Wing Sauce, Fried Chicken, and More Potato Salad

Now that we've got barbecue sauce making down pat, it's just made sense to try making our own homemade versions of many other sauces, dressings, and condiments. One of my personal favorites is buffalo wing sauce, so when reaching the bottom of a bottle one day it was obvious we needed to try making our own.

We've now done homemade wing sauce twice so far, and he's the ingredients used the first time around: garlic powder, paprika, apple cider vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, cayenne, butter, garlic hot sauce, and a few dabs of buffalo flavored tabasco.

All the ingredients are whisked together thoroughly. If you've got too much heat from the hot sauce or it isn't the right color or consistency, you can also throw in some extras, like brown sugar, ketchup, or tomato sauce.

While the flavor will already be almost-there just by mixing together, I recommended heating on the stove along with some extra butter for at least a half an hour so the flavors mix together better.

For the second batch, I ditched the tabasco and brown sugar, threw in some chili powder, and switched out the garlic hot sauce with the "Bull Snort" brand Texas Tail Torcher sauce. The end result was spicier, but had a much more spot-on buffalo flavor and the proper bright red color. Most of the recipes I've read online (and even one of our Facebook fans!) recommend using Frank's Red Hot as the base sauce, but I wanted to use things I already had on hand to keep the cost down, as a bottle of Frank's Red Hot is already as much or more than a bottle of ready made buffalo sauce.

For the finishing (and punishing!) touch, I carefully put a few drops of Satan's Rage sauce into the final product.

Now that we have our sauce, what to do with it? We had some chicken thighs in the freezer and decided to try out a twist on fried chicken. For our version, we're injecting the chicken with buffalo sauce and using a spicy coating. In the picture below you can see me putting on the initial coat of seasoning consisting of flour, cayenne, chili powder, garlic powder, and pepper. There are a lot of variations you can use here as well. For extra crunch, smash up some plain corn flakes and throw it in as well.

After the first coating the chicken is dunked in a bowl of milk, and then returned to the flour mixture and thoroughly covered again. At this point I inject the buffalo sauce directly into the meat using the red injector needle you can see at the lower-right corner of the image.

Normally we bake or grill our chicken, but in this instance we decided to go the messier and less healthy route and fry in oil.

Our wing sauce injected chicken thighs took about 16 minutes to cook in the bubbling hot oil - your times may vary depending on size and what part of the chicken you are using, as this could easily work with drumsticks, breasts, or wings. Don't forget to save your oil when done, as it can be used to fry things again. Simply turn off the heat and wait a few hours for it to cool, and then pour back into its original container or any other plastic container you've got lying around. We re-use an old plastic potato salad bucket.

Here's the first beautifully golden brown fried masterpiece coated with slightly spicy seasoning on the outside and pleasantly hot wing sauce on the inside.

Injecting the meat worked better than I expected for a fried meal, and we'll be doing this from now on with a variety of different sauces. It takes the already-awesome crunch of fried chicken and adds in a completely different and totally unexpected dimension of flavor.

Fried chicken alone isn't a meal of course, and this particular day happened to be perfect picnic weather, so we put together a potato salad to go with it. For a step-by-step on how to make potato salads, you can see our previous blogs covering standard veggie or chicken bacon ranch varieties, as well as a look at southwest and Italian versions.

This particular kind we made to go with our fried chicken was dubbed "Potato Salad Supreme," because it takes the standard veggie version of potato salad and ups the ante with everything delicious. Here are the cubed and boiled potatoes with shredded cheese, diced hardboiled egg, anaheim pepper, and both red and green bell pepper.

To make the dish more exciting, we cooked and finely chopped a whole mess of crispy bacon.

All the ingredients are then blended together with a combination of mayo, dijon mustard, standard yellow mustard, and about half a ranch dressing seasoning packet.

At the end of all that hard work we finally had a picnic meal ready to take out to the beautiful Ryan Dam island for a fantastic lunch, complete with a side of seasonal melon.

Coffee BBQ Sauce And Rub With Pork Ribs

This summer has really upped our backyard BBQ game, and it was a logical next stop to start making our own sauces to go with such delectable smoky meat and veggies. Experimenting with sauces not only lets us try combinations you can't readily buy at the store, but the end result is almost always as good or better than pre-bottled sauces.

While "hickory" and "mesquite" may be the standard for BBQ sauces, there's a whole lot more room to try different flavors, like our root beer or smoky raspberry varieties. Checking around different recipes online we found one base ingredient we knew we had to try: coffee.

To have the right consistency and reduce down properly, BBQ sauce needs something with sugar in it. Our original sauce attempt used corn syrup, and then our next several batches ditched that because all the sugar was coming from a variety of sodas for interesting flavors like orange and cherry.  Now we're trying something completely different by basing it around honey.

Here's the base ingredients for this new coffee based sauce: apple cider vinegar, ketchup, soy sauce, dark coffee, garlic, olive oil, just under two cups of honey, and ghost pepper salt.

The garlic gets the slice and dice treatment and is briefly cooked in a layer of oil until it just starts to turn golden brown, releasing that amazing garlic fragrance.

The remainder of the ingredients are then poured in, along with a cup and a half of the brewed coffee (don't throw in just plain grounds!) which was brewed incredibly strong so the flavor would be prominent. You can really play with the flavor here by making the coffee stronger or weaker or by using a lighter roast.

Once everything is in the pot it all gets brought to a rolling boil so the ingredients start to heat through.

After boiling, the heat is lowered and in about a half hour the sauce begins reducing and the color becomes much darker.

The cooking time will vary depending on how much honey and coffee you use, and how thick you want the sauce. We ended up cooking for more than two hours to get to this color and consistency.

After cooling down for a bit on the stove, we spooned the finished sauce into a container to be refrigerated. At this point it's a dark brownish black and smells wonderful.

After refrigerating overnight the sauce has reached its final consistency - which in our case was incredibly thick. With less honey or a shorter cooking time you can have it closer to standard BBQ sauce thickness.  The taste is a lot different than a normal BBQ sauce, but still amazingly good, and we ended up using it on both ribs and chicken. The soy sauce flavor present makes this sauce particularly good with chicken stir fry.

For our first attempt at using this new sauce we decided to make ribs, which also need a complimentary rub. We decided to double up on the coffee action, using garlic powder, parsley, onion powder, dried garlic, and a medium roast coffee (this time using the grounds, not brewed coffee).

As with our previous rubs, everything is mashed together in the mortar and pestle until thoroughly combined.

After mixing in the coffee we ended up throwing in some brown sugar as well to put a hint of sweet in with the dark flavors of the coffee and garlic.

For this rib outing we went with "country style" instead of babyback or spare ribs, as they were on sale and we'd never tried them before.  This kind is much thicker and meatier than either babyback or spare and usually come pre-cut. Here we've got the ribs on plastic wrap waiting to be rubbed down.

Using the plastic wrap not only prevents a big mess, but makes it easier to wrap them up after they've been rubbed so they can soak in the flavor in the fridge.

These are the ribs after being given a good rub down with the coffee and garlic mixture.

The sauce was too thick to directly inject in the ribs, so we heated it back up a bit and mixed in some melted butter to make it work with our needle injector.

A few hours later, after sitting tightly wrapped in the fridge to maximize the flavor, we get the grill going by heating up our charcoal in the chimney starter.

For the first few minutes we cooked the ribs directly over the coals to blacken the outside and make those eye-catching grill marks. Once the outer layer is cooked through, the ribs are pulled over to the other side of the grill where there are no coals and the lid is then closed so they can cook through via indirect heat. This keeps the moisture and gives a better flavor with the "low and slow" cooking. We of course also mopped on some extra coffee BBQ sauce periodically throughout the cooking process.

With our ribs finished we're ready for an amazing dinner! On the side we've got rice and Cuban style black beans made as its own meal earlier that week. The beans ended up stretching across several dinners as either a base ingredient or a side, and we'll be covering a lot of fun different things to do with them in a later blog entry.

Our finished ribs are charred around the outside, but still tender and easily pulls off the bone on the inside. The coffee sauce was a totally different experience but well worth the effort and a great new way to try grilling ribs.

Breakfast Revisited: Bell Pepper Toad In The Holes And McGriddles

Hearty, diner style breakfasts are a perfect way to start up a cold Montana day (or any morning after a night of heavy drinking, weather irrelevant). Six-Seven-Eight has already covered several different delicious breakfast options, like breakfast burritos, breakfast sandwiches, and the fun restaurant-themed breakfast skillet.

While these traditional early morning meals are always a fun time, there are plenty of different twists to make breakfast more exciting, like the avocado eggs benedict. We've been making a point of revisiting our standard breakfast fare lately, and now we'll explore two of our recent creations: a bell pepper version of the toad-in-a-hole, and our own homemade McGriddles.

Toads-in-a-hole are staples in some areas and completely unknown in others. If you haven't had these before, they are incredibly easy, as it just consists of pieces of toast with a hole cut in the middle. Butter the toast and throw it on a hot pan, and then put an egg in each hole.

Flip 'em over a few minutes later like you would cooking normal fried eggs on the stove.

We like to serve ours with grits covered with fried vegetables and a little sausage.  Of course, don't forget about the bread holes you cut out!  They fry up on the pan just as well to make mini-toast slices.

While that's the standard way to put together this egg-based dish, you don't have to stick with bread. One morning we decided to ditch the toast and instead use rings of red bell pepper.

Megan sliced up a bell pepper into large rings big enough to hold an egg, then put down a slice of tomato in the bottom. The egg then goes on top and cooks until the yolk starts to get firm.

Near the end of the cooking process, she also threw on some cheese to melt on top, creating a great combination of flavors and textures. We served this new version with cottage cheese and some wheat toast.

For another fun breakfast outside our normal rotation, we decided to put together our own version of the McGriddle from McDonalds.  For a slightly sweet addition to the savory breakfast sandwich, we started with French toast made with cinnamon bread.

After the French toast was cooked through, next we put on a pork sausage patty.

Of course a breakfast sandwich also needs some cheese, so some colby jack gets placed on top to melt slightly.

Finishing off the McGriddle is a fried egg, and the sandwich was served with steaming hot coffee and some strawberry strudel. If you like the sweet flavors, dip the sandwich in some flavored pancake syrup.

What's your favorite breakfast meal, and what twists on old favorites do you like to make at home?  Stay tuned for more awesome breakfast fare from Six-Seven-Eight, as well as more grilling adventures and many upcoming new homemade barbecue sauces.

Grilling Season '12: Cherry Rubbed Spareribs

Montana is currently experiencing record high temperatures, so in an apartment without air conditioning we try to avoid using the oven as much as possible - which means more opportunities for backyard grilling. Our horizons in the BBQ department have been greatly expanded this summer, as we've tried everything from grilling pizza to pork southwest salad and much more.

We've also done several variations on pork and beef ribs and now really hit our stride in preparing a great rack of spareribs that are the perfect match of tender, flavorful, and moist.  One of the best we've made so far used a non-traditional dry rub we made ourselves, along with a homemade cherry cola BBQ sauce.

Our new dry rub is also currently our favorite, as it mixes in sweet cherry flavors with spicy and savory rub standards. Here's a look at all our base ingredients:

The rub is based around two large scoops of brown sugar, which adds the hint of sweet necessary to counterbalance the savory for great BBQ.

Next we threw in mustard powder, paprika for color, and some cayenne for an undertone of strong heat.

Chili powder goes in next, both for the strong red color and for the addition of some extra flavor that isn't too hot.

Some of the old standbys have to also go in to round out the rub, such as garlic and onion powder and a few dashes of salt and pepper.

Finally comes the star of the show - cherry jello mix! It sounds strange, but it adds in a huge cherry flavor with minimal effort and makes the rub a very pretty reddish pink. We ended up making about four batches of this rub and keep it in containers in the cupboard so it's always on hand for any meat that needs a flavorful and slightly sweet rub.

Like with our first attempt at pork babyback ribs at the beginning of the grilling season, we covered both sides of these spareribs with the seasonings and gently rubbed them in.

After being completely coated, the ribs are tightly wrapped up to soak in the flavor and smells from the rub.

While the ribs refrigerate and take in all that amazing cherry color, we cooked up a batch of cherry cola BBQ sauce. The process for this one was nearly identical to our root beer BBQ sauce chronicled here, but with cherry cola instead.

With the sauce complete, the ribs are unwrapped and then injected with the sauce - which means the outer layer and the actual meat itself will be equally flavorful and moist. To see the injecting process, check out our previous pork sparerib blog from when we were experimenting with store bought sauces.

As usual, a rack of ribs like this requires using indirect heat with the hot coals spread out onto two different sides of the grill.

After being turned and then flipped at regular intervals during the cooking process, we baste the top side with more cherry cola BBQ sauce, keeping the outer layer moist and tender.

Between half and two-thirds of the way through the cooking process we carefully lift the ribs up and slide tin foil underneath. This not only makes the ribs easier to remove from the grill and carry, but also prevents burning on the bottom side and keeps all the juices packed in.

Hot off the grill the ribs are sliced apart in-between each bone for a hearty helping of BBQ you need to pick up and get messy with.

There are a million different possible side combinations for these, from potato salad to other traditional sides like macaroni salad, baked beans, or corn. We like to have a side salad (with my thousand island dressing of course!) topped with diced veggies, along with a hearty baked potato.

After having made smoky raspberry sauce and several soda based BBQ sauces, we're moving onto some different recipes that completely change up the formula. Coming soon we'll be making a coffee based sauce and rub, so stay tuned for more ways to grill fabulous pork!