Pro Chef Turns 2 Rotisserie Chickens Into 4 Meals For Under $12

It's actually considered a loss leader

in all these supermarkets.

I thought that was just for like Costco

cause Costco is like super cheap,

but apparently for all supermarkets

that have rotisserie chicken,

it's just to get people in the store

and they lose money on all of them.

Hi everyone, I'm Dan Giusti.

今天,我被challenged

to turn two supermarket rotisserie chickens

into four affordable meals, all for less than $3 a serving.

A breakfast, a snack, a lunch and a dinner.

Supermarket rotisserie chickens

provide a lot of value in themselves.

You go to the market,

you pick them up and you've got dinner ready to go.

But by being a little creative,

you can transform them into a variety of meals,

extending their value even further.

Before we get into making any of the dishes,

we got to break down our first rotisserie chicken here.

A beautiful thing about rotisserie chicken,

these things just fall apart.

Find where it connects, grab it there, slowly pull it off.

So we have the chicken thigh that is still connected

to the drum stick.

We have the chicken wings.

We have a few bits of meat.

We have the chicken breasts, we have the chicken skin,

and then we have the remainder

of the chicken carcass itself

along with some random bits that kind of fell off.

We haven't thrown anything away at this point,

except for the string, we got rid of the string.

But if you really wanted to,

you could cook the string and get the flavor

out of the string.

I wouldn't suggest that that's a little outrageous,

actually just forget I said that

because that's really not a good idea.

It's dangerous in fact.

It is time to start with the dishes

and we will begin with breakfast.

We'll be making a breakfast style chicken cacciatore.

It's a stew typically made with chicken or rabbit

and that stew has tomatoes, red bell peppers,

mushrooms, sometimes olives.

Some people would refer to the meat

that comes from the drumstick,

the thigh and the wing as dark meat

and that's what we'll be using

for this chicken cacciatore dish as well as the skins,

all the skin from the one bird is now in this bowl.

So I have my kind of high sided pan here.

I've turned it on high heat just to get a little preheated.

I'm gonna take my skin and I'm gonna chop it up.

There is still some fat on these pieces of skin

that has not rendered out,

meaning it has not really cooked and become crispy.

Pan's pretty hot.

If I just add this chicken skin to this pan as it is,

it might start to singe before it actually crisps up.

So I'm gonna go ahead and add

some of the olive oil to this first.

Go ahead and put this in here.

Get a nice little sizzle, spread this out.

You might feel it gets stuck, just get it off there.

We don't want to waste any of it.

While this cooks,

we're gonna start to prepare our vegetables.

So we have mushrooms, we have one bell pepper.

We have an onion, we have some garlic and some chili flakes.

The first thing we're gonna do here

while this pan is hot is roast the mushroom.

So our skin's nice and crispy, mushrooms are roasting.

I'm gonna add a touch more oil.

If there's not enough fat in the pan,

you're not gonna roast your mushrooms.

They are gonna start to steam.

I am not gonna add salt to the mushrooms.

Salt draws out liquid from the mushrooms,

thus prohibiting them from roasting.

Again, we want to roast the mushrooms.

You're not trying to steam them.

I'm gonna go ahead and cut the pepper.

所以辣椒的顶部,底部的胡椒,

you might not get this uniform cut like your other pieces.

It's gonna taste great though, don't throw it away.

It probably makes up like 10% of the pepper.

It's so wasteful and it doesn't make any sense.

So my mushrooms are starting to get caramelized.

This is kind of what we're looking for.

So I'm gonna go ahead and add peppers.

We're gonna use about half an onion for this.

So now that our mushrooms have roasted,

I'm gonna go ahead and add some salt to this.

I'm also gonna put some chili flakes in this dish.

It's nice to put your spices in during the process

where they're gonna get toasted a bit.

This will kind of activate some of the flavor.

So we have two cloves of garlic here.

I'm gonna slice this thing.

Put as much as you want in here.

So our peppers, our onions, our garlic has softened.

Our mushrooms are nice and roasted, chicken skin is crispy.

We are ready to start the stew part of this.

Crushed tomatoes and water.

Tomato can scorch really easily.

So now we want our heat to be medium low.

And I'm also gonna go ahead and add the chicken

at this point, I've left the chicken pieces large.

So as soon as it starts to simmer,

turn it down just a little bit so it's a slow simmer.

We're gonna move on to the other parts of the dish.

We're gonna fry an egg

and then we need some chopped parsley to garnish as well.

I'm gonna go ahead and chop the parsley first.

It's funny with things like canned tomatoes,

they taste like canned tomatoes for quite some time

and then there's that like magic moment

where all of a sudden they don't taste

like canned tomatoes anymore.

That's what we're looking for.

But I'm gonna add a bit of salt to this

and I'm gonna add a bit of black pepper.

Pepper is one of those things

that if you buy pre-ground pepper,

you might as well put like salt dust on your dish

and I'm not trying to be silly here or funny.

If you take pepper that is in a container

that's been pre-ground off the supermarket shelf

and put it in your mouth, you put this in your mouth,

it does not taste like the same thing.

Now we're gonna take a couple of slices of baguette.

I'm gonna cook an egg, touch of vegetable oil.

I personally only like eating eggs with runny yolks

when I have something to really soak up that yolk

and this is the perfect preparation for it.

Season the egg.

The stew's ready to go.

I'm gonna turn the heat off now, let it settle just a bit.

Time to toast the bread.

Gonna take these two pieces of bread.

We're gonna go with the stew first,

straight on the bread so it kind of soaks in.

Taste it off my finger.

That's what the customers like to see.

And then a bit of parsley.

And there you have it, chicken cacciatore breakfast style.

We are all set to taste this thing,

break this yolk up a bit, let it run down into the bread.

Go ahead and crush this thing with my hands

because I'm an animal.

As you can see, it's pretty hard and very suitable

I think for a nice brunch.

There's a win.

Time to move on to the snack.

We are going to make chicken salad.

We're gonna use the breasts.

So this lean meat that's going to remain cold

and just chopped and then added to the salad is ideal

for a dish like this is.

Now we are using this as a dip

so we don't want them to be huge

cause otherwise we're not gonna be able to pick up

the salad itself, but I want to keep them in larger chunks.

I'm gonna start with the mayonnaise.

I'm using honey mustard.

Mustard and mayonnaise in a chicken salad,

this is pretty traditional stuff here.

A bit of the olive oil.

I like to do that when I make mayonnaise-based salad

so you want to make tuna salad,

I put probably half the amount of mayonnaise in

and it's more of a flavor thing for me and a textual thing.

It's not so much of a health thing.

Of course, olive oil is a little more expensive,

so we kind of use it sparingly,

but I think we have a good ratio here,

it's still a very cost-effective recipe.

Incorporate things in gently as to not break everything up.

So we're gonna add a little salt, a little pepper,

and then we're gonna put some tarragon.

We're gonna use this pretty sparingly.

It's just very strong stuff.

I'm gonna go ahead and give it a taste.

I'm happy with that.

Now I'm gonna serve this salad cold.

So I'm gonna put this in the fridge.

In the meantime, we're gonna get the rest

准备准备

so we have our fruits and vegetables for the crudités

and we also have some walnuts here as a garnish.

First thing we're gonna do is toast the walnuts.

I'm gonna put this on low heat.

They're very high in fat.

So when you're toasting these,

they can go from like toasted to burnt very quickly.

Hopefully I don't do that, just pay attention.

So I'm gonna go ahead and cut our fruits

and vegetables for the crudités.

We have a bosc pear here.

The skin is really what provides this like acidity balance.

It almost like if you eat a pear without the skin,

it doesn't taste like a pear.

I can smell these nuts toasting.

Once you start to smell the nuts toasting,

you're good to go.

I'm gonna turn this off, just kind of put this to the side,

continue on with the pears.

We're gonna keep it pretty large.

I think this is a gala apple, is this a gala apple?

We have a honey crisp apple here.

Take the same approach on this apple.

Same thing here, we want to keep the peel on.

We have some endive, endive is a beautiful bitter green

that's really dense, crispy and crunchy.

I like to cut these in like wedges.

It's more substantial, it's juicy,

it's more in line with what we're doing here.

By keeping the root intact,

I'll be able to get nice spears of this endive

and they will stay together.

There you go.

This is slick.

And we have celery,

just yank this out of the middle of the whole celery.

This is the best part of the celery.

This is super tender.

It's very delicate and flavor, it's delicious.

Inner parts of celery, we're gonna use both the ribs

and the leaves.

I've taken the leaves off these so I can chop those leaves

and garnish the salad with them.

Walnuts are here, celery's here,

vegetables are cut and we are ready to plate the dish.

So our salad is out of the fridge.

So we're gonna take one side of the bowl

and use that for the salad.

Start with our fruits and vegetables.

You can do this however you want.

Last thing we have our toasted walnuts.

I'm just gonna put them on top of the chicken salad,

a little more olive oil I'm gonna add over everything,

little black pepper on everything.

We have our chop celery to finish things off.

And this is my chicken salad crudites style.

We'll give it a taste.

It's so tasty and the thing is what's fun

is I just ate it with an apple.

When you do it with the celery, when you do with the pear,

when you eat it with the endive,

it's gonna taste different.

Each bite's gonna be a little bit different

and that's what we want.

It keeps it interesting, it keeps people eating,

keeps it tasty.

For lunch, we are having a slab salad.

What is a slab salad?

Think wedge salad, but instead of cutting the lettuce

into wedges, we are cutting them into disks as in slabs.

A pretty simple, no brainer combination here,

makes for a delicious lunch.

So we're onto our second full rotisserie chicken here

and we've taken the thigh,

drumstick and wing off that chicken.

So we're gonna get into breaking this one down.

Try to break it down in a way that people wouldn't think

oh wow, this came from a rotisserie chicken.

We're gonna do our best to keep the pieces here

as large as possible.

What I would say is just kind of feel your way through.

Anything that you don't think is suitable to eat

like the cartilage, the bone we're putting in this bowl

and we're gonna use this all later,

not throwing anything away.

I think all the meat is ready to go here

and we're gonna broil them

and get that skin nice and crispy,

warm through the meat.

So it is time to make the blue cheese dressing

for our slab salad.

We have mayonnaise and sour cream

as the base of the dressing.

We have a little bit of a garlic powder,

but we have crumbled blue cheese

that you can usually buy already crumbled in the supermarket

and a little bit of water, salt, and some black pepper.

Give this a stir.

So this is a nice texture we have here and give it a taste.

Super tasty, one thing you'll notice

with the blue cheese dressing is as it sits,

the blue cheese flavor will permeate

through the whole dressing.

Right now, the only time I taste blue cheese

if I actually get a piece of the cheese.

Making the blue cheese dressing yourself is not cheaper

than buying it from the store,

but the quality is much higher.

By having the rotisserie chicken be kind of the star

of this dish, it provides us a lot of value

and gives us some room to buy some quality blue cheese

and put into our dressing here.

So dressings all set.

I'm gonna go ahead and wrap it.

Put it in the fridge.

We're making a slab salad.

So we have a whole head of iceberg lettuce,

and we're gonna cut this into four slabs.

The root is gonna help keep together

while we're doing this.

We'll take the root off at the end.

Always cleaning up as we go.

We have one medium-sized tomato.

We're gonna cut it into twelfths.

We need to make our wing sauce now.

You can use any type of hot sauce you want.

This hot sauce is pretty spicy.

It's a lot of hot sauces out there

in terms of a condiment that you would put on something

just on its own a drop here, drop there.

They're great like that,

but if you're gonna coat something in that sauce,

some of those hot sauces are just like way too much

so adding a bit of melted butter, it adds a bit of richness,

but it also tones down the sauce itself.

Chicken is ready to go.

So out of the broiler,

we get the skin kind of little crisp,

we don't want to burn it.

So we have our melted butter.

We're gonna go ahead and add the butter

into our sauce here, into our hot sauce.

Just kind of stir that around, nothing crazy.

Now we're gonna mix our chicken into this.

It's important that the chicken is pretty hot

when you're mixing this.

Because we're putting melted butter in here

and this chicken wasn't hot,

that butter is gonna really start to set off

and we don't want that.

I'm trying to be careful, we're just kind of folding it in.

If you want to get a little fancy

and I can do the old like bowl flip thing.

Not gonna do that because it probably go wrong

for me here.

Chicken's done, slabs are cut, tomatoes,

gonna season with salt.

Gonna go get the dressing.

Got that blue cheese dressing out of the fridge.

Gonna notice that it's set up a lot more than it was before

cause it's cold.

Before we serve this, I'm gonna give it a quick taste.

It's even better, we're ready to assemble the slab salad.

Gonna grab my most beautiful slab.

You need to remember that the amount of dressing

that you're putting on top needs to account

for the rest of the lettuce underneath.

It's not like your traditional salad

where you're tossing everything together.

Gonna kind of intertwine tomato and chicken.

So to finish the dish, gonna take some chives here,

take the tops off.

Chop a few chives real quick, blow hot sauce drizzle.

You don't see a lot of hot sauce drizzles.

I feel like people don't think hot sauce deserves a drizzle,

I think hot sauce deserves a drizzle.

We're gonna put our chives on

and then we're gonna put some black pepper on top.

And there you have it,

the old slab salad with rotisserie chicken

and blue cheese dressing.

Gonna get everything on here.

A little bit of lettuce, a little bit chicken.

It's banging, this is delicious.

This is one of those and supposed to taste it

and then we're done here, we just want to keep eating it.

It's dinner time.

We are making a dish of chicken and biscuits.

For that, we're gonna be using the breast

of the chicken as the meat

and we're also going to be using the rest of the bird

that we did not use, which is primarily the carcass.

And we're actually gonna use the skin from this breast

as well to make a stock as the base of the soup

of this chicken and biscuits dish.

So we're gonna make the stock first,

do a little bit kind of mix and match here.

We have some store-bought stock.

We're gonna add water to this,

equal parts water and stock.

We're gonna add our bones.

We are using every single piece of the chicken.

Nothing has gone in the trash here.

I'm gonna turn it on high heat just so we get it going.

We'll go ahead and add the skin,

but we're gonna bring it to a simmer.

Once it's to a simmer 15, 20 minutes,

we're gonna have a stock.

It's not gonna be intense in flavor.

It's gonna be a great base to the soup.

So I'm just gonna go ahead and move this to a larger burner.

So our stock has been simmering here

for about 15 minutes, flavor's developing.

While it kind of finishes up,

we're gonna get the stew itself started.

We have carrots, celery, onion,

think like chicken noodle soup,

those kinds of flavors, that's kind of what we're going for.

You want these slightly larger,

you can cut them slightly larger.

I wouldn't cut them any smaller.

This kind of soup, you want to eat these vegetables.

So if you cut them smaller,

they're gonna kind of start to disintegrate a bit,

but they're not gonna really add to the soup.

We're gonna add some butter in here.

We're gonna turn this pan on.

We will be making what's called a roux.

The French term, that is R-O-U-X.

Essentially it's a combination of butter and flour

to thicken something.

Two cloves of garlic.

I'm actually gonna add some salt to these vegetables.

The salt will draw out some of the moisture and promote

the sweating of these vegetables.

Sweating is when just like it sounds,

the liquid is gonna come out and they're gonna cook

in a way that they're not gonna caramelize.

While this continues to cook,

we're gonna go ahead and deal with our chicken meat.

So we have chicken breast.

We're gonna keep it in large pieces.

So I'm gonna go ahead and add the flour

and then we're gonna start to stir it.

So I think we're there.

So we're gonna go ahead and strain the stock,

add a small amount and let it thicken already.

And see this, that quickly it's thick.

So we're gonna go ahead and add more stock,

stir this in again, bring it back to a simmer.

And we basically repeat this process.

Why do we add the stock in increments?

Adding in increments gives me control.

So I'm gonna add a little bit of stock,

it's gonna come to a simmer,

I'm gonna see where it's at.

I'm gonna add a little more stock, I'm gonna see again.

And then we keep going until we're where we need to be.

There are no lumps in here.

It's really incorporated into the stock

that we currently have.

So we can add it

and just start pouring it directly out of the bowl.

I'm not gonna add it all.

We're gonna go ahead and taste this, see where we're at.

I'll tell you what, sometimes I impress myself.

There's so much flavor in this.

We used half water, half of this is just water.

We put a bit of salt in for the vegetables.

We haven't even added the meat

and already it's super flavorful.

We're gonna add some chopped parsley, stems and all.

Heat's off now.

So we're gonna go ahead and add the chicken.

We are going to be using biscuits from a can.

They are more expensive

than if you were to make biscuits on your own.

That takes a lot of time and effort.

We've made the decision here to find some value

by purchasing this supermarket rotisserie chicken

so we have a meal that's very inexpensive,

which has afforded us to use canned biscuit.

They're all ready to go, so we got eight biscuits here.

This is ready to go in the oven.

We'll check back in about 15 to 20 minutes.

Usually just look at whatever the direction says on here.

It might take slightly longer because they're cooking

in the stock, but it's not gonna take much longer.

So it's exciting now.

We've got some beautiful looking biscuits,

but they're not quite there.

So we're gonna put some melted butter.

I've found that these biscuits won't brown

the way we want them to brown

without the addition of a little bit of butter,

a little bit salt.

So back in the oven we go.

So I was excited before, I'm more excited now.

You get these biscuits that get boiled underneath

so it's like a dumpling.

And then on top, they get cooked in the oven

so you see the more traditional kind of biscuit shape

所以你得到你想要的,片状的biscuit.

But this underneath part is super delicious

because it just has the broth,

this flavored broth boiling into it.

So we're gonna go with two biscuits.

The pieces of chicken have remained large,

as you can see here.

And this broth is just slightly thickened.

So this will set up a little more,

it will thicken even slightly more.

So before you think to yourself, oh,

I would've liked it a bit thicker,

just wait a second because it will thicken up,

more will absorb into the biscuits as it cools down as well.

And there you have it, chicken and biscuits

made with supermarket rotisserie chicken

and canned biscuits.

Give it a shot here.

Nice big piece of chicken.

When you keep the chicken big, not only does it look great,

but it stays nice and juicy, big hunk of chicken.

Definitely the way to go.

We're just gonna pick the biscuit up.

It's so good.

with this broth boiled in, and this crunchy, salty,

buttery other side, I mean, this is pretty spot on.

We took what was just half

of a supermarket rotisserie chicken,

spent a little time and turned into a delicious

and affordable meal that is super substantial.

Supermarket rotisserie chickens provide

a ton of value and they're delicious,

but just because they're ready to eat

does not mean you need to eat them always as they are.

Just by being a little creative

和一些你在何成分use,

you can turn one supermarket rotisserie chicken

into a variety of cool meals.