Chicken Lickin’

Did you miss me yesterday?!

It’s okay if you didn’t. You were probably relieved to not see another post about Green Day!

I’ve been trying to do better with frequent updating, and I was on quite a roll for a while there, so I felt okay about taking a day off from blogging yesterday. That’s my day off from workouts, too, so there you go. I was mostly glued to the TV anyway, watching the last day of the Walking Dead-A-Thon. It was great to see Season 3 again, and it made me even more excited for Season 4 in October! Not to mention our upcoming two-day visit to Senoia, Georgia! Oh boy!

This isn’t a post about music or my favorite TV show, though. It’s a food post! Wheeee! I haven’t done one of those in a while.

Last week, my local grocery store had a special on Split Chickens. Not spatchcocked (is that one of the best words ever, or what?), but just split in half. Of course, I thought of “Return of the Living Dead” and “Under the Dome,” with their Split Dog and Split Cow, respectively. Since I had this Split Chicken, I thought I’d try a different recipe, and went looking for the recipe for Nelson’s Golden Glow.

Nelson’s is a local company, and I was surprised to see that this seems to be a rather unique way of cooking chicken. There may be other places in the country that have this sort of flavor, but I know that I’ve never come across one. They mainly do fundraisers and catering, and it’s a common thing to see a Port-A-Pit trailer on a street corner during the summer, the delicious smell wafting through the air. The service sorority I was in with my sister did a Port-A-Pit fundraiser once, and my sister rented a chicken suit for it. LOL Nelson’s slogan is “If the Colonel had our recipe, he would have become a General.” Haha! This stuff really is amazing, with a smoky flavor and fall-off-the-bones meat. They don’t make their recipe available, but I found one that claimed to be pretty close, so I thought I’d try it. It does require frequent basting, so I asked Ken if he was okay with hanging out at the grill in order to baste often. He said sure, he’d take a couple of beers out with him! And that’s exactly what he did!

Here is the recipe:

1 lb butter
1 C water
1 C vinegar
4 T salt
1 T pepper
4 T Worcestershire salt

It also calls for an ounce of Accent, and a little research showed that all that stuff is is MSG, so I eliminated it. This amount would probably do a couple of chickens, and since I was only doing one, I cut it in half.

Bring all this to a boil and pour over chicken to marinate. It calls for overnight, but since we eat so late, I was able to do this the day of, and it got a good 8 hours in the marinade. I basted it once while it was marinating. The butter solidifies, so when you’re ready to grill it, you scrape off as much butter as possible and put all the marinade and butter back into the saucepan. Bring it to a boil again. This is very important. You have been marinating raw chicken in this stuff, so you MUST boil it again to use it for basting! Give the chicken a good sear, then cook it low and slow until it’s done. (I think Ken gave it about 45 minutes, and he can correct me if I’m wrong. It could have used a tad bit longer than that.) Baste every five minutes or so with the re-boiled marinade...once it gets a good coating, you don’t need to marinate it as frequently.

Verdict: DELICIOUS! Not exactly the same flavor as Nelson’s (I think they use wood chips to grill), but fairly close and pretty damn tasty. I found it a little on the salty side, and I would cut the salt down a bit. We both agreed that we would make it again. I’ve got some leg quarters in the freezer, and I bet those would be great! It does use a lot of butter, but most of that cooks off, so no big deal. My niece was going to try replacing some of the butter with olive oil and will get back to me on that. I said that I’m not sure how well that would work, because you have to bring the marinade to a boil (twice), but it’s worth a try.

For anyone who remembers Nelson’s Golden Glow, but has moved away and can only get it when they come back here for a visit, this is worth a try. A little labor intensive, and you have to plan ahead, but it was worth the effort!