One division at the last competition was Purdue Chicken, it was an open theme where they provided two chickens and you had 6 hours to produce something. What can you do with chicken with a grilled theme and be above the pack. This was like coming up with some rules for my 16 year old daughter, too much too wide of a scope ARGH..... How to narrow this down was the topic many nights discussion and many chicken dinners. My family have been complaining that we eat one type of meat for two month straight (recently this would be ribs). They have been begging for salad, even Josh who hates everything green. Well the creative thought process flowed and we came up with a few new ideas for our short list. They sounded great but could we translate them into something that would produce some hardware?

Our second choice on the short list was a Chicken Roulade, it did not show as well as the Caribbean Chicken but that is another blog story. While this dish was very successful in tasting, there is room for improvement. So I'm not throwing this out just yet, perhaps shelve it for next year. We will go back to the R&D on this dish, I think it still has merit for an open chicken competition. We will have to layer some additional flavors and enhance the moisture content. Perhaps a brine or an interior rub combined with a lite glaze or sauce. This dish was originally inspired from my Turkey Roulade, it's stuffed with feta, mushrooms, bacon, spinach and water chestnuts. Unfortunately chickens are allot smaller and I wanted more distinction or segregation from the ingredients, you know "Eye Candy"! So we re-engineered the ingredient list and came up with the following dish.

As with any roulade, you have to flatten out your meat to allow for the best surface you can roll, thin as you can without tearing the chicken, easier said then done. To thin in one area and poof you get a hole. It's kind of like frosting a cake with one little can of icing, somebody somewhere once did it. (Susan would cringe if she knew I bought icing in a can).

We decided to go with a cold smoked chicken this was accomplished with the Bradley smoker in the middle of winter (hence really COLD smoke) we used the pecan wood to infuse a sweet nutty taste in our primary ingredient, also it would reinforce that this was BBQ. 

On our roulade we placed some          of our cherry smoked maple bacon along with roasted red peppers, feta cheese and portabella mushrooms. We marinated the red pepper as well as seasoned the mushrooms and cooked them down. We tried to keep everything symmetrical so it would show well. This was rolled tied and grilled on a medium hot gas grill (about 400)

The results were beyond what we thought and this was spectacular.



       

To serve this on a sauce with some grilled asparagus and some couscous would be divine. Other then the cold smoking the chicken it was a relatively quick dish to prepare. I might go with some soft cheese even goat cheese as the flavors are so distinct. We really should be selling this one to President's Choice... 

Hmmm can you say sponsorship....


This is a real 8 out of 10