Cowboy Cornbread Chicken | Food Wishes

[00:00] Hello, this is Chef John from FoodWishes.com with Cowboy Cornbread Chicken. That's right. Instead of serving chicken with cornbread, we're serving chicken in cornbread and

[00:15] not just any cornbread. Alright, we're going to spice up some cornbread southwest style, just like cowboys make it. Allegedly. And to get started, I'm going to cut up three chicken breasts lengthwise and half.

[00:28] Not because I wanted to, but because they were ginormous and I had to. Alright, these didn't even have the tenderloin attached and it was still close to like 12 ounces. So what we'll do in that case is take a knife and divide these right down the middle into

[00:43] two strips that are hopefully equally sized. And by the way, if you can find some normal sized chicken breast that are closer to like six ounces, then you can just buy six and use them whole. But either way, once cut will toss them in a bowl and will drizzle those with a little

[00:58] bit of olive oil, before we season and spice them up with a generous amount of salt, some freshly ground black pepper, plus I also added some chipotle pepper. But of course, as usual, you go ahead and toss in whatever you want.

[01:13] And what we'll do once we've given that a thorough mixing is pop it in the fridge until we need it. And then we'll head to this stove where we are going to melt an entire stick of butter over medium high heat and some kind of cast iron or other oven safe pan and once that

[01:27] butter melts, we'll go ahead and toss in a diced onion along with our customary big pinch of salt and we'll cook that stirring for a couple minutes until yes, you guessed it. They start to soften up and turn translucent.

[01:40] And once they do and things are looking a little something like this, we can back our heat down to medium and we'll toss in some bell pepper. And I like to use both red and green and we'll also toss in some minced garlic and we will

[01:54] cook this stirring for about two minutes or just until those peppers soften up slightly and start to lose the rage. At which point we'll turn off the heat and we'll grab a small bowl because before we move

[02:07] to the next step, I like to remove about three or four spoons of the mixture so that we can scatter those over the top of the cornbread before it goes in the oven. So this step is optional, but I think the cornbread does look better if we do it.

[02:20] So let's do it. And once that's been accomplished, we'll remove the pan from the heat and we'll let that sit and cool for about five minutes, during which time we can mix up our dry ingredients and

[02:32] there's only three, okay, some self-rising flour, some cornmeal of course, plus a little bit of salt and then we'll take a whisk and give that a thorough mixing for about 30 seconds

[02:44] and by the way, as always, if you don't have self-rising flour, you can simply use all purpose with some baking powder mixed in and we will definitely add how to do that to the written recipe and once that's set, we'll head back to our pan and we'll transfer in

[02:58] about three tablespoons of honey or a two if you want it less sweet and four if you want it more and once the pan's been honeyed, we'll transfer in our buttermilk as well as a couple large beaten eggs and then we'll take a whisk and mix this thoroughly until we're very

[03:14] sure everything's been evenly combined and by the way, I would make this no matter how many pots or pans that needed but as an added bonus, this is actually a one pan meal so we got that going for us which is nice but anyway, once that's been mixed up, we will

[03:30] transfer in our dry ingredients and we'll grab a spatula and we will very carefully, very thoughtfully mix this in and we are only going to do that until the flour disappears so as now to over mix the batter, all right, I like my cowboys tough but I want my cornbread

[03:46] tender, oh and if your spatula starts to get gunked up a little bit, just use this spoon to go ahead and clean it off and once we do have that mixed in, we'll go ahead and scrape down and clean up the sides a little bit and we'll also kind of level out the surface

[04:01] at which point we can grab our chicken, specifically the chicken we seasoned and put in the fridge and we can start pressing and pushing those pieces down into the batter and as I started to place these in, I realized my original wagon wheel spoke design was not going to work, right

[04:17] these pieces were just too long but as you know, we never let the food win and eventually I figured out that if I kind of bent them and shaped this more into a spiral that I would be able to fit them all in and they would be nice and evenly spaced and by the way,

[04:34] if you are using six small breasts and you're not using these cut up pieces, you can just go around and stick in a minute like a 45 degree angle and roughly the same positions or as long as they're equally spaced, it's all going to work out just fine and then once

[04:49] we have that placed in, we'll take a spoon and we will take a little bit of that batter from here and there and do about three or four spoons in the center where all the thinnest pieces of the chicken came together which I think helps this bake up nice and evenly

[05:03] and that's it to finish this off, we'll go ahead and scatter over our reserve pepper on your mixture, followed by a nice sprinkling of grated Monterey Jack cheese or at least that's what I decided to use, right a cheddar would also work well, so you decide I mean

[05:19] you are after all Billy the kid of whether to do it like Chef John did and that's it this is not ready to transfer into the upper center of a 400 degree oven for about 40 to 45 minutes

[05:31] or until our chicken safely cooked our cornbread is beautifully browned and it hopefully looks like this, oh yeah I mean yee ha now that is a real looker and not to brag but I knew

[05:46] this was cooked just by poking it right if you want to test with this gear to see if it comes out clean or stick a thermometer into the chicken go ahead but anyway once we're sure it's done we will garnish the top with some freshly sized green onions and that's it our cowboy

[06:01] cornbread chicken is ready to enjoy so I grabbed a spoon and scooped out one of those pieces of chicken with of course an appropriate amount of cowboy cornbread attached and while I'm

[06:13] sure this would be great as is I decided to serve mine up with some hot honey butter which is nothing more than half butter and half honey heated in a pan, oh and I also spiked it with some more chipotle and a little shake a cayenne which actually makes this hot hot

[06:28] honey butter and yes those measurements will be in the written recipe as well and that my friends for someone that loves cornbread and chicken as much as I do was a tremendously enjoyable bite of food, oh and if you wanted to do an extra step you could actually brown the chicken

[06:44] in the butter before you add your onions but I'm really not sure that's going to make much of a difference in this and those pieces of chicken are actually going to stiffen up and possibly be harder to put into the batter so I didn't and what this reminded me of most was a cornbread

[06:59] stuff chicken breast I had one time except this was way easier and less fussy and as I already mentioned we only need one pan which I'm sure cowboys will appreciate since everybody knows

[07:11] they hate to wash dishes in fact I remember watching a western when I was a little kid and after they finished eating they actually rubbed their dishes with sand to clean them and after seeing that I asked my mom if we could do that and she said no but anyway the point is cowboys don't

[07:27] like to wash dishes and neither do we and while a hot hot honey butter was really good with this a classic brown chicken gravy would also be beautiful but no matter how you serve yours I thought this easy

[07:40] one pan dish came out incredibly well and I really do hope you give it a try soon so please follow the links below for the ingredient amounts a printable written recipe and much more info as usual and as always enjoy