The '90s Got Chicken Alfredo Wrong. Here’s How I Fixed It.

Blackened Chicken Alfredo, the star entree of the 1990s. Basically, delicious chicken on top of cheesy noodles. You love that. Today, I'm gonna show you how to make it. To make this thing, I gotta start by making the blackened seasoning powder. To do that, I've got a little blender set up here, and into the jar, I'm gonna combine 25 grams of smoked paprika. Regular paprika would also work here, but the smoky flavor here kinda provides the entire backbone for the spice blend, so I think it's really nice to have. Then, eight grams of black pepper, 15 grams of garlic powder, 30 grams of onion powder, three grams of dried oregano, three grams of dried thyme, then 30 grams of salt, and finally three grams of cayenne pepper. But you gotta know that this amount of cayenne is gonna make a spice blend that's pretty punchy, so if you're sensitive, you probably wanna turn down the volume on that. Next, I'll just drop a double layer of paper towel over the top of my blender jar, then pop on the lid. Then I'm gonna spin this on high speed. For about 30 to 40 seconds just to get everything homogenous and well broken down. There we go. If you're wondering about the paper towel, anytime I'm grinding spices, I like to use it just because it keeps the spices contained in the jar and not shot all up in the inside of the lid. Especially when I've got spicy stuff in there, this keeps it from being vaporized into a powder that's going to fill my entire kitchen and just roast my sinuses for the next 20 minutes and make me cough my head off. Once my blackened seasoning is spun up, I'm going to move half of it over to a bowl. Which is about 50 to 60 grams worth. I like to mill this into a fine powder instead of just stirring it together because I find for stuff like dried herbs or the coarse kosher salt that I'm using, it never really gets homogenous with everything else. And it either sits on top or sinks to the bottom. And I just can't get even coverage on the chicken. The other reason that I like to do this is that the finer you mill this, the more it sticks to the meat and the more evenly it gets blackened. And then I'll make sure to reserve the other half for future blackening projects. If you're not interested in making your own spice blend for this, you can certainly use store-bought blackened seasoning, but you gotta look at the label or give it a taste because the salt level on that stuff is all over the place and it could be quite different from what we've got here. Next, I'm gonna grab two large chicken breasts, which happens to be about 400 to 500 grams. And I'm not using thighs here just because they're way too rich for the amount of butter and cheese that's gonna be in this final dish. And they take quite a bit longer to get cooked, so instead of getting blackened, the spices will get burnt. Now to prep this breast, I'm gonna cut it in half just above the halfway point. Like that. Then I'm gonna set aside the tip and then I'm gonna carefully cut the thick end of the breast in half horizontally. The main idea here is to just get all of the pieces roughly the same thickness. Chicken breast is just a very weird shaped piece of meat that is very lean and very hard to get cooked evenly as a whole piece. And once I've got six portions that are roughly the same weight, I'm gonna take the thicker pieces and throw them into a Ziploc bag and then use a sauce pan or a meat pounder Seven or eight pounds to get it three quarters of an inch thick. I almost never cook chicken breast at its original thickness just because it takes a long time. And by the time the center is the ideal temperature, the outer edge has dried out completely. You don't want to go crazy with this, though. You can certainly over pound the meat and make it kind of mealy and smushed up. There's a couple pieces here that are a little bit on the thin side. They're only gonna get four or five pounds. Once these are pounded out, it's gonna be time to dust them up. But I wanna reiterate that at this point, they don't need to be the most beautiful pieces of chicken in the world. The only thing that we're optimizing for at this stage is piece size and uniform piece thickness, which as a reminder should be somewhere between half and three quarters of an inch. Now to dust up these breasts, I'm gonna lay a piece in and I'm gonna give it a really firm press. Into the spices to get as much stuck as I possibly can and then I'll just flip it over onto the backside and press it super firmly and there we go. Again, I really like grinding these spices into such a fine powder because of the coverage that you get on the meat. I think you'd be surprised if you compared this to the grind of the spices that come in the jars from the store. They look pretty fine, but compared to this, they actually end up being pretty coarse. And since we've got such a fine powder here, every little square millimeter is totally covered and it's going to give us a really beautiful blackened crust because of it. Now, once I've got this last piece dusted up, I'm gonna throw these in the refrigerator to cure and dry out for about 20 to 30 minutes. This is an essential step that I absolutely would not skip for a couple of reasons. Number one is it's gonna give time for the salt to penetrate, and it's gonna keep the chicken juicier during cooking and make it taste better. And then number two, which is even more important, is that it's going to allow the spices to fuse with the protein in the chicken so that they won't slide off after cooking. One of my biggest pet peeves is when people just throw spices on meat and then cook it right away. That doesn't give the two things enough time to get bonded together. And then once it's cooked, the spices just slough right off. And then it's like, what was the point of even putting these on there in the first place? 30 minutes later, it's time to cook the chicken. But before we do that, you wanna make sure you got a big old pot of water at a ripping boil, because as soon as these little breasts come out of the hot pan, we're gonna drop the pasta. As far as the chicken goes, you can see that after that 30 minutes, it's nicely cured up. The spices and the meat have basically unified, and they're not going anywhere. Now to cook this chicken, I've got a 12-inch stainless steel pan here that I'm going to preheat over, let's call it the high end of medium, about 6.5 out of 10, maybe 7. And if you don't have a 12-inch pan, you can certainly cook this in a 10-incher. Just do the chicken in two batches of three. But at this point, you should just have a 12-inch pan. I've said it many times, but a 12-inch pan can cook everything that a 10-inch pan can, and it's not really that much more expensive. So between the two sizes, I would always go for the bigger one. Once I have a strong medium going, I'm gonna add in about a two to three tablespoon squeezer of oil and spread that out to get it into an even layer. Then I'm gonna very carefully drop these cutlets into the oil away from my body just so I don't splash hot oil on myself. And make sure that you're getting some oil underneath the chicken as you drop it in. If these go directly into a dry pan, the spices are gonna bond to the pan and it's not gonna release cleanly. And then when you go to flip it, the spices are gonna get ripped off. And then once the chicken's in, I'm just gonna double check my heat here to make sure that it's not too high or too cold. Then I'm gonna grab a spatula or a meat weight and just come and give each piece of chicken a little bit of a downward pressure to make sure that as much of the surface area is touching the pan as possible. But from this point on, don't mess with the chicken too much. We wanna make sure that the chicken is in contact with the pan basically the entire time because any agitation we do can inhibit the development of that spice crust on the bottom side. And again, the spices will get stuck to the pan when we go to flip it over. Now from here, I'm gonna sear this on this first side for about three to three and a half minutes or until the spices are very deeply golden brown. Not literally black though. So if you're wondering what that actually means, this guy Paul Perdom in the 1980s came up with this dish called blackened red fish in Louisiana that was super, super popular. And it's basically putting a smoky, spicy blend of spices on meat and cooking it until they are way darker than would be traditional. But I wanna emphasize here, Really, really dark spices does not mean black spices. Things that are black taste really bitter, really acrid, and they're disgusting. So if actually black is a 10 out of 10, what we're going for here is more like a eight out of 10, which is very, very dark golden brown. That's where we're gonna be roasting the spices and the fat and developing these flavors that are deep, very roasty, and pretty exotic and mysterious compared to where spices are normally cooked. And after about two minutes or so, I'm just gonna come back and peek underneath. And we still need just a little bit more time. I'm actually noticing that these are starting to curl up a little bit in the middle, so I'm going to drop a little meat weight on here and give that about 20 seconds of downward pressure just to make sure that the whole thing is touching the pan and we're getting really even color. Now, normally when you're searing a piece of meat like this, you're relying on really high heat, quick cook times, and the Maillard reaction to get that browning crust on the meat. What's happening here... It's not that we're not using the Maillard reaction, it's just that a bunch of other things are happening. And when you're cooking spices, you can't use that kind of heat because it's not a linear progression of color. With meat, you go from one, two, three, four, five, six. Like that's how it gets browner. With spices, you go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11,000, a million. It goes really dark really fast, the closer you get to the darker of the color. So I just think this moderate heat is better because it allows us to kind of coast up into that darker zone a little bit more carefully instead of just hammering into it at high heat. You don't want too much pressure because you'll start to squeeze moisture out of the chicken, but you probably still want about a pound or two of downforce. A good sign that I'm not using too much heat here too is that after about three minutes, the spices in the pan are still golden brown and not totally black. If you were using a higher heat, At this point, those spices that are just sitting in the pan would be totally roasted because they're not protected by any steam that's coming off the meat, so they progress really quickly. At this point, the chicken breast is most of the way cooked through on the first side. Now, just to bring a little bit more flavor, I'm going to add in a big pat of butter in the final minute here and let that melt. Hopefully, by the end of this too, we'll get a little bit of brown butter flavor. Just add one more layer of mystery and depth to the chicken. At about three and a half minutes, I'm going to come back and flip over a piece. Ooh, dude. That is perfect. It's super deep golden brown, but it's not actually black. This is really important. Yeah, that looks awesome. And then once these are flipped over, I'm actually gonna kill the heat and let these carry over cook on the backside. And I'm gonna give them a little bit of basting in this butter. Ooh, baby, look at that. Absolutely nasty. Okay now I've kissed these on the backside for about 30 to 45 seconds and I really don't want to cook them further than that. At this point the internal temperature is going to be somewhere around 155 F which for me is the sweet spot for chicken breast. The FDA or a lot of food safety advice will say you need to cook chicken to 165 F but what they don't mention is that food safety is a function of time and temperature meaning that The food can be cooked to a lower temperature as long as it's held at that temperature for a longer period of time. So I think it's somewhere in the ballpark of about two to three minutes at 155 F is as safe as chicken that's been cooked to 165 for like five to 10 seconds or so. And what we're doing here at a lower temperature is squeezing out way less of the juice of the chicken and preserving a lot more of its natural bouncy texture instead of cooking it to something that is really ropey and dry. It's also not gonna hurt to pour that melty butter all over the chicken. Cause this is not a calorie conscious dish guys. This dish is about flavor maxing. So just be a pig and get every drop of butter on this chicken. I mean, look at that. Look at it. Oh my gosh. Ooh, man, that is just. Oh, that smells so good. And it's very smoky, but not just in the same way that smoked paprika makes things kind of smoky. This is deeper. It's a little bit closer to charred, like almost like it was cooked on the grill and it's a lot more primal. It's just very interesting. Real quick, I want to thank Cometeer for sponsoring this vid. I have a lot of different coffee making stuff. Like, Three of these kettles, a French press, a classic drip machine. I have multiple pour over options, like a V60 and this little Chemex thing. I've got three different espresso makers, including a Nespresso machine. And this is all just because I love the process of making coffee. But if I'm being 100% honest with my stuff, the coffee that I've made at home isn't as good as the frozen stuff that I've gotten from Cometeer, the sponsor of this video. Now, this seems insane, and it's going to seem like I'm totally simping for this company and this ad, but it's just a really freaking good product. I don't understand how it works, but what's in this little capsule tastes... Really good. I think it's because Cometeer sources the highest quality coffee from roasters like Counter Culture, Onyx, and Intelligentsia, and then they precision brew it at 10x strength and flash freeze that brew to lock in the flavor and all of its freshness. The coffee gets shipped frozen on dry ice directly to your door, and it's packed in these little recyclable aluminum capsules. To make a hot coffee, you just pop out the frozen puck into a mug and then melt it with piping hot water. For iced lattes, I'll just put some milk on ice and then drizzle in melted coffee straight from the capsule. And then for iced coffee, same deal, water and ice plus melted coffee, and that's it. Honestly, this is the best tasting coffee that I have ever made at home, and it really pains me to say that as somebody who has spent a ton of time and money trying to get good at homemade coffee over the years. It just works. I don't really get it, but it tastes good. Also, these little capsules make great gifts for people because you can give them the gift of great tasting coffee without them having to figure out how to use something like this. So if you guys want to give this stuff a try. Use the link in my description, or go to cometeer.com slash brianlagerstrom, and you get $20 off your first order. Link in description, cometeer.com slash brianlagerstrom. Once the chicken's cooked, I'm gonna set this off to the side. And before we move on, I just wanna reiterate that the target temp is about 155 F, and we don't want to blacken the spices literally. If you keep those two things in mind, you're gonna have a good result. Now, I'm going to grab the boiling water from my back burner here, so we can work on the fettuccine. and the alfredo sauce. To start I'm going to add in two strong three or four finger pinches of salt. A lot of people say your pasta water needs to taste exactly like the ocean but I think that's a bad heuristic because there are a lot of variables involved and there's a lot of cooking time differences between thick dried pastas and fresh pastas and how long the pasta is in the water determines how much salt it's going to absorb. For this pasta in this dish we need it to taste like there is a noticeable amount of salt in the water but I would stay well below the brininess of the ocean Then I'm gonna drop in one whole box of the De Cecco egg fettuccine number 103. Now, once this is in the pot, I'm just gonna fluff it to break up the noodles, and I'm gonna cook it per package instructions, which is five minutes here. Now, I'm being very specific about this nested egg-style fettuccine for a couple of reasons. Number one is that it's quite a bit thinner than the long, flat fettuccine that you get at the grocery store, and for me, I just think that that gives this dish a much better bite. Those long, straight fettuccine noodles are too thick, they get a little bit gummy, they're too chewy, and I just don't think they pair well with cheese sauce. Speaking of cheese sauce, Those long, flat fettuccine noodles, are smooth and so they don't really grip the sauce and it just sort of slides off on the outside. This product right here is extruded from the machine in a way that approximates a traditional style of pasta making which is bronze die extrusion which gives the outside of the pasta a lot more texture which means that it can hold a lot more sauce. In developing this recipe I just realized that classical fettuccine noodles, the long flat ones, they're just they're They're not good. They're like a D tier noodle. And I just, I think that if you made this dish with them, you're gonna be pretty disappointed. That being said, if you can't find this exact product, pretty much every regular grocery store in the US is gonna have something that's very, very similar. We're looking for a wide noodle that is pretty thin in terms of top to bottom thickness. And we're looking for something that has a nice amount of texture on the outside. And after five minutes, I'm just gonna snatch one of these little bad boys out of here and burn myself trying to get it into my mouth. Perfect. This is al dente, which for this pasta I think is just right. It's quite thin, so when you cook it to that point where it's got just a little bit of toothiness in the middle, it gives you a pleasant amount of chewiness. It just doesn't have that hard bite that you get from cooking thicker, dried pastas till al dente. Now before I strain this, I'm just gonna jump in and grab about a full cup of the starchy pasta liquid to serve as the base of my Alfredo sauce. In total we probably want about 200 grams or so. There's really no need to measure it, but go for a full cup at least. Then I'm gonna move this over to the sink and strain it. And then I'm actually just gonna leave those noodles in the sink to hang off and drain for the two to three minutes that it takes to bring this sauce together. Normally I'd be pretty worried about leaving hot pasta in a strainer like that because it would carry over cook and get all gummy and stuck together. But since this sauce comes together super quickly, it's not a big deal. Now my pot's back up over medium heat, so I'm gonna add in 150 grams of half and half. Then I'm gonna add in 200 grams of my pasta water. I'll save a little bit. Then 75 grams of butter, and then I'm gonna jump in right away and keep this moving so that I get the butter emulsified into the starchy water and the half and half. Now, traditional fettuccine alfredo, as far as I know, does not use any heavy cream or half and half to stabilize the sauce. And honestly, if you can pull it off and make it that way with just butter and melted Parmesan cheese, it's an ethereal dish, truly an S tier pasta. one of the all-time best, but it's really, really hard to get it dialed in because you basically have a very, very small window where the cheese is melted enough and the butter is held in emulsion enough for it to actually be silky and glaze the outside of the pasta. Most of the time, the noodles are going to absorb all the moisture, which will break your emulsion and make things a little bit greasy, or you'll have too much water in there, or the cheese will seize up. There's just like a bunch of stuff that can go wrong with it. And if it's hard for me to get right, Someone who has made literally probably 10,000 emulsified pasta sauces in restaurants at this point in their life, if it's hard for me to get right, then it's going to be very, very hard for you guys. And what the little bit of heavy cream in this sauce does is just provides a stable base for us to melt stuff into. It doesn't make the pasta too heavy. It doesn't make it taste like dairy. It's really just there to serve a utilitarian purpose at holding the sauce. Okay, once the butter is nice and emulsified and things are looking silky, I am going to grab my My pasta from the sink, drop that in. And then I want to be really easy on it, okay? So instead of just coming in and mashing it, I'm going to very, very carefully spread it out with my tongs until it gets spread out into the cream like that. Since this pasta has that thinness to it from top to bottom, it just makes it quite a bit more brittle than a dried noodle. So you wanna be careful. Okay, so let's assess overall wetness in the pan at this point. As you can see, when I pull the noodles to the side, we've got some moisture in here, but just based on experience, I feel like we could use just a little bit more. So I am gonna add in just a little bit more pasta water. And I wanna show you guys how much moisture should be in the pan before you add the cheese. This is just a tricky thing to do though, because the noodles are just gonna keep soaking it up as time goes on. Okay, once it's looking like there's a decent amount of wetness in the bottom of the pan like this, I'm going to kill the heat, then add in 75 grams of grated Parmesan cheese. Then I'm going to break up this ball and make sure that it's evenly distributed, because if you were to start stirring with a big fist of Parmesan right here, it's all going to melt right there, and then getting it evenly distributed amongst the rest of the noodles is going to be a challenge. So just make sure you spread it out the best you can. And then from here, I'm just going to very, very gently stir this around the edge. Try to avoid too much violent action through the middle because that will break up the noodles. Reminder, we're off heat here. Parmesan can seize up really easily and become grainy if you use too much heat to melt it. So we're just using the residual heat in the pot to very, very slowly melt it into a silky sauce. You can hear it starting to sound good though. So as you can see, the sauce is tightened up a little bit now, and it's starting to glaze the outside. Like, look at that, dude. That looks absolutely perfect. But I know that this sauce is going to keep tightening as it sits, and we want to make sure that it's in the sweet spot of sauciness for more than 30 seconds. So I am just going to add a little bit more water, and then again, very gently fold everything around the outside to thin out that sauce just a tiny bit. You want the sauce to be on the thin side in the pot because as you serve it, the noodles are going to soak up that moisture and it's going to get thicker. If you want to have a silky experience in the bowl, it should look a little bit wet, but look at that, dude. The noodles are just perfectly coated. So silky, so smooth. Once we've got perfect sauce texture here, I'm just going to snatch a noodle out and taste it for salt level. The Parmesan is pretty salty. We salted the pasta water, but that's not gonna get us exactly where we need to go. So this is a really important step. You just wanna make sure to come back and add STT, salt to taste. And then again, very gently stir it in, maybe a tiny bit more. And this is gonna turn a good tasting pasta into an amazing tasting pasta. Okay, once the pasta is sauced and seasoned, I'm gonna move it off to the side and then move on to cutting my chicken. For that, I'm just gonna grab a couple of pieces of my blackened chicken. And I'm actually going to dice it because in testing this recipe, I found that putting big strips of chicken on top, while that is traditionally what people do in restaurants, it actually doesn't eat very good at all. If you think about it, trying to get a big stick of chicken on your fork with a bunch of pasta is going to be basically impossible. So I find that dicing it while being a little bit more rustic looking just leads to a much better eating experience. Now let's get a taste of this stuff real quick. First of all, before you even think about the spices, you're like, whoa, that chicken is really juicy, which is kind of surprising for a chicken breast. But there are times and places where when a chicken breast hits just right, you're like, who needs thighs, dude? It's just good. It's like nice meat. And it's really smoky too, in a really natural way. Not in like that fake liquid smoke thing that just kind of tastes disgusting. Now to plate this up, I'm just gonna twirl in a healthy amount of this fettuccine. That looks beautiful. Then before chicken, a strong pinch of grated Parmesan because never enough parm. And then I'm gonna top it with a little bit of my blackened chicken right on top. And one more final pinch of parm just to drive home the point. And then we're all grownups here, maybe a little bit of olive oil on top to make it glisten. Ooh, man, look at that. That looks so good, dude. Looks like 1996. You're hanging out at a fancy Italian restaurant in a strip mall, and there's wallpaper that looks like Mount Vesuvio going on in the background, red checkered tablecloths, some fake plastic grapes on the wall, perhaps, a giant bottle of Barolo nearby. Let's try it. Good, sweet, lord. I don't know how many times I can stand here and tell you guys something is delicious in a new and different way, so let me try. This is delicious. Honestly, the first thing that I get from the bite is not the cheesy sauce or the smoky chicken. It's the texture of the pasta. It just has the right bite. It's interesting, and I want to keep taking bites of it. Very different from that flat, wide noodle that's really chewy and really, really heavy. Then, of course, you get the sauce and you understand why fettuccine Alfredo is such a thing. The unity of nutty Parmesan and unctuous melted butter is sick as hell. And you immediately, like the base of your brain stem is just like, yes, more, me likey. The chicken itself, smoky, super interesting, super juicy, and it has a really nice texture, which is rare for chicken breast. That's not an afterthought here. It's actually, in my opinion, the star. Yes, starchy, cheesy noodles, awesome. Everybody loves them, but if you can get chicken breast tasting this good, You've really done something special. So if you guys wanna make this recipe, I will throw a short version down in the description beneath this video, along with a link to the long version over at my blog at brianlagerstrom.com. As always, guys, thank you so much for your time and attention. Thank you for sticking around to the end of the video, and I'll see you next time.