Lots of people have their own recipes for making Nashville hot chicken at home, not to mention all the different secret proprietary spice mixes that restaurants protect like crown jewels. Of course, first and foremost, you can’t make great Nashville hot chicken without starting with great fried chicken. If you don’t have a deep fryer, or your skillet skills are lacking, there’s nothing wrong with picking up a eight-piece box from Publix or some tenders in a pinch.
But then you still have to come up with a spice blend that will turn your crispy chicken into something more diabolical. Gillie Chester’s Nashville Hot! is a company owned by Navy veteran Josh Davis, and he’s looking to help you fire up your fowl. His flagship product is his Hot Chicken Spread, which is shelf-stable at room temperature but melts at 100 degrees. While you should definitely refrigerate it after opening, this spread is an excellent substitute for adding spice to oil or lard to paint on your chicken after heating.
Because the spread melts, it can seep between the cracks of the fried batter, or you can just smear it on the top of your bun like a spread for a burger or breast sandwich. While Davis won’t reveal his exact recipe, he does claim it’s a blend of 20 peppers and spices. A little internet sleuthing shows he's playing with some of the hottest peppers in the world, including habaneros, scorpions, ghost and Carolina Reapers. There’s also a distinct brown sugar sweetness to the spread that helps to soften the bite of the heat. Although sugar in the rub or sauce is anathema to some hot chicken purists, I thought it contributed a nice balance to the burn.
Some hot chicken joints actually vary the peppers they use in their spice mix as heat levels go up, but the more traditional method of adding heat is just to add more of the same spice blend. Nashville Hot! works that way, so a light swipe of spread could equate to say, Prince’s medium heat, but you could certainly pile it on to break through to the hot zone. Your results may vary, but you can certainly do some intentional damage to your taste buds if that’s what you’re into.
Davis rounds out his line of spices with four other interesting products, a Nashville Hot! Ketchup that I didn’t sample, a shaker of dry seasoning that has a very similar flavor profile to the spread, and bottles of white sauce and hot chicken dressing that could be used as dipping sauces for wings or a torqued-up condiment for sandwiches. I really liked both sauces, though neither would likely break much of a sweat for some of the more ardent hot chicken aficionados. I left that sort of braggadocio behind years ago, so I appreciated the heat level that Davis chose.
The products are available in large quantities, including gallon-sized jugs that would be appropriate for food service if a restaurant or bar wanted to serve its own version of hot chicken or wings. For us civilians, you can order the spice by the shaker, spread by the half-pint and sauces by the pint from the company's commercial website. And since Davis was kind enough to send me two bottles of each of those products to sample, why don’t we give away a set? Dependent on whether I can legally mail these hazardous materials or just drop them off at the winner’s office without tripping the HazMat robots, we will pick a winner at noon this Monday, Nov. 19, and announce the lucky recipient of a set of Nashville Hot products in this space on the following day.
All you have to do is leave a comment with your answer to this completely non-controversial question: Who do you think makes the best Nashville hot chicken in Middle Tennessee? The flame war starts now!
