Friday, May 20, 2011

Chicken Breasts - Stuffed! Grilled!

I've launched a little food-related project in conjunction with the folks at Fooducopia, a site where small food producers sell their products. My part in this is that I'll be creating recipes specifically for products sold on the Fooducopia site. This is one of those recipes.

One the the items I got from Fooducopia was a bottle of wing sauce. Booya! Buffalo Wing Sauce, to be exact. So, of course I wasn't going to use it for wings. That would be too easy.

I sampled it and lemme tell ya, it's pretty darned hot. I had the version called "sorta hot," which isn't the spiciest they sell - so you can choose the heat level you prefer. I thought the Sorta hot would be perfect for buffalo wings and a big pitcher of something cold to wash them down.

Working this into a new recipe proved a little challenging, though. I'd already made a few spicy recipes for other Fooducopia products, and I didn't want to revamp any of those. This stuff deserved something that would both showcase and harness that heat.

Dairy products cut the heat of pepper, so I decided to use cream cheese mixed with the peppers. But that wasn't enough. I also added caramelized onions. You can caramelize onions just for this dish, or make a big batch of crockpot caramelized onions and freeze them for other dishes. They take a while to cook, but it's mostly unattended and the result is pretty darned good.

The resulting mixture would have made a great cracker spread, but I wanted to do more with it, so I used it to stuff some chicken breasts that I grilled. The taste of the onions and hot sauce seeped into the chicken and the cream cheese added a nice richness.

This recipe makes enough to stuff 4 breasts, I made extra and served it with the chicken. It's good cold or you can warm it up a bit if you prefer. My suggestion is to make extra. Serve some with the chicken, and if you have any left, serve it on crackers or use it as a chip dip. You'll be making more. I promise

Stuffed and Grilled Chicken Breasts

4 chicken breasts (bone-in or boneless)
4 ounces cream cheese
1/4 cup caramelized onions, chilled
Booyah! Buffalo Wing Sauce (to taste, starting with 1 teaspoon)

In a small bowl, combine the cream cheese, onions, and wing sauce. Start with a teaspoon of the sauce and taste. This stuff is potent. A teaspoon will add a little heat that you'll notice, but it won't frighten anyone. Add more sauce, a teaspoon at a time, until you find the heat level that you like.

With a small, sharp knife, stab a hole into the side of the chicken breast, and then move the knife back and forth to create a pocket without enlarging the entry hole any more than you need to. Make the pocket as large as you can without cutting through the far side of the chicken.

Now comes the tricky part - stuffing the chicken. I found that the easiest thing to do is to place the cheese mixture into a plastic bag, snip off the tip of one corner, insert that open corner into the the hole in the chicken breast, and squeeze the mixture in. Try to get about 1/4 of the mixture into each breast. It's a little messy, but it works.

Note: if you made extra cheese mixture, set it aside before you start stuffing the chicken - you don't want to get it contaminated with the chicken juices. Keep it refrigerated until you need it, and serve it cold or warm it up a bit, if you prefer.

You can cook the breasts in the oven at 325 degrees - or on the grill. Cook them until they read 155 degrees in the thickest part and then let them rest at least 10 minutes before serving. The carryover heat will raise the temperature to 160 degrees while they rest.

The cooking time will vary depending on the size of the chicken breasts and how you cook them, but figure on 20-30 minutes, on average.

For a more formal presentation, slice the breasts and serve with extra sauce.

To be clear, I'm not reviewing or endorsing the products in this recipe. I've created the recipe for Fooducopia to post its site and I'm re-posting the recipe here for my readers as well. Then again, since I created the recipe, rest assured that I liked it. I don't cook stuff that we're not going to eat.
Yum

1 comment:

Mary @Delightful Bitefuls said...

This sounds and looks incredible! Love the filling!

New to your blog; happy I found you!

Mary xo
Delightful Bitefuls

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