Cowboy Cornbread Chicken: A Southwest-Style One-Pan Meal

Hello, this is Chef John from foodwishes.com with cowboy cornbread chicken. That's right. Instead of serving chicken with cornbread, we're serving chicken in cornbread. And not just any cornbread. All right, we're going to spice up some cornbread southwest style, just like cowboys make it, allegedly. And to get started, I'm going to cut up three chicken breasts lengthwise in half. Not because I wanted to, but because they were ginormous and I had to. Right. These didn't even have the tenderloin attached and it was still close to like 12 ounces. So, what we'll do in that case is take a knife and divide these right down the middle into two strips

that are hopefully equally sized. And by the way, if you can find some normalsized chicken breast that are closer to like 6 ounces, then you can just buy six and use them whole. But either way, once cut, we'll toss them in a bowl and we'll drizzle those with a little bit of olive oil before we season and spice them up with a generous amount of salt, some freshly ground black pepper, plus I also added some chipotle pepper. But of course, as usual, you go ahead and toss in whatever you want. And what we'll do once we've given that a thorough mixing is pop it in the fridge until we need it. And then we'll head to the stove where we are going to melt an entire stick of butter over mediumigh heat and some kind of cast iron or other

oven safe pan. And once that butter melts, we'll go ahead and toss in a diced onion along with our customary big pinch of salt. And we'll cook that stirring for a couple minutes until, yes, you guessed it, they start to soften up and turn translucent. And once they do and things are looking a little something like this, we can back our heat down to medium. And we'll toss in some bell pepper. And I like to use both red and green. And we'll also toss in some minced garlic. And we will cook this stirring for about 2 minutes or just until those peppers soften up slightly and start to lose their raw edge. At which point, we'll turn off the heat and we'll grab a small bowl. Because before we move to the next step,

I like to remove about three or four spoons of the mixture so that we can scatter those over the top of the cornbread before it goes in the oven. So, this step is optional, but I think the cornbread does look better if we do it. So, let's do it. And once that's been accomplished, we'll remove the pan from the heat. And we'll let that sit and cool for about 5 minutes, during which time we can mix up our dry ingredients. And there's only three. Okay. some self-rising flour, some cornmeal of course, plus a little bit of salt, and then we'll take a whisk and give that a thorough mixing for about 30 seconds. And by the way, as always, if you don't have self-rising flour, you

can simply use allpurpose with some baking powder mixed in. And we will definitely add how to do that to the written recipe. And once that's set, we'll head back to our pan and we'll transfer in about 3 tablespoons of honey. All right, two if you want it less sweet. and four if you want it more. And once the pan's been honeyed, we'll transfer in our buttermilk as well as a couple large beaten eggs. And then we'll take a whisk and mix this thoroughly until we're very sure everything's been evenly combined. And by the way, I would make this no matter how many pots or pans it needed. But as an added bonus, this is actually a one pan meal. So, we got that going for us, which is nice. But anyway, once that's been mixed up, we will transfer in our

dry ingredients. And we'll grab a spatula. And we will very carefully, very thoughtfully mix this in. And we are only going to do that until the flour disappears so as not to overm mix the batter. All right. I like my cowboys tough, but I want my cornbread tender. Oh, and if your spatula starts to get gked up a little bit, just use a spoon to go ahead and clean it off. And once we do have that mixed in, we'll go ahead and scrape down and clean up the sides a little bit. And we'll also kind of level out the surface, at which point we can grab our chicken, specifically the chicken we seasoned and put in the fridge. And we can start pressing and pushing those pieces down into the

batter. And as I started to place these in, I realized my original wagon wheel spoke design was not going to work. Right? These pieces were just too long. But as you know, we never let the food win. And eventually I figured out that if I kind of bent them and shape this more into a spiral that I would be able to fit them all in and they would be nice and evenly spaced. And by the way, if you are using six small breasts and you're not using these cutup pieces, you can just go around sticking them in like a 45 degree angle in roughly the same positions. All right, as long as they're equally spaced, it's all going to work out just fine. And then once we have that placed in, we'll take a spoon and

we will take a little bit of that batter from here and there and do about three or four spoons in the center where all the thinnest pieces of the chicken came together, which I think helps this bake up nice and evenly. And that's it. To finish this off, we'll go ahead and scatter over our reserved pepper onion mixture, followed by a nice sprinkling of grated Monterey Jack cheese, or at least that's what I decided to use. Grated cheddar would also work well. So you decide, I mean, you are after all Billy the kid of whether to do it like Chef John did. And that's it. This is now ready to transfer into the upper center of a 400°ree oven for about 40 to

45 minutes or until our chicken safely cooked, our cornbread is beautifully browned. And it hopefully looks like this. Oh yeah. I mean, yeehya. Now that is a real looker. And not to brag, but I knew this was cooked just by poking it. Or if you want to test with a skewer to see if it comes out clean or stick a thermometer into the chicken, go ahead. But anyway, once we're sure it's done, we will garnish the top with some freshly sliced green onions. And that's it. Our cowboy cornbread chicken is ready to enjoy. So, I grabbed a spoon and scooped out one of those pieces of chicken with, of course, an appropriate

amount of cowboy cornbread attached. And while I'm sure this would be great as is, I decided to serve mine up with some hot honey butter, which is nothing more than half butter and half honey heated in a pan. Oh, and I also spiked it with some more chipotle and a little shake of cayenne, which actually makes this hot honey butter. And yes, those measurements will be in the written recipe as well. And that, my friends, for someone that loves cornbread and chicken as much as I do, was a tremendously enjoyable bite of food. Oh, and if you wanted to do an extra step, you could actually brown the chicken in the butter before you add your onions, but I'm really not sure that's going to make much of a difference in this. And

those pieces of chicken are actually going to stiffen up and possibly be harder to put into the batter, so I didn't. And what this reminded me of most was a cornbread stuffed chicken breast I had one time, except this was way easier and less fussy. And as I already mentioned, we only need one pan, which I'm sure cowboys will appreciate since everybody knows they hate to wash dishes. In fact, I remember watching a western when I was a little kid. And after they finished eating, they actually rubbed their dishes with sand to clean them. And after seeing that, I asked my mom if we could do that, and she said no. But anyway, the point is, cowboys don't like to wash dishes, and neither do we. And while the hot

honey butter was really good with this, a classic brown chicken gravy would also be beautiful. But no matter how you serve yours, I thought this easy onep dish came out incredibly well. And I really do hope you give it a try soon. So please follow the links below for the ingredient amounts, a printable written recipe, and much more info as usual. And as always, enjoy.