Chicken caesar salad with chicken fat croutons

you can make an extremely satisfying dinner-sized chicken caesar salad by simply roasting the chicken on top of bread the bread becomes the croutons chicken fat croutons get yourself any kind of baking tray for four meal size portions i'd say at least a pound and a half 700 grams of skin on bone-in dark meat chicken pieces thighs are my preference but you could use legs i'll show you what those would look like i would not attempt to do this with breast meat white meat would turn into chalk with this method enough olive oil to coat a ton of salt we're seasoning more than just the chicken here and a ton of pepper i like some dried sage on roast chicken too and only because i'm already going to be using it in the dressing i might as well grate in the zest of this lemon i have tossed to get everything really well coated and then bread like half a pound of any bread 225 grams this is stale leftover bread which is of course what croutons were originally invented to utilize and i have torn it into a couple of big flat boats upon which we'll sail my chicken pieces i'm trying to get the bread as covered with chicken as possible and the chicken pieces are skin side up that's important my oven is already hot 350 fahrenheit 180c convection if you've got it the skin will keep the meat from drying out and the chicken will keep the bread from burning so you can just leave that in there for like an hour and a half this is easy but it's not quick halfway through you might move the pieces around just if you've got some bread that isn't covered in chicken you don't want that to burn so move the chicken on top and i just want to roast this meat until i can pull it apart like barbecue which of course only dark meat does now i guess i can just chill because i'm not making the dressing my friend ben is hey adam this is benjamin r harrison's famous caesar dressing that he talked about recently on his hugely popular star trek rewatch podcast it's called the greatest generation you should subscribe i write the music for them it's super goofy welcome to the greatest generation very simple this dressing is he's got a couple of big garlic cloves if you know anything about eating raw garlic you know that's gonna be a lot ben does not use the traditional mustard so the garlic is the pungency a big squeeze of mayonnaise that's in place of the traditional raw egg which squeezes a lot of people out please don't be skeezed out by the two anchovy fillets i swear this dressing will not taste fishy especially not with the juice of this lemon check been rolling it to bust up some of its internal structure thus making it easier to squeeze that's a big lemon even though it doesn't look like it because ben is a big man with big hands with a smaller lemon i'd use the whole thing he's using half maybe twice as much olive oil as he has lemon juice in there and then a shot of worcestershire sauce that brand is thickened with corn starch yours does not have to be thickened a pinch of salt just go easy at first the worcestershire sauce and the anchovies are very salty then a ton of pepper and hit it with a stick you could mince up the garlic and anchovies fine with a knife but the stick is super easy yes some real science says blender blades can create bitter flavors and extra virgin olive oil but the effect is pretty subtle and would be easily blown away by the extremely strong flavor of this all right dude all done oh sorry thank you i was just scanning my grocery receipt with the sponsor of this video fetch rewards fetch is a stupid easy app that you can use to earn free rewards on anything you buy it's not just groceries it's any retail receipt you just hit the scan button and the app tells you where to hold the camera done upload and yay you get points basically gift cards you could use at a billion places restaurants gaming amazon if you shop online it's even easier you hit the e-receipt button and it just scans your email for any eligible receipts that you may have been sent if it finds one boom points free points it's all free get 3000 free points when you sign up with my link in the description and use my code regucia when you enter your first receipt download the app now use my name get 3 000 points on your first receipt that's a limited time offer for you thank you fetch my chicken is brown it feels soft when i poke it it's done dark meat you can cook pretty much as long as you want to out those pieces come to a plate where they can cool so that i can pull them apart later i find that roasting the bread in big chunks helps keep it from overheating and developing burned flavors however we now have to chop it up into whatever size croutons we like and then return them to the pan to crisp up a little bit more while we finish the salad leave those crumbs behind they'll only burn i'll taste one of those for seasoning needs way more salt if you're feeling naughty you could drop in some butter and back in the oven just remember to reach in and stir those every now and then until they're crisp as you want them okay lettuce caesar salad is traditionally made with romaine lettuce if you had a big fresh one that'd be enough for four dinners this is a small not terribly fresh one so i bought a second when they're not fresh you have to discard the wilted outer leaves hey lettuce is dirty the leaves grow up through the dirt i prefer to tear my leaves into bite-sized pieces and then wash them you can chop salad people say that bruises the leaves more tearing theoretically pulls them apart along their cellular walls as opposed to just cutting through those walls with a knife it certainly doesn't matter if you're doing this shortly before dinner i just tear because it's easier to control little pretty leaves like that i want to leave whole into the sink and the way i like to do this is just submerge everything in a very big bowl swish it around and then lift the lettuce up and out into a strainer all the sand has settled to the bottom of the bowl we are lifting the lettuce up and away from it dry your lettuce on a towel but for what it's worth we started eating a lot more salad a few years ago once we got a salad spinner it's a cheap thing it's just a centrifuge that sends the water flying out to the outer bowl it is so easy and effective and dry lettuce holds dressing so much better into a big mixing bowl and this is my little salad trick mince up a couple of shallots pretty fine it's not like biting into a giant slice of raw onion in a salad you don't even notice it per se it just sends this subtle uniform fresh pungency through the leaves i can handle the chicken now without frying my fingers off so first i'm pulling the skin off this is why i prefer thighs to legs the skin comes off much more easily and you don't have to do this but yeah imma put those skins in with the croutons to get hot and crispy beautiful moist meat underneath you pull it apart with your fingers and you can feel around for chunks of cartilage or any slimy bits anything you don't want to eat and obviously you can take out the bones i recommend big pieces of meat because they'll break apart some more when you toss your salad i like to get the chicken coated in dressing along with the veg salads always need less dressing than you think because most of the volume here is just air so be conservative you can always mix in more i like my salads very lightly dressed which works perfect with the strong flavor of ben's recipe here big handful of that onto a plate one of those pretty little leaves from the heart now are super crunchy chicken fried croutons don't be afraid to pull them out of the oven when they still have some soft juicy spots on them those taste good and they get firmer as they cool some people put parmesan into caesar dressing i'm just depositing some fresh shavings on top heterogeneity and what would a salad be without a big crispy shard of chicken skin i mean duh that's just what salad is it's science caesar salad is such a delightfully old-fashioned thing it was invented in the 1920s by an italian chef in tijuana and it has a delightful roaring 20s decadence to it this is surely one of the most decadent versions definitely not diet food that's salad it's just good

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 314,598

Rating: 4.9567232 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: E_CFYtwk1zE

Length: 7min 32sec (452 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/dm7b5isbi]

those buttery chicken fat bread croutons look amazing

[u/GeorgeAmberson]

Friends of DeSoto represent!

[u/chenDawg]

I tried this one, but the juices from the chicken just made all my bread unusably soggy on top and near burnt on the bottom. Not really sure how to avoid that.

[u/CatholicAngst]

I tried this with chicken thighs and it was really good and so easy. Like one of the previous folks said, I thought the bread was way too wet, but I chopped it up into large croutons and cooked it a bit longer, then let them cool a bit and they crisped up. That chicken fat taste in the croutons was amazing. I made a big mistake in using cheap bottled Caesar dressing, though - will make my own next time.