February 7, 2007

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Recipe: Bacon Wrapped Chicken Sandwich with Mozzarella

These Bacon Wrapped Chicken Sandwiches with Mozzarella and Pineapple turned out great. Inspired by the Will It Blend series of advertisements, I came to ask the universal qustion: "Will it Wrap in Bacon?" It turns out that chicken actually seems naturally fit to be wrapped in bacon. This is a great way to eat a chicken sandwich with bacon with an added textural twist. The sweet, soft pineapple on it perfectly compliments the salty, crunchy/chewy(depends how you cook it) bacon. I know that making a sandwich isn't very hard, so I'll be brief with the recipe. Oh, and these also go great with fruit smoothies.


Bacon Wrapped Mozzarella Chicken Sandwiches w/ Pineapple


Serves 3 people. Cooking time: 20 minutes + 40 minute Grill prep.

The ingredients:

  • 3 boneless chicken breasts
  • 0.5 lbs. of bacon (any variety)
  • 1 can of sliced pineapple
  • 1 package of sandwich buns
  • 4 slices of mozzarella cheese

The algorithm:
Start your Grill. I suggest that you use only charcoal of the non instant variety. It burns cleaner and leaves less in your food. Make a pyramid of briquettes, put a liberal amount of lighter fluid on it, wait 30 seconds, and light it. It should take the charcoal a good 40 minutes to burn down. Make sure it burns down all the way before you begin to grill.

While the charcoal is burning down, take out the chicken breasts and slice any breasts that are too large or too thick into multiple pieces. Wrap each chicken piece in bacon in a spiral fashion. For any parts you have cut off of the other breasts to size them down, you should have a couple slices of bacon left. You can use these slices of bacon to splice together an awesome mutated 4th breast.

Once the grill is ready, place each bacon-wrapped chicken breast on the grill. If you cook with high heat, the bacon will come out crispier and your sandwich will be done faster. If you use low heat, the bacon will have more of a ham toughness and your sandwich will take longer to cook. Keep an eye on the bacon to make sure it does not burn. Cook until the sandwiches are done. Once they are done, bring them in, and place each breast on an awaiting bun. Throw 4 pineapple slices on the grill. Leave them on for about 3-5 minutes and flip them to get nice grill marks on them. Top the chicken with a slice of mozzarella. Finish with the pineapple and bun crown.

Posted by Chris Santoro at February 7, 2007 10:21 PM | Comments (2) | EatFoo 1.0 Posts


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In my experience, slow-cooking is the key to good, crispy bacon. Fast-cooking doesn't allow all of the sugar in the fat to caramelize, which makes the meatier bits crispy, but the fatty bits remain soft. I don't like mine that way. I like every part of the bacon to be absolutely crispy and brittle, so that it shatters into a million pieces in my mouth.

Also, I'm concerned that the chicken breasts won't be done before the bacon starts burning when the grill is hot. Did you, by any chance, use a kitchen thermometer to test the doneness?

Posted by: Barzelay at February 8, 2007 4:01 PM


I was actually concerned about the same thing, so I went with low heat. I didn't use any kind of thermometer, I just eyeballed it and left it on a couple extra minutes. I figure if the chicken is sliced thin enough that you could cook it effectively at high heat without burning the bacon.

A challenge with getting bacon to be crispy on the grill is that you don't have the bacon being deep fried in its own fats, a lot of that drains away. While grilled bacon is good, I have to say that deep fried bacon is the finest way to cook bacon.

Posted by: Chris Santoro at February 9, 2007 3:36 PM

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