At 4:45 this afternoon, Jack was already in his Halloween costume, which this year is his baseball uniform plus a cape, and Ryan was on the patio dunking smoked chicken halves, one at a time, into a mixing bowl of white sauce. Trick-or-treating in our neighborhood starts at six. Dinner had to be on the table by five or it wasn't happening.
We've been on a white sauce kick since fall break, when we spent two days in Huntsville and Decatur, Alabama, for rockets and barbecue. In Decatur, we ate at a barbecue place where the chicken comes out of the pit, goes straight into a tub of white sauce and lands on your tray dripping. White sauce is mayonnaise, vinegar and a lot of black pepper. It sounds wrong if you grew up on red sauce, the way Ryan and I did, but on smoky chicken skin it tastes sharp, tangy and peppery, more like a thin dressing than a barbecue sauce.
Nora, who won't touch anything spicy, ate two pieces in Decatur and asked if we could make it at home. That settled it.
Ingredients
- 2 whole chickens, about 4 1/2 pounds each
- Rub: 2 tablespoons kosher salt, 1 tablespoon black pepper, 2 teaspoons garlic powder and 2 teaspoons paprika
- White sauce (about 2 cups): 1 1/2 cups Duke's mayonnaise, 1/2 cup apple cider vinegar, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, 1 tablespoon coarse black pepper, 2 teaspoons prepared horseradish, 1 teaspoon sugar, 1 teaspoon kosher salt and 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
- A pinch of cayenne, optional (we leave it out)
How we make it
- Whisk the white sauce together a day ahead if you can, since the pepper and horseradish mellow overnight. Divide it between two jars, one for dunking and one for the table, and refrigerate both.
- Cut the backbone out of each chicken with kitchen shears, then cut down through the breastbone to make halves. Pat them dry and season all over with the rub.
- Heat the pellet grill to 300°F and lay the halves on skin side up.
- Cook 1 1/2 to 2 hours, until the thickest part of the breast reads 165°F and the thigh reads about 175°F.
- Take the chicken off the grill and dunk each half in a big bowl of white sauce, or brush it on heavily. Don't put it back on the heat.
- Serve with the table jar, and throw away whatever is left in the dunking bowl.
Ryan got home from the plant at 2:40 and had the halves on by three, and the breasts hit 165 at 4:40. Today went smoothly because the first time didn't.
The first time, two Saturdays after fall break, he brushed the sauce on during the last twenty minutes of cooking, the way you'd glaze with red sauce. Mayonnaise is an emulsion, oil held in tiny droplets by egg yolk, and heat breaks it. The sauce split into a greasy, curdled-looking slick, the skin went soft and the chicken tasted like warm oil. Ryan looked at it for a long minute and made the call for good: "Sauce goes on after it comes off."
The dunking bowl gets thrown out because it sat warm next to hot chicken and a basting brush all through dinner. Mayonnaise-based anything shouldn't hang around at room temperature, so the table jar goes back in the fridge within two hours, and it keeps about a week.
The jar in our fridge
It rarely lasts a week. Since fall break we've used it on leftover chicken sandwiches, as the dressing on a potato salad, on grilled pork chops and as a dip for oven fries. Nora puts it on the turkey sandwiches in her lunch box. It's the first barbecue sauce in our house that both kids will put on anything, and Jack dipped every bite of tonight's chicken in it and gave it a nine, which from him is close to a coronation.
Two chickens from the Aldi in Columbia were $1.49 a pound, $13.41 for nine pounds, and with the sauce and pellets the whole thing came to about $21 for dinner tonight and lunches through Monday.
Then the cape came back out, and the plates sat in the sink until eight.
