Straight Outta Cashville: Dub Shack BBQ Presents Nashville Hot Chicken Sandwiches

 When you think of Nashville, what comes to mind?

Country music everywhere with studios, bars, aspiring artists, a burgeoning paradise for visible conservatives in media, and a nightlife scene that could potentially give both Memphis and Atlanta a run for their money?

Young Buck spitting fire bars about Cashville and a shorty who wants a ride with G-Unit in the mid-2000s?

Tennessee State, Vanderbilt, Belmont, Meharry, Austin Peay, and Nashville State?

Home of the National Baptist Convention – where most Black Baptist churches order Sunday School books from?

The early forming of the SCLC as related to the Freedom Riders and sit-ins throughout the Civil Rights Movement?

But what if I told you about some chicken so hot you might need a waiver to eat it?

In this recipe below, your friendly pitmaster is bringing the heat with Nashville hot chicken sandwiches. Make sure you don’t rub your eyes after eating it, and if your mouths cannot handle the flames, have a glass of milk to cool down.

INGREDIENTS

One whole chicken 

Nashville Hot barbecue rub

Hot sauce of your choice

One stick of butter

Coarse black pepper

Garlic powder

Brown sugar

White bread

Pickle slices

Dub Shack BBQ’s Dat White BBQ sauce

STEP ONE. If you’ve seen my other pulled chicken recipe [Dub Shack BBQ Does a Chicken Pickin’ from October 2020], then follow those early steps. If not – and since we are making sandwiches – cut the backbone out of the chicken and save it for some homemade chicken stock. Next, apply the hot rub all over the bird; the more you add, the hotter it will be. To elevate the hottest chicken around, feel free to use either hot sauce or Dub Shack BBQ’s best-selling The Ancestors mustard sauce as your binder. Set aside and light the smoker for 275-300 degrees.

STEP TWO. Smoke that bird until the internal temperatures are at 165 degrees in the breasts and 175 degrees in the legs and wings. Since it is being pulled and turned into sandwiches for the next tailgate party, appearance won’t mean as much as it normally would as a parted-out item but we still don’t want to serve ugly birds to beautiful people. Once they cool off to a manageable temperature for pulling with the two hands God gave you, grab a skillet to melt the stick of butter and as we are bringing the fire, add both the hot rub and hot sauce to a thin sauce before compounding the pulled chicken to the mixture. Don’t forget to save to save some of the slurry!

STEP THREE. Here’s the fun part: Assembling the chicken sandwiches! Toast the white bread, add the chicken, hot butter mixture, pickles, and Dat White with another hit of the butter mixture. Enjoy!

This is not a substitute for the original Prince’s Hot Chicken which came about decades ago over a man named Thornton Prince who kept the city jumpin’ even during the Great Depression and kept plenty of women in his black book. Legend has it after he stepped out on his “steady girl” he was served a plate of fried chicken that had been doused in hot pepper to teach him a lesson. Despite the unexpected heat, Prince loved the taste of the fiery fried dish and began sharing it with friends and family until it was perfected leading to the opening of BBQ Chicken Shack, now known as Prince’s Hot Chicken. Although I took the barbecue liberty of smoking it, the chicken is usually prepared by marinating in buttermilk, breaded, and deep-fried before coating it in a cayenne pepper-based paste and served on white bread with pickle slices. Since Jim Crow segregation impacted Nashville like every other city and town in the South with its racially separated highways, trains, and freeways – don’t get me started on Interstate 630 in Little Rock, hot chicken was primarily made and sold in Black neighborhoods along the east side across from the Cumberland River.

You’ve gotta love the colonizers who think they ran up on something new because it wasn’t offered on their side of the freeway or tracks.

Enough of the history lesson.

Nashville hot chicken is guaranteed to be the hottest thing popping at the tailgate even if it isn’t from the hot grease. Y’all be safe, be blessed, be good to each other, and tell everyone that every day is a GREAT day for Dub Shack BBQ!