Hot chicken, a food once known only in the African-American community and a few soul food restaurants in Nashville, Tennessee, is breaking out and making its way to all four corners of the United States and as far away as Melbourne, Australia. The trend towards eating spicier and hotter foods feeds right into the new cult-like popularity of hot chicken. From medium hot capable of giving you a capsicum high to “burn your shorts off” hot, which comes with a medical warning, more and more people are discovering the addictive flavors of this spicy fried food, hot chicken.
When you ask folks in Nashville about hot chicken, they will tell you the very first batch was prepared by a scorned woman, one of many who were involved with a rather handsome man named Thornton Prince back in the 1930s. This one lady, however, decided to get even with his womanizing. After Thornton spent yet another night out, she prepared the rogue his favorite dish for breakfast, a batch of fried chicken; but this bird had a twist. It might be better referred to as her revenge meal.
Without knowing what she used in the batter precisely, legend has it she dumped in every hot spice in her pantry and produced a fried chicken that was black in color and tongue numbing hot. Who knows if Thornton really thought it was good or he was just playing along, but rather than flinch when he ate it, he said it was the best chicken he ever had and took it to other family members to try. While this woman seems to have disappeared, urban legend has it that this was the birth of Prince’s Hot Chicken.
Several years ago when we were researching an article for a magazine on soul food, we spent a lot of time in East Nashville with some local soul food aficionados, including Vernon Winfrey, Oprah’s father. It was the gentlemen in his barber shop who put us on the hunt to find the best hot chicken in town. They also recommended that we not get in the car and head back to Atlanta immediately after our lunch.
There are a lot of strong opinions in Nashville about whose chicken is the hottest and whose reigns supreme but, among those men at Winfrey’s Barber Shop, Bolton’s version was preferred. However, there were still some hold-outs for the original style at Prince’s. We spent the remainder of the day taste testing variations of Nashville-style hot chicken to form our own opinion. We personally liked the chicken at a newer restaurant, Hattie B’s. We thought it had more flavor while still being plenty spicy.
Just a few months later we returned to Nashville for an event with the Nashville Wine Auction and followed up the evening with post dinner bourbon(s) back at the hotel. We were with Chef Anthony Lamas waiting to hear from our publisher on a final agreement on our book proposal, Southern Heat: New Southern Cooking Latin Style. We thought the odds were pretty good, so we did a little (a lot of) celebrating that night. The next morning, the book deal was confirmed, along with a pounding headache.
This hot chicken recipe, Nashville-Style Habanero Hot Chicken, was born out of a hangover and a trip to Prince’s the following morning. What better way to cure the hangover than with fatty and spicy food?! From the mild recipe to off the charts hot, we got a lot of heat, but not a lot of flavor throughout the chicken at Prince’s. After this visit, we knew we needed a recipe for hot chicken in the cookbook.
This version creates hot chicken that is very flavorful from the spicy crust right down to the bone by using Papa’s Hot Sauce (a recipe collaboration between Anthony and one of his longtime cooks known as Papa) and Chef Lamas’ special blend of seasonings for the batter. The brining of the chicken followed by a double dipping method for the coating (one time drenching in a mixture of buttermilk and seasonings), along with the addition of the hot sauce (or not, depending on your heat tolerance), creates a moist, tender, and flavorful piece of chicken with a crispy and even coating and flavor to knock your socks off…in a good way.
We might upset those folks in Nashville, but this is the best hot chicken any of us have ever tasted. The variations in the recipe allow you to control how much heat you add, depending on your personal preference. What has been produced is mighty tasty and we’ll stack this hot chicken up against the best.
As a word of caution, when you serve and eat hot chicken, especially the spicier versions, be sure to swallow down the fiery bird with a milk-based chaser, like a milkshake. Or do as they do in Nashville (and what we did in the book) and serve the chicken with soft white bread (think Wonder Bread) and a packet of mayonnaise or a side dish with mayonnaise (like Momma’s Potato Salad, which is also a recipe in the book) to tone down those spiced up taste buds. At all costs, avoid carbonated beverages, such as Coca Cola. And while an ice-cold beer may sound like the right thing to chug when your mouth is on fire, all it does is add fuel to that fire, so heed this advice and proceed with caution. Also, for added relief, do as Chef Sean Brock suggests and put the TP in the freezer. All good advice for virgin hot chicken eaters.
In addition, when preparing the recipe for Papa’s Hot Sauce, make sure you have proper ventilation in your kitchen. The fumes from cooking the habaneros can be overwhelming. Also, avoid putting your face over the simmering pot of sauce to smell the delightful aroma. The recovery from that brief moment could be a painful process.
Nashville-Style Habanero Hot Chicken is just one of the many recipes in Southern Heat: New Southern Cooking Latin Style. We hope you’ll enjoy making it as well as Banana Rum Pudding with Toasted Coconut, one of my favorite desserts from the book. For more delicious recipes, you can purchase Southern Heat at Amazon.com.
It was important that the hot chicken in this recipe was more than just hot (like a number of the hot chicken shacks in Nashville) and that each bite was packed with flavor. The brine creates moistness with seasonings that penetrate the meat. The crispy skin is achieved by double-dipping in flour with spices and using a buttermilk base. Papa’s Hot Sauce adds another layer of flavor and complexity of heat with a little sweetness. While the chicken is best prepared after 24 hours in the brine, you can leave it as long as 36 to 48 hours for an even hotter version of hot chicken and you can brush more of Papa’s Hot Sauce on the chicken before baking to achieve a “real burn your shorts” hot chicken.
How to achieve different levels of heat and spice:
Medium: 24-hour brine and do not brush Papa’s Hot Sauce on the chicken before baking.
Hot: 36-hour brine and use Papa’s Hot Sauce for light dipping or mop on after finishing in the oven to control heat (do not brush on the chicken prior to baking).
Burn your shorts hot: 48-hour brine and brush Papa’s Hot Sauce over the chicken prior to baking.
Note – The recipes in the book were prepared with Diamond Crystals Kosher salt.
Recipe reprinted from Southern Heat: New Southern Cooking Latin Style
Authors Chef Anthony Lamas and Gwen Pratesi
Publisher – The Taunton Press
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