Carla Makes Calabrian Chicken Thighs & Cooling Salad

hello thigh guys it's Carla and I am back again in my kitchen today with a brand spanking new recipe this is spicy calabrian chicken thighs with croutons and a cooling salad and I am very very excited about it because there's nothing I like more than a crispy skinned chicken thigh except for a hard-working condiment and when that condiment is spicy Tangy vibrant calabrian chili paste folks you can't go wrong I'm pairing this one with crunchy croutons and a really crispy refreshing salad that has my new favorite buttermilk dressing this is a one pan dish that is hotter than the heat of 1 000 Southern Italian Suns I'm going to prove it to you come along let's get burned up together the first step in this recipe is to make the marinade it's super super easy you can do it one hour before you start cooking the chicken or you could do it yesterday I've got three cloves of garlic I'm gonna get these in the bowl recipe development has been really fun for me lately after that sounds so good came out creatively I was just like at a net zero and that's okay you kind of have to go through some lean times but it's been really really fun the first time I made this recipe it just had the calabrian chili paste it was good but it wasn't like good enough for you guys for eight chicken thighs I've got a quarter cup of calabrin chili paste I'm finding this a lot more available but if you cannot find calabrian chili paste you could use Harissa and I'm pretty sure you could use chili crisp I'm also adding the zest of a lemon calabrian chili paste on its own basically needed lovers right and why is it always with the Italian recipes that get to have the polyamorous ingredient relationships as as an Italian myself I could run a little hot and it's nice to have a presence in your life like the Citrus that is bright and optimistic and garlic of course we all need depth and we all need someone in our Lives who is anti-inflaming right as a as a hot blooded Italian Leo I can be a little inflaming to others so the garlic is the anti-inflame I think they're a great triplet triple we've talked about truffles on the show before the last thing I'm adding so actually now we're in a quadruplet is olive oil and the role of olive oil in this marinade or the roll of olive oil in this romantic relationship is really to bring all of everybody together the olive oil is bridging and bringing traversing and fat carries flavor and we love fat in this house so olive oil just makes it good before I put the chicken in here I want to season the chicken I have a tendency to do this instead of salting the marinade I'm going to Salt the protein even if you didn't want to get all your marinade ingredients out earlier in the day you could salt the chicken also one to two days in advance keep it in the fridge I am definitely like a skin on bone-in person I like the fat I like the textures I like that it's extra juicy it will make the cook time a little bit longer this is only cooking for like 22 or 25 minutes anyway the croutons are gonna get into the pan with the chicken renderings and it makes it very delicious situation I just want to cut these ahead let them dry out a little bit dailed bread is really great for this so any kind of crusty loaf that you have hang around this is a niche which is like a type of sourdough a ciabatta would be great you could use a baguette just something that has some good chew to it I think that would make a good Crouton the first time I did this recipe I wanted to get like really kind of crispy smashed potatoes that would cook in the chicken fat sometimes you just have to do things to find out that it didn't work if hearing about the recipe process is interesting to you I am showing more of my mistakes and going through the process over on substack there were a lot of failures and disasters before getting here oh my God speak of the devil Omega head just asked where's Cosmo and I was like oh he's doing some shopping and then you came in with this which is a beautiful shade of red and shockingly I love calabrian chili he loves collaborating chili you're a good color story with that if Calabria and chili were a personality in a relationship what would that person's personality be spicy buy a cosmarella now that these are torn I'm gonna season them ahead the first time I did the recipe I also drizzled them with olive oil but there was so much good chicken fat in the pan that didn't need the olive oil I do like to season them and just let them hang another thing you could bang out in the morning if you wanted to so that your dinner prep would be halfway there this is optional I can't really handle Red Onion when it's raw it's too much for me it gives me a belly ache so I soak my red onion if I'm going to soak the Red Onion I might as well soak the celery and the fennel because it just makes everything super crisp and crunchy soaking onion or any allium in cold water or even in Citrus juice is called deflaming and it just sort of takes some of that hot sulfury bite off of the onion you could also use a shallot here you could use a quarter of the white onion this is like when we find out if Carla wore waterproof mascara or not I don't think I did that's enough onion I think so sad you guys know I love fennel try to find a way to put it in everything trim it but keep some of the softer fronds I'm just gonna put those here I'm gonna save some of the celery leaves also because these can get tossed into the salad at the end everybody needs a good frond group I'm gonna take the bottom I think we're gonna go lengthwise you could just use twice as much of the celery if you wanted to and skip the fennel cucumber's a little bit watery but you could totally go for it thinly sliced baby carrots chioga beets are really pretty they might stain the whole thing but who cares I'm gonna use four of these celery stalks if you can get a couple with the leaves on the inside add those for my little salad I'm just going to trim the ends of these I'm going to cut them on a bias you could go straight across and these really just need to sit for if you're doing the soaking step five or ten minutes drain and spin and they'll be nice and crisp and a little bit curled up and delicious [Music] this is a 10 inch cast iron skillet before I put the chicken in I'm just gonna coat the surface with oil you want to put these in skin side down they're going to cook skin side down for I would say 90 of the entire cooking time this is another great example of kill it on the first side except we're not going over super high heat but this is a skin side down for rendering for crisping we're giving all of our attention to the crispy skin that is where the texture is going to come from if there's any marinade left in the bowl don't throw it away and because these thighs are like so nicely puzzled in together I'm just going to take that spread it all over everybody the choice of the skillet here is actually very intentional a lot of recipes will tell you to not crowd the pan if you're trying to saute something you don't want too many things in the pan what's key right now is that I actually am crowding the pan and what's good about it is it is creating steam it's encouraging a lot of juices it's warming up the chicken skin but reducing the risk of us burning all of these things are going to help that chicken fat render render chicken fat leads to crispy skin it's great everybody's super tight in this gives me the perfect time to make my buttermilk dressing and wait for those to be done I've got that zested lemon that I use for the marinade I wanted to build a dressing that had like a lot of cooling properties to kind of be the Counterpoint to our spicy and crispy chicken thighs buttermilk came into my head immediately because it's Tangy and it's sour but it's also lactic and dairy and fatty even though it's like relatively low fat it still has that fatty feeling which is almost like eating yogurt with spicy Indian food those herrings work like putting sour cream on a jalapeno popper so now I'm seasoning this pretty aggressively with pepper and very aggressively with kosher salt and it is kind of amazing how much salt this dressing can take I think that's because of the fattiness of the buttermilk how much lemon juice is in there salt is key Hmm this is going to hang out these guys are gonna finish turning back to the chicken every once in a while you want to check for doneness that's looking really really nice but also picking it up in case the skin has started to stick a little bit you want to lift it up let some of the oil and the renderings that have accumulated in the pan run back underneath the spot that that piece of chicken was in and then place it back down we're about 15 minutes in right now and I do think these need like six or seven more minutes on the skin side before I split them right into that 23 24 minutes the outer edge is really cooked through so it's gone from that like weird fleshy pinky color to you know a beautiful yellow opaque so of course you also want to look for beautiful burnished Brown crispiness they'll continue to cook for four or five more minutes just to get that flush side cooked through keep an eye on your chilies don't burn the marinade everything that's in the pan is going to become our Crouton seasoning so we really want to be able to use the pond these are done they're going to rest over here their juices are going to settle some of their juices are going to come out and this resting time gives us just a perfect opportunity to make spicy chicken fat croutons the goal is to have about as much Crouton that will fit all in a single layer in the bottom of the pan when the croutons go in there get them nice and tossed up with the fat and the renderings and just try to scrape up some of those brown bits the fond that is sticking on the bottom of the pan so I actually would recommend switching over to a wooden spoon instead of tongs to kind of really press them firmly against the pan to soak all of that goodness up you also want to encourage Browning and crisping on these guys too let them cook for a few minutes before tossing them if you are keeping them moving all of the time they're not going to get the opportunity that they need to just be against that hot surface and take on color okay these are looking really toasty and I'm also listening for that sound of the juices having been absorbed and more of a crackly sound as the bread starts to toast so these are ready to go and so is my dinner [Music] chicken and croutons crispy chicken cooling crunchy salad get some of these croutons they're all different sizes so it's that nice mix of like the chewy ones the really crisp ones the darker ones the craggy ones salad has been drained this is going over our salad it's dressing the salad but once everything is on your plate you've also got delicious dressing juices that are going to be mingling with chicken juices and I love making a plate where all of the bites together just make each other better as any polyamorous Community or love affair should um [Music] sure to Serve Yourself Crouton I have a second lemon on standby for squeezing over I'm so excited and I just can't hide it down I'm about to lose control of my chicken crocon day yeah yeah I'm so sorry everybody that hot cold thing with the texture on top of it it just never gets old this chicken is so crispy in Italy they said it was Christmas Simo in Italy they said it was the chicken is so hot it's like being on the beach in southern Italy in August and the salad is the umbrella and the Spritz that somebody brings over so those are the Vibes I bid you bon voyagio ciao go to Calabria

Channel: Carla Lalli Music

Views: 91,387

Keywords: carla lalli music, carla lalli music bon appetit, bon appetit chefs, carla lalli music chicken thighs, calabrian chicken, spicy chicken recipe, italian chicken thigh recipes, weeknight recipes, quick chicken thigh recipes, chicken thigh recipes, dinner for one, carla lalli, chicken and salad recipe, chicken and salad, summer recipes for dinner, summer recipes, Calabrian Chicken Thighs, dinner for two, date night recipes, spring recipes

Id: Q-IiJa76kG4

Length: 13min 40sec (820 seconds)

Published: Wed May 03 2023