Ingredients
4 chicken breasts, split in half
1 large bottle of Tabasco or Trappey’s Louisiana Hot Sauce
1 cup flour
1 tbsp Ancho chile powder
1 tsp hot Cayenne powder or Hatch chile powder
1 tsp salt
½ tsp ground black pepper
1 cup vegetable oil
1 stick butter
Directions
This recipe can be used for hot chicken wings for appetizers, but I prefer the breast meat for a meal. In a gallon size Zip-Loc bag mix flour and dry ingredients. Depending on how hot you like your chicken wings use more or less of the Cayenne or Hatch chile powder. The Ancho powder is very mild and is mostly for color and flavor. Once well-mixed, add the chicken and coat it with the seasoned flour by shaking things up. Make sure you have bag sealed, especially if indoors, or you may have a mess to clean up.
This next step can be done in a deep fryer or even in a stove-top skillet, but I do most of my cooking in the outdoors and like to use my Dutch ovens. If you are an experienced Dutch oven cook, pardon my digression; this is for novice DO cooks.
Dig a pit about a food deep, two feet wide and three feet long, approximate –like that feller on TV says, “It ain’t rocket science.” In the pit build a BIG fire, using ironwood, mesquite, oak or other good hardwood. (No pine or Palo Verde, these woods will not burn as slowly nor as hot as hardwoods.) Once you have a good fire going, keep adding wood until you have a nice, deep bed of coals. Allow the flames to die down, then shovel out whatever coals you need for whatever dishes you are making. I generally have at least three Dutch ovens in which I prepare the chicken, a green bean casserole or other vegetable dish, plus biscuits and dessert, maybe a peach or apple cobbler. For the chicken, you’ll want a couple of shovels full of coals on the bottom and another shovelful on the lid. If you are doing this in a deep fryer or stovetop, you can skip the wood gathering and firebuilding parts of these instructions. From here, they are pretty much the same.
Fry the chicken in the oil about 10 minutes or until it is just a tad crispier then the Colonel’s, then remove from pot. Drain and set aside, it is tempting but don’t eat it yet. To the oil in pot add one or two sticks of butter, depending on how much chicken you are doing. (I often feed as many as 20 folks on my cookouts.) Once butter has melted, add about half the large bottle of hot sauce, or two of the standard bottles of Tabasco.
This is mostly for show and will not add a lot of “heat” to the chicken. The heat comes from the Hatch or Cayenne powder. But it is fun to watch the tenderfeet cringe and groan when they see how much hot sauce you are adding. Now, refry the chicken for a five minutes in the red molten mixture. Serve right out of the pot using a ladle to scoop out the red “gravy.” You’ll want bread or biscuits to sop up the delicious gravy.
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