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Alabama White Sauce Chicken
- Intermediate
- 1 h 30 m
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
Leads with wood-smoke running underneath, acid holding everything up to the light, with a bitter-edged char at the rim.
Ingredients
- 1 whole chicken, spatchcocked
- 2 tbsp salt
- 1 tbsp black pepper
- For the white sauce: 300ml mayonnaise, 120ml cider vinegar, 2 tbsp lemon juice, 1 tbsp horseradish, 1 tsp black pepper, 1 tsp sugar, 1/2 tsp cayenne, 1 tsp salt
Equipment
Grill
The skills inside
Butchery basicsGrilling over live coals
Allergen screen
Found: egg
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Season the spatchcocked chicken hard with salt and pepper and let it sit an hour.
- Smoke or grill over indirect heat at 150C for about 75 min until 74C in the thigh. 75 min
- Whisk all the white sauce ingredients together: it should be thin, sharp, and peppery.
- When the chicken comes off the heat, dunk the whole bird in the white sauce or brush it on generously.
- Rest 10 min and serve with more sauce on the side. 10 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Grilling over live coals 77 recipes
- The fire was ready before the food was: coals evenly covered in grey ash with no flames licking through and no raw smoke coming off, and a hot zone and a cooler one both available.
- The grate was hot and clean when the food landed, and the food released cleanly from it when the time came to turn rather than tearing away.
- Marks are browned, not burnt: deep colour where the metal touched, with no carbon flaking off and no soot transferred onto the food.
- The interior reaches its target with a thin gradient, not charred outside and cold within, and not driven through by a flare-up.
- What comes off the fire smells of fire and food only: no raw wood smoke, no fuel, nothing acrid at the back of the nose.
Where it goes wrong It went on over live flames instead of settled coals, so the outside charred bitter in the flare-ups while the middle stayed cold, and everything on the plate tastes of soot.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Pinot Noir or Gamay
- Also Right
- Chenin Blanc
- From the Taps
- Bière de garde
- Zero-Proof
- Verbena iced tea
Chicken is wine’s most agreeable partner. Match the SAUCE, not the bird: cream to oak, tomato to Sangiovese’s acid, herbs to Loire whites.
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