(upbeat music) - What's up chef?

- What's going on, man?

- So we're here at the Lynnie Studios at Lynhall.

I'm here with chef Gerard.

What do you got for us today?

- Today we're gonna get into our fried chicken and some jalapeño cornbread for our A.A. sandwich.

It's a soul food sandwich- should be super exciting.

- Dude that's sounds amazing, man.

Let's go.

- Let's go.

(upbeat music) (click) (upbeat music) So what we're gonna make first is our chicken flour which is our dredge.

It's gonna help us get like the crispy crunchy texture that we're looking for with our fried chicken.

Next, we have our seasoning salt our granulated garlic powder and then we're gonna do cornstarch and the cornstarch is nice because it really helps the chicken get a nice crispy texture some extra crunch that we're looking for as well.

- Tell me more about it.

When did you eat it?

When was it made, you know, growing up in your household?

- Fried chicken was the elegant like special delicacy for us.

- Perfect.

- So in our marinade we're gonna start with a little bit of Old Bay.

It was always something that I would see like maybe a Friday night when my parents were home and getting ready to be home for the weekend that they would marinate the chicken and you know, they would put it in the fridge and you'd have to move everything around to make space for this giant bowl.

We had a blue bowl and I just remember that blue bowl in the fridge.

And then we're gonna do one egg.

The egg is also gonna help the flour kind of stick to it and give us a really good, like crunchy exterior.

And our last item is hot sauce, It was unpleasant for me as a kid because I was like as soon as I seen them marinate the chicken and I was ready to eat it right away.

And it was like the night before, you know it just was too much anticipation as a kid.

It's was like, I want fried chicken tonight and my parents were like, no, this is for dinner tomorrow.

- Yeah, Perfect, we're gonna put this in the fridge for a little bit and let this marinate and then we're gonna get started on the cornbread mix and we'll come back to this a little later.

- Awesome.

I love cornbread.

- So cornbread was like the first thing I learned to make.

People always say, they, you know, they were cooking by the time they could reach the stove, I say, I was pulling up a chair and the counter mixing.

It was a simple thing, but it started like my love for cooking because my parents would make the other dishes and it was like, okay, you're on cornbread tonight.

It was fun to be able to like contribute to dinner at an early age.

- [Interviewer] Yeah.

So for you, did you develop this recipe?

- My stepdad had a recipe that he'd been making, I could never get it that way and one of the times I was making cornbread.

I use the one on the back of the flour bag.

It turned out so perfect and I just like forever was ingrained like five dry, three wet the recipe always just stuck with me.

- So when you say that, that's exactly how I learned how to make it's a Jiffy box for me.

I always felt so guilty about that.

But hearing that I'm like, Oh dude, I did the same thing.

- That is the process that I learned.

I like my cornbread a little bit sweeter.

- Yeah.

- My family is more of a savory cornbread.

My in-laws the cornbread is like cake and I absolutely love it.

So, all right.

- Its a yellow cake basically with corn in it.

- Exactly, exactly.

- It's more of a corn cake.

Yeah.

- Over the years, this recipe has just evolved and we've used, you know, different fats.

We'll switch what the liquids are.

Sometimes we'll use more of like a stock instead of the milk.

We'll change flour.

Sometimes I've done, buckwheat flour.

Also, it's fun, we've always ended up playing around and changing it with the seasons.

- Awesome.

- So we're going to mix this up and then we're gonna fold in the jalapeño and the onion.

What's nice, the onions are in jalapeno actually gonna add a little bit of liquid to the batter as it cooks.

We seeded the jalapeño sort of kinda of give us the sweet profile that we're looking for.

- Like, you'll have the flavor of the jalapeños, but not much of the heat.

- Not as much as the heat.

Cornbread was something that we always had.

We used it, you know, crumbled up for dressing in the holiday times, you know, sometimes it would be a stuffing.

I don't know what happened but as soon as you poured it in there, I got hungry.

- Too.

This is, this is incredible bro.

- Cornbread was something that I would just have with a slice of butter as a snack.

You know, as a kid I probably ate more cornbread and butter than toast, you know, so that was kinda of more, probably more true to my upbringing and something that I still love today.

All right.

We're gonna pop these into a 350 degree oven.

- Okay.

Chef, we have the cornbread that's all done and we have the fryer hot and ready it's angry over there.

You can hear, we can hear it.

We're ready for the chicken then.

- We're ready for the chicken.

So, if you wanna grab the seasoned flour for me.

I have our milkshake and our chicken that's been marinating here.

- And this is one of my favorite parts is just breading chicken, you know?

'Cause you wanna get every nook and cranny in that bread.

- Exactly.

So this is like interesting thing because it's so simple but it's like the patience of a, the technique.

So I usually give it one more toss just to make sure it's coated in the milk.

My technique is I bury it.

- Yeah.

- Give it a good press.

- Like being a archeologist, you know, looking for dinosaur bones.

- So we'll shake off any excess flour and then we're gonna come in here nice and slow and lay them down, yeah.

- How long are you letting it sit in the fryer?

- So we're using about seven minutes on the chicken thighs.

We also are looking for the bubbles to kind of subside around.

I'm looking for a certain color, I think fried chicken is one of those things that teaches patience and preciseness, you know 'cause you gotta have a grease at the right temperature and I always watched like my grandma or my aunt make chicken.

They didn't have things with temperature gauges on there.

They're just using a pan and like perfect every time.

So we season afterwards.

So we do a little bit of dry ranch powder just to give her like a little tang and that also kind of carries through similar to like the buttermilk that we are doing.

- Yeah, cause dry, dry ranch powder is like dehydrated buttermilk, yep.

That's actually really smart.

- Kind of goes on the same, same flavor profile.

- Yup.

- All right.

So we are gonna assemble this thing.

We're gonna start with our mac and cheese you got a nice golden brown on here which is my favorite thing that my mother makes.

Collard greens are gonna go next.

The collard greens are cool.

They're really a bridge of my wife's and the greens I grew up eating.

- Yeah.

- And so my side of it is bok choy.

- Oh wow, okay.

- And so I grew up in Seattle.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And we had a lot of Asian markets.

[Yia] Asian influence.

- Dude, I've never heard of that before.

That's awesome.

- And my wife, she kind of grew up with like a jalapeño veggie-based blend.

And so we put the jalapeños in and sautè those down as well.

- Oh my gosh!

Dude.

- This is the secret sauce.

- Okay.

- On my dad's side of the family brings in the D.C. Mambo sauce that kind of ties everything together.

There we go.

Beautiful, And we're just going to tilt our bun up.

This is open-face - Oh my gosh.

- This is like one of the most intense cupcakes ever.

- That's what I'm thinking about.

That's awesome, dude.

- Whenever somebody is like what is soul food always like go right to this.

- Bro, when I look at this dish it tells your story too.

- It's definitely kind of me on a plate and you get to see this a different side of family and experiences.

So food always reminds me about potential the flour we started with or the pieces of chicken thigh can become this and you know the same same with us that we can become these great chefs just cooking the dishes that we grew up eating at home, you know.

- Man, that's beautiful.

I've never heard it.

Soul food explained like that before.

I love that dude.

That makes a lot of sense.

So I'm excited, let's dig into this thing.

- Perfect, let's do it.

- So what's the best way to just dig into this thing?

- I see some brave people that try to pick this thing up and fight it.

I'm not one of those people but I try to go in with a knife and a fork and get one of those bites with little bit of everything on it.

It's what I would recommend.

- Its what I gonna try to do.

What really makes this for me, is that Mambo sauce bro.

Like, it brings it all together just that little sweetness of that Mambo sauce, man.

It's so great.

The crunchy of the fried chicken that tang and the green that richness and the mac and cheese and then obviously all of that gets sopped up into, you know.

- Into the cornbread.

- Into cornbread dude.

That's just so delicious.

- It's interesting as a chef like growing up in the West coast having a lot of family East coast and then living in the Midwest because soul food is such a big diaspora and sometimes I think people only think about down South and they don't think about, okay what's the D.C. and Virginia's tie to west of Chicago influence, you know as I started to go North those different elements.

So for me, it's about kinda bringing all those different things together, and then, you know, you bring a little bit of the chef techniques that you learned from working in nice restaurants and that kind of allows me to refine it down to make it even more special.

- That's so cool, bro.

Guys, I got to work after this.

I feel like this dish is gonna like everyone make me want to take a nap.

- Yeah, this is a nap dish.

- Man.