looks good.

I'm gonna add now my butter, MSG, and white pepper.

All right, I'm turning this off

'cause I think it's basically done-ish, probably.

This is going to be a purposely broken vinaigrette.

We're not looking for a mayonnaise like texture.

We're purposely doing something that's light and refreshing.

So just a little bit of vinegar,

and then we're just gonna whisk in a little bit of oil.

Light, refreshing.

Just a nice bite to have alongside this rich, fatty,

spicy chicken sandwich.

All right, I have marinated coleslaw here.

I have my grilled cabbage vinegarette here

and we're just gonna combine the two.

It'll be juicy, that's for sure.

But adding the oil in, it'll be nice and marinated.

I think it's gonna be a nice compliment

to our fried chicken sandwich.

So traditionally, Nashville hot chicken

is served with some white bread.

You see the chicken on top,

and the idea is it kind of soaks up the chili,

but we're gonna use it in our sandwich.

All right, we're going to go like a medium heat here.

Just a little bit of butter, get it in there.

Kinda messing around a little bit,

and just a very light weight, nothing crazy.

Ooh, yeah, that happened fast.

Oh yeah, toasted all the way around

because it had that little weight on it.

All right, let the wonder continue.

Now we're gonna make some breadcrumbs.

A little bit non-traditional,

but I think it's gonna be really delicious.

We're gonna cut the crust off here,

and then we'll cut it into manageable sizes.

So pillowy.

[food processor pulsing]

Okay, go slow.

It's gonna be light and airy, kind of like a Panko.

It should be pretty good.

All right, so I have my oil heating up to fry my chicken

and in the meantime, I'm gonna make my dredge.

I have all-purpose flour, potato starch, corn starch,

and my EverCrisp.

I not only have never used this before,

I've never even heard of it before.

EverCrisp is a modified wheat dextrin.

It makes your food super crispy

and it keeps it crispy forever.

My seasoning mix, boom.

I'm just gonna give that gentle whisking together.

Ready for dredgification.

It's almost frying time.

We're gonna prepare our breading station.

So we're gonna make a seasoned flour dredge, just AP flour,

big pinch of salt, black pepper, a little bit of cayenne.

Since we went through all this effort

of smoking our own paprika, let's use some.

Whisk that together.

Done.

And then we're gonna make an egg wash.

It's exactly what you think it is.

It's eggs, it's water.

It'll coat a lot more evenly if you add a little water.

And you do wanna make sure it's smoothly beaten.

And that's that, egg wash.

Okay, so we're ready to bread our chicken.

This is our breading station.

This is a standard breading procedure.

We're going to flour.

We want to cover every bit.

That's really important.

Any wet spot is gonna show up later on the crust.

And then we wanna shake off as much excess as possible.

Egg wash phase, same thing.

We're gonna make sure it's completely covered

all the way around.

And then I'm going right into the fresh breadcrumbs.

And then we're just gonna kind of press it a little bit.

Make sure that the fresh breadcrumbs are adhering.

So this is reminiscent

of a katsu style fried Japanese sandwich.

All right, we got even coverage of our fresh breadcrumbs.

Let's get ready to fry.

All right, it's time to fry my chicken.

We're doing two fries.

This is fry number one.

The double frying serves a couple functions.

It allows you to par cook your chicken

and have everything ready at the same time.

It makes things a lot easier.

But also it allows you, after you cook it the first time,

to allow the chicken to rest,

which allows all the juices to redistribute it.

You'll find that it's a really juicy bite as a result.

Thigh going in.

[oil sizzling]

So what I'm doing here is a shallow fry.

It's a little bit more forgiving on the skin.

And if you want to have like a more delicate crust,

shallow frying is the way to go.

I'm at 325F and I'm gonna lay it in

and just kind of away from me.

Should be bubbling immediately.

There we go.

Okay, just laying it in gently.

Not splattering.

I think this is gonna take about probably seven minutes.

I honestly don't know how this is supposed to look

at this phase, so I think it looks good.

We want obviously everything to be brown

and crispy on the outside,

and for the chicken to be cooked all the way through.

All right, wing coming out.

And final breast, ouch.

Fry number one, done.

One fry to go.

Okay, I'm gonna turn it every so gently.

We're gonna kind of turn it throughout.

Make sure it's not browning too much on one side or another.

Now it's time for fry two.

The second fry is super easy.

You just need to think about it as crisping up the skin

and you're reheating the chicken.

I have my chili paste situation,

and I'm just gonna make this warm chicken into hot chicken.

Sorry for the slight mess,

but when you're making hot chicken

and if you don't make a mess, did you make hot chicken?

That feels like hot chicken to me.

There she is, Nashville hot chicken, kind of.

We're ready to plate.

The last thing I have to do is plate my hot chicken,

and I have my garnish here to make sure

that it looks absolutely radishing.

[soft triumphant music] [people cheering]

First up, we definitely want a nice big helping of rice.

This rice smells really good.

[Eric] Bottom bread, bread and butter pickle sauce on,

and of course our Nashville slash katsu style hot chicken.

[Emily] This maybe.

[Eric] Chili butter sauce.

We'll do a couple slices of pickles,

a side of bread on the tilt,

and then I will put a bunch of our slaw on the side.

All right. And here's my take

on Chef Eric's hot chicken recipe,

double fried hot chicken with Tianjin chilies, duck fat,

and dirty fried rice.

And this is my take on Emily's recipe,

smoked paprika hot chicken

with pickle sauce and charred cabbage slaw.

I hope Emily likes it,

and I'm really excited to see how my recipe turned out.

It looks freaking tasty.

Hey, what's up? Hello.

Nice to see you. Likewise.

How did it go? I thought it was all right.

How about you? We'll find out.

[Eric] Okay, here we go.

[Emily] Ooh, hey. Oh, okay.

You made a sandwich.

God gave us Wonder Bread, I made it happen

[Emily] with Wonder Bread. Yeah, you got it.

It's begging for, it looks so good.

[Eric] This looks great.

[Eric] Thank you. Yeah.

I did my best.

I would love you to try it

and be mostly honest with me. [laughs]

Okay. All right.

We can do that.

You did a nice job.

Oh, thank you. It's hot.

So you hit the balance very nicely.

Nice, but. Hold on.

There's a nice crunch factor.

You heard the crunch.

All right, we'll try the rice.

I liked this idea.

I've had dirty rice, but I've never made it before.

Okay.

I've made a lot of fried rice.

Mm-hmm. Bring them together,

it was a great idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There we go.

[Emily] Well done. Yay.

The radish we always, you know,

nice refreshing bite. I didn't do anything

to the radish, but like.

It's kind of nice having, eating it

when someone else makes it for once.

[both laughing]

All right, so I guess it's my turn.

You gotta taste what I made.

[Emily] This looks so good.

What did you do?

Yeah, it's unusual looking breading, right?

So it's a fresh breadcrumb breading.

So we have a chili butter sauce on top

with the Louisiana style hot sauce we had.

Made a bread and butter pickle sauce

that's sitting underneath.

Beautifully toasted pieces of Wonder Bread,

and then a charred cabbage slaw on the side.

Amazing. Yeah.

I feel like the toasted Wonder Bread almost gives it

like a grilled cheese feel like.

Buttery Wonder Bread is like the childhood flavor

of grilled cheese. Yeah.

It's totally like a very,

I wanna say like cozy chicken sandwich.

You know what I mean? Okay, mm-hmm.

[Emily] I also wanna taste your coleslaw.

Oh yes, yes, yes.

[Emily] Have some smokiness there. Yeah.

I think this kind of worked out nicely with the balance.

Yeah, it's super light. I think it's refreshing.

You successfully completed the hot chicken challenge.

What's my prize?

Is it these leftovers? [laughs]

Yeah, you get to take these home.