How to Make the Ultimate Grilled Chicken Thighs and Italian Pasta Salad

today on america's test kitchen dan makes julia perfect grilled chicken thighs jack challenges bridgette to a tasting of fresh mozzarella and keith cooks bridget the ultimate italian pasta salad it's all coming up right here on america's test kitchen [Music] bone-in chicken thighs have a lot going for them they're more flavorful than a chicken breast they're less prone to overcooking and also they have that wonderful piece of skin that is delicious when it's brown and crisp but they also have just a little more fat right under the skin that makes them hard to grill it causes massive flare-ups and it prevents that skin from getting crisp so today dan is going to show us how to grill bone-in chicken thighs once and for all so the name of the game with chicken thighs on the grill is to go low and slow low and slowly low and slow and it's going to be perfect but before we get to that we're going to talk about how we're going to season these so let's pop over here we're gonna do a spice paste on these and so we tried all kinds of things marinating you know just dry salting i found the spice paste was great we had to apply it properly to the chicken so we're gonna start with three tablespoons of dijon mustard it's a really nice intense base to that i'm going to add five minced garlic cloves i've also got a tablespoon of lemon zest we're gonna serve these with some lemon wedges at the end so you kind of get it flavored here and then the acidity at the end which is nice i also have two teaspoons of minced tarragon are you a tarragon fan yeah i'm a huge tarragon fan i also have one and a half teaspoons of kosher salt half a teaspoon of black pepper and just a little bit of water this is just a teaspoon of water if you add too much water we get some really big issues where we can't brown at the chicken thighs a little bit of water that'll help spread the paste nicely so i'm just gonna stir this together okay let's pop over here so we've got eight bone-in chicken thighs here if there's any you know excess skin that's really hanging over you want to trim that off but these look really good so we're gonna season uh with a half teaspoon of salt just over the skin side here we're gonna use a little less of the paste so we wanna make sure we have good seasoning and that salt will probably help to dry the skin out hopefully to make it more crisp absolutely so we tried lots of different ways of putting the paste on the chicken and we found you know if we put it all on the skin skin never got crispy we put it all on the meat side the skin was great but it wasn't very well seasoned so we actually found that using about a third of it on the skin side and then two thirds on the flash was perfect you don't have to be super exact about it but i just like to go but you are never you know it never hurts to be exact so i'm just gonna dollop right on top and then i'll just use the back of my spoon to spread it over just enough to add some flavor but not enough to get in the way of fat rendering and that skin getting crispy and brown okay that looks great i'm just gonna flip these over and when you're shopping for these it pays to go to the butcher counter and pick them out yourself be that person it's okay because if you buy them in the package you're gonna get a whole bunch of different sizes and they're not gonna cook at the same rate okay and again just spread a nice even layer on the flesh side the grill's gonna do all the work for us on this we're gonna go nice and low and slow get some beautiful results let's head out okey-doke okay so we've got our beautiful chicken thighs out here and i've been preheating the grill for about 15 minutes all on high we have a little bit of grill prep to do and then we'll get that chicken on oh that's a hot grill nice hot grill so what we're gonna do first is cut out these two burners i'm gonna leave this one on high so we're creating basically a hot zone here and a cool zone over here known as indirect cooking exactly so we're gonna actually cook these chicken thighs over indirect heat for most of the cook time that indirect cooking is gonna be really great for the meat and the skin actually so both of them contain a lot of collagen as we cook them low and slow that collagen dissolves into gelatin it's gonna help make the meat really tender it's also gonna allow us to get that skin really crispy so this is good for dark meat but not for white meat that's right so what we're gonna do now is just scrape this off we always prefer to clean the grill right before we're gonna use it because the heat helps loosen up some of that gunk and you get it good and clean right before you need it so i'm gonna use a little paper towel and oil and let's get a nice coating of grease on here the oil does a few things first it helps clean the grill it helps get any of those last bits off the grill grates it also polymerizes onto the grill grace that helps make them a little nonstick okay so now we're gonna put our chicken on and we're gonna do something a little bit different here i'm actually gonna go skin side down we tested this we went you know skin side up most of the time and then when we flipped it onto the hot side to get it crispy all of the fat that had rendered under the skin came out dripped down onto the coils and huge flare up so skin side down almost the whole time oh i can smell the little bit of mustard as soon as those hit the grill smells good doesn't it does smell good so this is going to maintain at about 350 degrees which is perfect and we'll cook for 20 minutes all right okay so it's been 20 minutes let's take a look at these awesome thighs they're looking good now we're gonna do a little shuffle around we want them to cook really evenly a little dosy dough a little dosy though so we're just gonna slide these over here make room for these to move over and then these go right in their place yeah so it's starting to render but it's not brown at all not brown at all absolutely it's very very gentle heat over here rendering lots of fat so it doesn't end up flaring up on the other side so we're gonna cook this with the lid down for another 15 to 20 minutes this would be relatively tender around 175 but we find that if we go even higher about 185 to 190 we get more collagen breakdown we get really really tender juicy result okay so it's been 15 minutes let's see how we are on the temp here so we're looking for about 185 to 190 all right right there so that is 187 188 fantastic okay so all this nice indirect cooking was fantastic for the meat and the skin right we made everything nice and tender but the skin needs to crisp up at this point so we're gonna go over to the hot side here finally some direct heat finally so this is gonna happen really fast because we've rendered everything we've got it really nice and soft it's gonna take a second to crisp it up okay okay so that's been about five minutes oh man look at that oh that is a very beautiful looking chicken thigh gorgeous so we're just gonna put these over and cook the paste that's on the other side just for another minute or so right because they're cooked through at this point we're just getting a little bit of that gorgeous jar all the way around exactly okay these smell and look fantastic time to get them off okay so these need to rest for about 10 minutes we're gonna cover them with foil and we'll bring them inside all right okay these look and smell fantastic oh look at that the crispy test that is some crisp skin right there going low and slow like that and just finishing at the very end is the key you know it tenderizes the skin and then it puffs and really really beautiful and before you dig in let me give you uh a little lemon where you definitely had to stop me there [Laughter] all right let's dig in mm-hmm well the chicken is moist and juicy no wonder because it's thighs and they're always pretty juicy but it's the flavor i know it's not overpowering you know we think about the strong flavors all that lemon zest and the mustard i was a little worried that it would be too strong but it's just a subtle background to the chicken it's lovely it's really good just good grilled flavor yeah and going low and slow and cooking it to a higher temperature really melts all that collagen it ends up being really really juicy and then that skin i kind of call it chicken bacon so for the ultimate grilled chicken start by making a flavorful spice paste with mustard garlic lemon and tarragon and rub it over both sides of the chicken after heating the grill turn all of the burners off except for one so the grill has a hot side and a cool side lay the chicken skin side down on the cool side and cook until the meat registers 185 degrees finish on the hot side of the grill until the chicken is well browned on both sides and let it rest for 10 minutes before serving from america's desk kitchen to your kitchen the best grilled chicken thighs awesome awesome just awesome [Music] if you really want to lose yourself in the internet for a few hours just go and check out videos of artisans making fresh mozzarella it is captivating they cook the cheese stretch it into long thick ropes cut it and shape it but we've got jack here who's going to show us a much easier way to get mozzarella on the plate go to the supermarket and buy it which one is best so we're doing the eating no shaping no shaking i mean this is a great simple cheese these are all fresh mozzarellas okay they're all domestic this is not pizza cheese this has a higher moisture content and it's designed to eat as you are having it today all right so i should explain why these are all domestic because of course mozzarella originates in italy fresh mozzarella in italy a lot of it is what we know as buffalo mozzarella it was made from the milk of water buffaloes it is delicious because there's a lot of fat but it's highly perishable that cheese really only has a shelf life of four or five days so when it comes to supermarket options for fresh mozzarella it needs to be made with cow's milk now they do make cow's milk mozzarella in italy it's called fjordi latte and that's the tradition that's really been exported here and most of the supermarket options and in fact everything we're tasting today is made in the usa with the italian recipe so it's cow's milk you add some salt some rennet an acid and curdle it and then put in hot water and start stretching and making an amazing video moisture content is really important some of the brands basically had as much moisture as you would get in pizza black cheese meaning they were dry and rubbery yeah that is not a good thing we found that the top cheeses had a moisture content of around 60 percent bottom ranked cheeses more like 48 okay which is really as i say what you would get in a pizza cheese and this is a fine delicate salad cheese so the second thing to think about is texture and one of the things that influences texture is the ph so if the ph is too high it can get very soft almost like a wet sponge and so you want kind of a moderate ph usually that means they were using vinegar or cheese culture rather than citric acid or lactic acid to curdle the milk the other thing is salt you want some salt you don't want to be totally bland but you don't want it to hide the flavor of the milk and so you want the salt to bring out all the flavors you want grassy floral notes you don't want a salt bottle you also don't want it to be totally bland right right so i've given you lots of do's and don'ts when it comes to making mozzarella what about eating all right i will happily eat mozzarella this one you mentioned a shreddable cheese this one i could see shredding very easily it's not what i think of as fresh mozzarella especially i love fiore de latte is that right you guys sounds so much better than cow's milk mozzarella doesn't it this one is very seasoned perhaps just a little too seasoned but i'm don't mind it the texture it's a little bit dry this one is bland bland bland bland and soggy actually a little bit mushy these two are my favorite because they have the better seasoning this one's a little bit higher season so i think i would be able to eat at least a pound or two more of that than this one and it's about quantity it's about quantity for me yes you know i know that about you and i'm with you so i would say that this is my favorite this is a very close runner-up maybe too much salt you want to start with what you chose and you are a winner yeah always but in this case you agree with the tasting panel okay this is bel joyoso it's from wisconsin that's italian american family making it in the italian tradition and we thought it was just right had enough seasoning but not too much salt high moisture content it was soft but it wasn't wet right speaking of yes and that is our lowest rated cheese distefano and it was at the bottom of the ranking because it was described as a wet sponge yeah i can totally see that it's just too soft it's literally slippery not a description of a cheese that you want it's because the ph content which is affecting the proteins and making the cheese too soft we don't want that and on the other side and that cheese is from crave brothers it was next last because it's way too dry this is one that had a moisture content below 50 as opposed to the winners at 60 or 61. it's not fresh mozzarella no i i would shred it and heat it and put it between bread but it's not fresh mozzarella and this one your runner-up was also the tasting panels it has again that high moisture content that we want it's not bland it's not overly soft it's a good cheese and it was our second place choice next time we'll have to make mozzarella that's a date sound good all right but in the meantime let's go out and buy some the winner is belle joyoso fresh mozzarella it's 7.99 for eight ounces [Music] you know about the food pyramid but do you know about bridget lancaster's picnic food pyramid we have at the apex cold fried chicken right underneath that it's potato salad and baked beans you have assorted cakes of course cornbread biscuits a few salads under that and then boom right at the bottom pasta salad everybody brings them to the picnics and everybody goes home with the leftovers because no one's eating them but keith's here and he has told me he's going to change my mind about pasta salads yeah could i bring that pasta salad up in your pyramid if the salad had tender pasta fresh flavorful ingredients and a potent dressing that kind of brought everything together rather than sitting at the bottom of the bowl sure but can you also get me a unicorn i'll work on the unicorn let's focus on the pasta salad today so we're going to actually start with a pasta which makes sense and we're going to start with a pound of fusilli pasta this corkscrew shape is perfect for pasta salad because it traps everything it's like pasta velcro so all those dressings and all those flavorful ingredients get caught in these little nooks and crannies for this pasta so i have four quarts of water here we'll just add our pasta and we want to add one tablespoon of salt because bland pasta in a pasta salad is well bland yes we want to go three minutes passed out that day so when the pasta cools down it's still going to be tender okay you know it will depend on what brand of pasta you're using so we'll come back and taste this towards the end of cooking to make sure that we get it just right so while we pastas cook we're going to focus on our dressing now most dressings are kind of bland they fall to the bottom a lot of people use the bottled italian dressing we're not going to do that we're actually going to build the dressing and make sure that we have something really flavorful to start with right so here i have a quarter cup of extra virgin olive oil and i also have three cloves of minced garlic three anchovy fillets and a quarter teaspoon of red pepper flakes rather than just whisking these into cold olive oil and adding some vinegar like most people would make a vinaigrette we're actually going to warm this up in the microwave we're going to bloom those flavors into an infused oil i'm just going to put a plate on this to make sure it's covered and doesn't splatter all over the microwave if we get it too hot so we're just going to go in the microwave for 30 to 60 seconds until it's bubbling and fragrant all right wow that smells quite strong oh it's bubbling yeah all those aromatics have infused into the oil and that will be the base for our dressing another problem with pasta salad dressings is that they're usually too thin so if you have a flavorful dressing and it's at the bottom of the bowl it's not doing any good no so we wanted to create a dressing that had some body to it so we went through some different variations and what we found is that we wanted to take some of the ingredients that you normally put in pasta salad and actually grind them up and make a dressing from those ingredients one ingredient that we found a lot was pepperoncini these things are great they're tart they're spicy so we're gonna take a half cup of these we're gonna take the stems off we'll take the seeds out and then we're gonna actually process them in the food processor as the base of our dressing okay i'm just gonna take these stems off first and then we'll reach in here and we can kind of pinch that core out there's not a lot of seeds here but you can get the majority of them out that's great but if you leave some in that's okay too it's not going to ruin anything we're going to process it up nice and fine okay in addition to our pepperoncini i'm going to add two tablespoons of capers again potent ingredient briny flavor it's going to be really great in our pasta salad okay i'm just going to pulse this 10 times until the pepperoncini and the capers are broken down and finely chopped okay that looks great you can see that they're nice and finely chopped i can smell it from over here pickle so we're going to add two tablespoons of the pepperoncini liquid that they come in it's vinegar and a little bit of salt and also pepperoncini flavor so rather than using our wine vinegar or balsamic vinegar we're just going to use this instead very good two tablespoons and then we have our warm infused yes oil that we'll put in here so we have our infused oil and our pepperoncini liquid in there i'm just going to process it for 20 seconds until everything is incorporated okay you can see it looks almost like a pesto that we have going on here yeah it sure does really yummy pesto yeah so it's super concentrated super flavorful and it's actually going to work into those nooks and crannies and the fusilli and make sure that we have a nice flavorful dressing that doesn't fall at the bottom of the bowl great you've got everything in teeny tiny pieces so it'll hook on to the velcro pasta okay so the pasta's been cooking i'm just going to give it a test here that's great so it's past al dente it's soft it's tender which is going to be perfect when we cool it so can i ask you to drain and rinse the pasta you sure can that's nice and cooled down and we want to make sure that we shake that really well we're going to use a nice big bowl today to make sure that we can toss all these ingredients in here evenly great i'm just going to add our thick dressing to this pasta you can see there's nothing in the bottom of the bowl right now so it's clung into that pasta and you're going to get that flavorful dressing in every bite so now we have our pasta let's look at our mixins and we weren't really interested in doing more cooking for this we didn't want to go out to the grill to grill vegetables or roast vegetables so we went to our pantry to find a bunch of nice flavorful ingredients so first up is a half cup of sun-dried tomatoes that have been thinly sliced a nice bright flavor that these will add and a little bit of chew yep they're acidic they're sweet and they're chewy nice next up i have a half cup of kalamata olives that we've cut into quarters again big flavor high impact ingredients you know briny salty flavors i also have two cups of baby or arugula we were missing kind of a salad element and that's where this arugula came in okay so two cups of baby arugula and i also have eight ounces of fresh mozzarella cheese right now we all we have is that quarter cup of olive oil we're looking for a little bit more richness and we're going to have a bunch of bold ingredients in there and the fresh mozzarella gave us a nice fresh creamy flavor without really dominating like a pecorino or parmesan so now i have to do a little bit more knife work here we have eight ounces of dried salami here and we like a small salami like this we like the texture of it we like the flavor of it rather than going to the deli and buying those slices the deli slices will work but you want to make sure that you're getting a fairly thick slice so you have a nice substantial dice in here and the dried salami just has so much more flavor than the deli salami it does much more flavor so you know we're looking for a genoa salami or soprasada which do have more flavor than those jelly slices we want a 3 8 inch dice here and that might sound a little finicky but it was the perfect kind of size for our salad too small and it kind of fell to the bottom too big and then you're kind of chewing on a big piece of salami nobody wants that okay let's transfer use our bench scraper to transfer this over easily you are not skimping on the additions either no this this is hearty in flavor and texture so i have more pepperoncini we have that in our dressing but we wanted a little bit more this time we're going to add it in slices rather than processing it so same drill here i'm just going to take the top off take the core out so i'm starting with a half cup here and i'm going to just slice these into thin rings okay one last ingredient and that's basil you can't have pasta salad without basil that's a lot of basil it is we're looking for a cup of chopped basil here so again this is like the arugula it's going to add flavor but it's also going to add freshness and color i'm just going to chop this up basil bruises very easily especially as it sits after you chop it it's a good idea to cut it at the last minute yes same thing with the arugula too you can make this pasta salad in advance after two or three days but with the greens the arugula and the basil you want to add them at the last minute oh that smells so good i'm just gonna toss this really well that is beautiful okay one last thing i'm gonna do before we eat i'm just gonna taste this he's he's thinking about it i'm thinking about it it's good i'm gonna add a little bit more salt and a healthy dose of pepper here okay it looks great i gotta admit it tastes great this is looking good it's climbing up your pyramid well we'll see i'll see okay so i'm just going to transfer this into a prettier bowl i just want you to notice that there's no dressing in the bottom of this bowl no there is not all in the pasta clinging to the velcro if you're silly right yeah okay serving for you make sure i get a little bit of everything in here is this going to climb onto the pyramid you will has tons of flavor in them the anchovy capers pepperoncini yeah beautiful you can see the toppings and the pasta they're all mixed together everything didn't make a big dive for the bottom of the bowl and the pasta is firm but tender and i love the little bits of mozzarella in there too they add such a beautiful creamy texture of all the pasta salads this has definitely reached the apex yeah this is a pasta salad i'm proud to bring to a picnic you should be proud for a pasta salad you'll be proud to take to a picnic cook you silly until very tender then microwave oil anchovies and garlic until sizzling process with pepperoncini and cabers then toss with the pasta finish with salami olives cheese and herbs and of course serve from our test kitchen to your kitchen a surefire flavor packed italian pasta salad you can get this recipe and all the recipes from this season along with our tastings testings and select episodes on our website americastestkitchen.com it's it's gone shoveling it in keith thanks for watching america's test kitchen what'd you think well leave a comment and let us know which recipes you're excited to make or you can just say hello you can find links to today's recipes and reviews in the video description and don't forget to subscribe to our channel see you later i'll see you later

Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 144,421

Keywords: grilled chicken thighs, italian pasta salad, pasta salad, how to grill chicken, americas test kitchen, cooks illustrated

Id: YZQEC7iOyZI

Length: 23min 6sec (1386 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 07 2020