It's Shake and Bake and I helped!

A couple of days ago I was craving chicken nuggets. Now I love chicken breasts. They are so very versatile and a great way to make a few breasts go far is to make chicken strips or even chicken nuggets. I find that often a single breast can feed two people til they are very satisfied. Fried chicken doesn't always have to be fattening. Stay tuned later this week and find out about my fattening version. A lot of times I simply "oven-fry" the chicken. With less than a tablespoon of oil I cooked 5 chicken breasts cut into strips and coated. They were crispy, flavorful, and the chicken was moist and tender inside. Here's how I made this from "whats in the fridge."

The Breading:

A good chicken strip or nugget is all about the breading. What is the most memorable part of a McDonald's nugget? That coating. Yes you want all white meat and not processed but once you've established that, the art is the breading. For this batch of strips I decided to scan through the pantry and see what I had on hand to make a nice coating.

I found a package of Vinta multigrain crackers. Inside the box was one of the rolls of crackers already open. They were going stale sitting in a far back shelf of the pantry. I stopped buying breadcrumbs in general. Mostly because I usually have some crackers lying around if I ever want to make breading and I don't coat things very often. I also found a mostly full 99 cent bag of Buffalo Wing and Ranch flavored Doritos that no one in the house liked. To me that equaled hotwing flavored chicken strips.

Now with crackers, chips, cereal, or just about anything that you want to make a breading with you have to first crush. I'm not that good at this. My attempt was to simply put it in a large gallon freezer bag and run a rolling pin across it until either I got tired of it or it was all crushed. I got tired first. So my husband, being much better at this sort of thing took over. He'd really like my mortar and pestle or really any sort of larger industrial size mortar and pestle for the cracker crumbling but he makes work with it. Another method he's been known to use if you don't like the ziplock method is a large glass or ceramic bowl and a rounded metal thermos lid. The problem with that one is the lid is uncomfortable in the hand after a while.

So now we have the base of our breading but since no one really liked the flavor of the Doritos I needed to incorporate its mostly generic and fairly bland buffalo flavor into something that we all would want to eat. Candy has a ton of powdered sauce packets. I'm sure you've seen them and they really are handy to start out as a base flavoring. Then you can adjust and add from there. Well I flipped through them like a rolodex of spices and found 2 that I thought would be pleasing: Nacho Cheese and Hot Wings. I added them to my cracker and chip crumbs. I also added a little sugar for crystalizing while baking, some dry mustard powder, paprika, and cumin.

Now my shake and bake was all ready for the chicken.

Coating:

I wonder how you bread your chicken. I find for myself the best way is to do a three dip system. I like to take some flour mixed with salt and pepper as my base layer. After it is well coated I shake off the excess and dip it into some egg beaten with water. In this case I used 3 eggs, a squirt of mustard, and some water and beat them together. And lastly after the egg wash is the cracker crumbs. I like to put a couple pieces into the cracker crumbs, put on a lid, and shake shake shake. This is a fun step for kids if you have them. You flour and egg wash and then let them shake them up in the tupperware. Everything gets well coated and you have a happy helper.

Cooking:

Finally these are ready to cook. Now there are many methods to making them. I don't have a deep fryer but they can be deep fried to get a hard outer layer and then placed in an oven on a metal grid and a pan underneath to drip dry and cook the inside the rest of the way. I'm trying to find healthier options in my cooking so what I did this time was to very lightly coat the tops of the broiler pan to keep the chicken from sticking. Then I placed the chicken on and cooked them in a 450 degree oven flipping them halfway til done. No I don't know how long. Once the chicken was in the oven, I made the side dishes. Half way ... I flipped the chicken and when the side dishes were done so was the chicken.

Results:

These were really good. Everyone seemed to love them and they used up some staling chips and crackers! Out of about 40 chicken strips we only had 5 left. While they weren't healthy, they did satisfy a craving and we chose a healthier way to make them! All in all it was a great night for chicken.