So, I definitely love some good fried chicken, and have had the opportunity to taste offerings in many different settings. Some of my favorites have been The Cluck Shack in San Diego, and the food stall at Reffen in Copenhagen. But, I have a huge soft spot for Nashville Hot Chicken and have tried many variations across the country and thankfully a ton of spots in Nashville itself. My ultimate favorite is Hattie B’s, and I have been able to visit a number of their locations in Nashville during various trips, and their spot out in Atlanta when I went to see the Braves and Blue Jays last year.
This is definitely one of those meals I have been missing this year, being unable to travel and hit some of my favorite restaurants. However, for Christmas my team at work chipped in and sent me an e-gift card for Goldbelly, which if you are unfamiliar, is a website that provides restaurants across the country with a platform to offer their signature dishes directly to consumers who cannot get to the actual restaurant. I started surfing the site while we were vacationing in Greenville and lo and behold came across Hattie B’s. It was a very easy decision to add the whole chicken meal to cart and arranged to have it delivered this week. I also ordered some amazing sausage from Seoul Sausage in LA, but that’s a different story.
Shipped was clean and easy, and our package of deliciousness was on the doorstep this past Wednesday afternoon. The kit came complete with an entire flash frozen fried chicken, a package of the red sauce of heat and awesomeness, and a pack of the red dust of death. The order confirmation had all of the preparation instructions, but they also included a great (and at times hilarious) pamphlet to walk you through the whole process step by step. I decided to wait until Saturday so we could enjoy some awesome chicken while watching some football as a family.
It could not have been easier to prepare, simply take the chicken out and separate the pieces and allow it to sit at room temperature for an hour. Then place in the oven for an hour at three hundred and fifty degrees, (within 10 minutes the house was filled with the most mouth-watering smell imaginable). After an hour, I turned the temp up to four hundred degrees to “crisp” the chicken while heating and whisking the sauce so that everything would be ready to combine. The chicken came out of the oven, super crispy and amazingly moist. A liberal application of the sauce brought it to just a great heat level for the family. Probably just short of the hot level in-restaurant, but the powder was available to bump things up if anyone wanted to. I figured it would be good, but definitely under-estimated how well it would come back from frozen to crispy. We added some onion rings and crinkle fries, and plenty of beverages and had just the best football watching meal possible.
Needless to say I cannot recommend Goldbelly or Hattie B’s enough to anyone who is so inclined. It was definitely a little expensive, but well worth the splurge given both the quality of the food and also the added sense of the world seeming just a little bit bigger again.
Hopefully the pictures I have added do the meal justice, as I am now going to go and hunt down the little bit of chicken that was leftover.
The Free Range Viking
The Free Range Viking 