Bizarro Double Down (Poulet Charlotte)

Last week when we presented one of the recipes on the blog my friend Nick suggested making a Double Down sandwich. For those of you who don’t visit Colonel Sanders too often, this is a KFC sandwich. It consists of two chicken breasts instead of bread, bacon and “colonel sauce”. This thing was a huge scandal due to the amount of sodium, fat and calories in it yet it was also a big success in the US and in Canada where it is only available for short periods of time.

Pierre accepted the challenge but suggested doing a healthy version of it. And we set to make it this past weekend. Now, making a healthy version of such a dirty dish is a difficult task. We also found ourselves very short on time and having to shop in a small neighborhood grocery store instead of a nice big pretentious market or grocery store. Because of this “complications” the results are not extremely healthy but they are delicious and slightly less damaging than the actual double down. Also to make it feel fancy we gave it a silly name “Poulet Charlotte”. Tell me you can’t picture an extremely pretentious French waiter offering “Poulet Charlotte” as the plat du jour.

What you need

5 skinless, boneless chicken breasts. Sliced in two lengthwise.
1 cup of milk
1 cup of white flour
1 cup of dried bread crumbs
1 cup of wheat bran
2 tablespoons of roasted sesame seeds
1 tea spoon dried parsley
½ a tea spoon of espelette pepper powder
10 slices of good quality bacon
5 slices of provolone cheese
5 basil leaves, minced
5-6 eggs
2 garlic cloves, minced and crushed.
Extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper

How to make it

First of all you will need to set an assembly line on your counter. First put a tray with all your sliced chicken breasts on your first station. Second station is a bowl with the milk. The next station is a plate with the white flour. The 4th station is a bowl with 4 eggs, scrambled with some salt. In the next plate mix the bread crumbs, bran, sesame seeds, dried parsley, espelette pepper and some salt and pepper. Run each of the chicken halves through each of the stations so that they get completely covered in all of the ingredients. Once they are all nicely breaded put them in a baking sheet making sure you know which half matches the other. For optimum crunchiness you want to put them either in a baking rack with a drip pan underneath or some sort of baking sheet with holes in it. We used a fancy sheet that Pierre uses for pizza crust and it worked wonderfully. Brush or spray some oil on the rack / pan and also on top of the chicken breasts and throw them in the oven for 10 minutes at 375 degrees. Take them out, flip them, brush this new side with more oil and throw them in the oven for another 10 minutes. While the chicken is cooking fry the bacon a bit to get all the grease out but without it getting too crunchy (unless you are American and you like it that way). Once the bacon is done you should also make an aioli to substitute the colonel sauce. The aioli is very simple to make, put an egg yolk in a non-reactive bowl and beat the hell out of it while a very slim string of oil is being poured into the mix constantly. If you are very dexterous or you have 3 hands you can do it yourself, otherwise you should ask one of your little friends for help. In total you will probably use about a cup of oil. Once the mix has a mayonnaise like texture you are done beating and you can mix the garlic, salt and pepper and the minced basil leaves.
By now your chicken should be almost ready and your kitchen shouldn’t be on fire yet. If it is on fire please call the firefighters and do not mention our blog. So once the chicken is ready it’s the fun time to assemble the double downs. The first layer is one half of the chicken breast, then spread some aioli on it, put 2 slices of bacon, a slice of cheese, and the matching half of the chicken breast on top. If you are not as OCD as Pierre and me you may not use the matching parts of the breasts. Once your 5 “sandwiches” are assembled put them in the oven for 5 minutes on bake and 5 minutes on broil. Take them out of the oven, let them cool down a bit and… eat.

Now, as you can see there isn’t anything healthy about a sandwich with chicken instead of bread, bacon and cheese but our version has fiber, we didn't deep fry it and the bacon we used had no preservatives so Foodgang 3 KFC 0 ! Score is not up for discussion ok?

So even though this recipe is delicious like that there are a few things that can be changed. First of all my initial idea was to use cayenne pepper instead of espelette but I forgot my cayenne pepper at home. In terms of the dried breadcrumbs I would probably do ½ cup of dried bread crumbs and half a cup of panko. I was also not too happy with provolone as the cheese choice, I would have gone with a nice gruyere and Pierre suggested aged cheddar. Also you may want to spread aioli on both “slices of bread” for maximum moisture. As is the case with every recipe we post, by no means should you ever follow the recipe exactly as the best kind of cooking is experimental using the ingredients you like the most and as much as you like. That way if you don’t like the dish you know it’s your fault and not mine.

Having nothing else to say… DIG IN !