Grilled Chicken Ala Chris

Before I discuss the chicken, a comment about the weekend. I’ve always been a history buff and find myself watching the History Channel as much as any. This past weekend, I watched nearly all of their series on “The Revolution” and am even more appreciative of our forefathers and George Washington. I didn’t realize it went on so long nor how close America came to not happening. Now for some chicken.

Thanks to my blogging buddies, I have book marked 18 chicken recipes that I definitely want to try and several of them are for the grill. There is a dive of a store in an older area of North Knoxville called Chicken City that I like to frequent to buy jumbo wings for the smoker. They make the selling of their chicken parts simple – it’s all fresh and comes in a 5# bag and priced by the bag. It’s less expensive than regular supermarket prices but higher than the on-sale prices, but after about 25 years of buying from them, I’ve always been well pleased with their meat. I’d mentioned in a recent post that the breasts I find in the markets look like they came from an elephant chicken and while I like them for the smoker, they are bigger than I like for the grill. So while at Chicken City last week, I bought 15 # of fryer breasts, froze them individually on a cookie sheet and stuck them in the freezer in zip top plastic bags.

Since we had some of that good Cruze Farm buttermilk, we decided to go with Chris Henry’s Cruze Dairy Farm's Buttermilk Grilled Chicken. I thawed the chicken breasts the day before and made up the marinade per his recipe (except used regular black pepper and I only had ¾ of a lemon – but it was a big juicy one). I used an immersion blender to create the emulsion, put all but a cup and the chicken in a gallon plastic bag and stuck it in the fridge about 9 pm for a 21 hour soak – I massaged and rotated it a few times.

I would have used the Weber, but we wanted to eat at the lake so I used the gasser that’s down there. It seems at least 10 degrees cooler in the shade down by the lake and makes standing around a hot grill much more pleasant.



Before starting the chicken, I began boiling the potatoes along with some garlic cloves on the side burner. When cooked, Bev minced the garlic into the drained potatoes and mashed them with butter and buttermilk.

When I started the grill, I set a skillet of oil on top to start warming up for the other side dish – out of the garden fried ripe tomatoes. I’ve been eating fried green maters all my life and have had fried ripe ones a time or two, but when I saw the recipe for them on For The Love Of Cooking, I decided to give them a try along with her buttermilk basil dressing – have you noticed there is buttermilk in each dish? For the tomatoes, I used one red and one yellow for a comparison and I followed her recipe except had no flavored panko, so I just gave each tomato slice a sprinkle of Italian herbs between the buttermilk (verses regular milk) dip and the breadcrumbs.


After I took the taters off the burner, I put the skillet on and fried up the tomatoes while Bev mashed the potatoes.


Here’s my plate.


I thought the chicken was outstanding – moist tender and a flavor I liked. The taters also turned out good with just boiling the garlic – Bev’s not a big fan of the roasted garlic flavor. Bev thought the buttermilk made them a little tart. I liked the tomatoes but the crust didn't stay on very well, so I think an initial dusting of flour would have helped. I really liked the sauce on them and will find more uses for it. All-in-all, a darn good meal. Thanks everyone for the recipes - I love being able to cook your creations.

Have a great day and thanks for stopping by.

Larry