- What if I don't win?
I just want her to love them so much.
- My nuggets are gonna be fantastic.
MSG's gonna be the reason why I win.
- I am really gonna try to make this plate
look pretty for Inga.
- [Alexis] Fingers crossed.
- Spice it up.
(exciting music)
- Hello, it's Inga
and today, I am challenging three cooks
to spice up a mystery dish which is chicken McNuggets.
I love chicken nuggets.
I think they're perfect as is.
I'm really curious to know how people would jazz it up.
They have 45 minutes to come up with something
and then at the very end, I'll pick my favorite.
Let's see who can spice it up the best.
- Hi, I'm Alexis and today,
I'm gonna make my version of chicken nuggets.
My boyfriend said that these chicken nuggets
were like the best he's ever had.
I don't know what Inga wants or is looking for
but these are truly the best I've ever had.
So for my chicken nuggets,
I'm gonna start by grinding my own meat.
I'm using chicken breasts
and I'm just gonna blot them dry with paper towels.
That's just to get any like extra moisture off
and the reason that I'm grinding these myself
is because when you do that,
you have more control over what's in it obviously.
There's not like other spices or preservatives,
no extra water content in there
and also, that means I can control the texture
and the size more.
Just gonna cut these into like half inch cubes.
So the reason that I'm putting the chicken
on a parchment paper lined baking sheet
is because I'm gonna actually throw it in the freezer
for like 20 minutes.
So you don't need it like totally ice cube frozen.
You just want it to be frozen enough
that it's gonna blend and get chunky.
Back with my frozen chicken and the food processor blade
which I also had in the freezer and that's just again
to help it get to the right consistency.
So you can see that this chicken, it's like,
yeah, it comes off the parchment paper super easily.
It's like hard but not like rock hard.
Pop it in the food processor bowl.
When dealing with raw chicken,
it is very important to wash your hands.
Okay, so chicken in the bowl
and now I'm gonna add some heavy cream
and I've got rosemary, thyme, oregano, salt.
Looks like a lot of salt but it's chicken breast.
You need salt and pepper.
All right.
I don't want big chunks but I do want some uneven texture.
It does look like cat food right now but just bear with me.
All right, I'm ready to shape my chicken nuggets.
Okay, my chicken mixture.
I've got another parchment paper lined baking sheet.
So just take like a heaping tablespoon
and put it on the baking sheet.
You can make them in any shape
and that's really the joy of it.
Okay, I've got all my chicken nugget shapes.
I think they look really cute.
I'm gonna pop these in the freezer
and then I'm gonna make the sauce.
What are chicken nuggets without sauce?
There's so many good sauce options
but today, I'm gonna make a barbecue mayo.
Super simple, it's mayo, barbecue sauce, smoked paprika.
The smoked paprika's gonna give it a little kick
and it's just gonna add like a little depth of flavor.
- If I was a spice, I'd be cardamom.
My boyfriend says I use cardamom in everything
and that is true but I think it's such a nice like,
again, depth of flavor.
Okay, I think that this is like sufficiently stirred.
It looks so good.
I would love to put my finger in it but this is for Inga
so I'm just gonna put it in the fridge.
I'm gonna do a classic dredging situation
for my chicken nuggets.
I've got flour here.
I've got salt and pepper.
It's again just gonna add a little more flavor.
I feel like with something like chicken breasts,
you really wanna add that extra salt and extra flavor.
Some really beautiful eggs and then I've got panko.
First, into the flour and whenever you're dredging,
you just wanna make sure that you get
like excess flour off excess egg
so that it's not like a big, weird flour chunk
that gets fried.
I think you could totally bake them.
You're making a chicken nugget.
It's not like the time to really be like
so health-conscious, right?
I've heated my oil to 350 degrees
and I'm gonna fry my nuggets for a few minutes
until they're golden brown and hit 165 in the middle.
That's the temperature you want chicken to be cooked at
and these are just like slowly frying.
They look great.
That's like the perfect nugget.
Have you ever seen something more perfect?
I feel so proud of these chicken nuggets
and I feel like they are the best.
Even if I don't win, I feel like she's gonna love them.
I'm sorry to everyone else.
This is perfect.
I love it.
Okay, I think at this point, it's just up to Inga
so fingers crossed.
- Hi, I'm Kanchan.
So I'm gonna turn Indian inspired chicken kabobs
into nuggets.
I grew up eating these chicken kabobs.
They were my grandmother's recipe
passed down through the ages.
It's been a long time since I had some McNuggets
but I remember them pretty fondly.
So we're roughly chopping some chicken
and putting it into a food processor.
So to our roughly chopped chicken,
we are going to add some red onion, garlic,
ginger, fresh cilantro and mint
then we're going in with garam masala.
Garam masala is a traditional Indian spice blend.
It has a bunch of beautiful spices
like cardamom and cloves and cinnamon, cumin, coriander.
It adds warmth, peppery notes, kind of earthiness.
It's just a match made in heaven for kabobs
and then for heat because it's all about spicing it up,
we are going to add some cayenne pepper
and we're just gonna finish this
with a generous sprinkling of salt and pepper.
Okay, so now we're just going to pulse this
until we have a kind of kabob nugget mixture
if there is such a thing.
If there isn't such a thing, there will be after today.
Now it's time to shape our nuggets.
We wanna go in with wet hands
so it prevents sticking as we shape the nuggets.
So we're going for that classic
kind of flat-ish, roundish no shape shape.
You also wanna have it not too thick
so that it fries up quickly.
Now we're just gonna freeze our nuggets
for one to two hours.
The secret to an award-winning chicken nugget
is an award-winning sauce.
So we are going to make a chutney inspired
kind of ranch dressing.
To the food processor, I'm adding some Greek yogurt,
more fresh cilantro to really bring out those flavors
in the kabob nuggets, fresh mint leaves, jalapeno peppers,
garlic, lime juice, sugar to balance things out
and salt and pepper
and we're just gonna blend this until smooth
adding water if necessary.
I grew up eating this green chutney
on sandwiches with tomatoes.
I grew up dipping these kabobs in this green chutney
so this is a really nice way
to kind of pay homage to my childhood.
Cool.
We're gonna make our dry mix and our wet batter
so we can fry these kabob nuggets.
To my dry mixture, I'm going to add all-purpose flour,
potato starch.
Potato starch will add crispiness
like it does to the traditional
Japanese fried chicken karaage.
So that's my little trick for crispy nuggets.
And then we're just gonna add onion powder, garlic powder,
sumac for kind of tangy, lemony, earthy notes
and a little bit more heat with cayenne pepper
and to this, I'm just gonna add a little bit more salt.
Really hoping that potato starch works its crispy magic.
So for our wet mix, we are going to add two eggs,
water and some more potato starch.
We're gonna mix this really well
and now we're ready to bread and fry our nuggets.
So now that we have our frozen nuggets,
we're just going to take our nuggets,
dip them in our dry mixture, pop them into the wet batter.
I'm gonna use one hand for wet, one hand for dry.
That way, I don't make a gooey mess.
And we end in the dry and fry.
If I were a spice, I would be the child of sumac
and like red chili powder or cayenne.
I just love the heat from the chili
and the sort of lemony, fruity, earthy tang from sumac.
These are all breaded and ready for frying.
We're just gonna pop these nuggets into our hot oil.
All right, we got some crispy brown action.
We are ready to take 'em out.
Ooh, nice and golden brown.
I really wonder what my grandmother would think
if she knew I turned her kabobs into McNuggets.
I feel like she'd be pretty pleased.
We're gonna start by plating our dipping sauce,
our chutney ranch dressing.
That's just what I'm calling it
and of course, we're gonna top it with some spices.
We're spicing things up.
So we have a little dusting of cumin, some coriander
and some more of that spicy cayenne pepper
and we're gonna try to plate these beautifully
and tantalize Inga's taste buds visually.
There we have it, garam masala chicken McNuggets.
- What it do, everybody, my name is Ross Pineda.
I am the chef and owner of FYEH Kitchen
and I will be making spicy nuggets.
What makes my spicy nuggets spicy?
Spices and a certain ingredient
that not a lot of people are fond of or know about.
It's MSG.
Monosodium glutamate is like a food additive.
It is a flavor enhancer
and a lot of people have this negative connotation
that's like it's bad for you
but anything in excess is bad for you.
A little bit of love goes a long way.
Pretty much, we're gonna go ahead
and start with our ground chicken.
I'm using ground chicken thighs here.
It is the juicier part of the chicken.
You can use chicken breasts
but I feel like it gets weird after you like fry it too much
and then it gets like dry and stuff.
Fantastic, all right, so we're gonna use this spat.
Pat it down.
Give it some love.
We're gonna throw in some salt, throw in some paprika,
some can jan, cayenne pepper.
We call it can jan in the kitchen.
This is white pepper.
This is gonna make it crazy.
Some black pepper, onion and garlic powder
and then I'm just gonna mix this up real quick
before I add the flavor booster.
All right, cool, bam, MSG.
MSG's gonna be the reason why I win.
It's like a little kick.
Just wanna add some happiness and joy to your life.
It is dredge time, guys.
Got some cornstarch here.
This is the best way to make something crunchy
without just using regular AP flour.
I feel like people should have this stuff in their crib.
Then I got some potato starch.
It gives a nice texture.
This is my regular AP flour.
Put it in there.
We're gonna add all the spices in this dredge
because you wanna have all the same flavors except MSG.
Throw some salt in there, garlic powder, onion powder,
white pepper, black pepper, paprika.
Gonna whisk it all up.
If I was a spice, what would I be?
Salt.
If you ask all my best friends,
I'm the saltiest person you'll ever meet
because I sweat a lot and I'm always upset at something.
We're gonna be dredging our chicken two times.
Making a mess.
My chefs would be proud of me.
So now we're gonna form some chicken nugget patties.
Dip my hands in water then form some some nuggets.
So we're gonna set 'em on that tray.
Talk about life.
How your grandmother won the lotto the other day
but she didn't give you any money.
Now that our nugget patty things have been formed,
so we're gonna go ahead and chill this for about 20 minutes.
Forgot my spicy apron.
Bam, so we've gotta work on our batter.
I've got eggs here, my golden whisk 'cause we bougie.
Gonna throw in your buttermilk.
So all you wanna do is make sure that your buttermilk
and your eggs are fully incorporated
because this will be the key to success.
We have these two trays of the dredge
and I'm stuttering right now because I'm so nervous
'cause I want these to come out so well.
Take one.
On your first tray,
you're gonna dust it ever so, so kindly and lightly.
You just wanna treat it with some love.
Quickly dip it in your egg mixture with the buttermilk
because buttermilk and chicken go together
like lamb and tuna fish.
If anybody gets that reference, I will love you forever.
We're gonna dip it in the second one for an even coat
and we're gonna transfer it over to our tray.
We're gonna repeat this as many much times
as you have pieces of chicken and then we're done.
Now they're all floured and nice
and we're ready to set them in the fridge.
So now we're gonna build our sauce.
Now, I'm a big fan of mayonnaise
but I'm a bigger fan of Kewpie mayonnaise.
What is Kewpie mayonnaise?
Kewpie mayonnaise is mayonnaise
that is pretty much egg yolk based and has MSG in it.
I've got some ketchup and pickle juice
'cause sweet, sour, salty, spice it up.
Got some white pepper.
White pepper is something
that a lot of people don't really use.
It is very pungent.
It's very pungent smelling.
This is the consistency you want.
It's drippy and it looks good.
This is done.
We're gonna do a double fry, guys.
We're double frying
because one, we would like it to be extra crispy.
So we're gonna go ahead and fry these
and then remember, don't drop it like it's hot.
You're gonna drop it like it's not hot
because you don't wanna burn yourself
and the reason why I'm moving them around
is because you don't want 'em to stick to each other
but yeah, these are getting nice and crunchy.
They're floating so that means
a lot of things are cooking on inside,
they're getting nice and not raw anymore.
Nuggets are done with their initial fry.
I can only fit five in this spot over here.
I'm gonna lay 'em over.
My oil's gonna come back up to 350 for the final fry.
The second fry is the shorter fry.
So we did the first initial fry about six to seven minutes.
It's gonna be about like two and a half to three
depending on like I said how big your nuggets are
or how hot your oil is or how fast it goes down.
Yada, yada, yada.
Sometimes you're gonna get these like nice little,
really dark deep brown parts but that's fine.
That's all flavor.
The nuggets are looking fantabulous.
Anyway, so now we're gonna lay it back on our paper towel
but we're gonna go ahead and try these.
We're gonna go ahead and plate.
I'm gonna go ahead and arrange our nuggets
like we're feeding the president.
So cheers to you, all my nugget lovers out there.
Oh my God.
These are good.
That is our nuggets,
spicy nuggets 'cause we're spicing it up.
- We have these three beautiful plates of nuggets here.
I guess I'm just going to start here.
For this one, I can already smell like,
even from here, I can smell the spice.
First bite, I'm just gonna dunk it in the sauce.
This one has so much flavor.
Oh my goodness.
Oh, it's just super, super fragrant.
I'm also not used to seeing so much color going on in here.
Crust great, flavor great.
Okay, moving on.
Ooh, okay, this one, beautiful crust.
Good crunch.
The sauce is like sweet and tangy.
Mm.
Tastes great with the sauce.
Tastes great without the sauce.
Okay, moving on to our last one.
But I'm gonna dip it in here.
Mm.
There's a bit of a kick to it which I love.
Look at how juicy that is.
Dear Lord.
Overall, fantastic nugget.
I have come to a decision so let's bring everyone back
and we will share who the winner is.
Thank you all for coming today.
They were all so great.
The first one I tried had incredible flavor.
So many spices went into it.
The second one, beautiful panko crust,
amazing mouth feel and texture.
The third one, the heat of it and just like so juicy
but this is my winner.
Tada.
I love it, are you surprised?
- I was like, wait, that doesn't look familiar.
- Everybody, try it.
Amazing, right?
- This is the best chicken nugget I've ever had.
This is incredible.
- I'd like to thank God
and my dad for teaching me how to cook
and my love for nuggets.
Thank you, guys.
- That's it for today.
Tell us in the comments what we should spice up next.
Otherwise, we will see you next time.
(calm music)