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At Peaches HotHouse in Brooklyn, a restaurant that specializes in notoriously spicy Nashville-style fried chicken, they are not exaggerating when they say the chicken is hot.
And when they say extra hot — well, you’ve been warned. Have a handkerchief and an ice-cold beer ready, then pick up a drumstick and take a bite.
At first all is well as you crunch through the fried skin; it is oily, brittle and crisp. Next, you sense sweetness from a touch of sugar in the spice mix. For a moment, you’re feeling cocky.
But then it comes: the chile onslaught. A pungent, fiery, screaming blast of heat that will make you cry with agony and bliss. Drink some beer. Wipe your nose. And start all over again.
When the owners, Ben Grossman and Craig Samuel, along with their chef, Rodney Frazer, set out to make their own version of the chicken inspired by classic Nashville renditions, they knew regular cayenne alone wouldn’t be incendiary enough. So they added a dose of the hottest chiles in the world, ghost chiles, which can reach 1,000,000 on the Scoville scale, which rates the heat of peppers. (Compare that with a measly 50,000 for cayenne.)
It took much trial and error to come up with this chile mix, which is spiked with paprika, black pepper and plenty of dried garlic and onion. It makes their hot chicken particularly well seasoned as well as spicy.
In the tradition of the hot-chicken houses in Nashville, the Peaches HotHouse team has been protective of the recipe. It has never before been given it out in the four years the restaurant has been open, despite what the owners say have been many requests. You see it here first.
At home, you can adjust the heat by dialing back the chile powder. Or add more. If you dare.
Recipe: Peaches HotHouse Extra Hot Chicken
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