BBQ Chicken Sandwiches from a Comments Section

To start off, I'm going to talk about a BBQ chicken sandwich recipe that I found in the comments section here:

http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2009/01/30/the-frugal-magic-of-the-five-ingredient-crock-pot-meal/


I'm going to start off by talking about my slow cooker. The slow cooker is an essential tool for people who can't cook shit and are lazy as hell. All you do is just dump a bunch of ingredients into your cooker, cover it up, turn the dial to "low" or "high," then go watch a movie, go for a walk, whatever. Depending on the cook time, you can go to work and come back home to a fully-cooked meal that you just scoop out and start munching. It's so insanely easy to use that I feel like a douche for not knowing about it beforehand.

Anyhow, today I'm working on my fourth slow cooker recipe. The first one I ever did was a rather ambitious Korean shredded beef taco recipe, which resulted in the best meal I've ever made. When I make it again I'll talk about it in detail. My next dish was pot roast that came out tasting like a soggy, beef-flavored rice cake. My last one was a five ingredient chili recipe (taken from the above link) which came out really good. All of these, if and when I make them again with adjustments, I'll describe. Today, I'm working on something from the comment section.

User submitted recipes are kind of risky, since anyone can just throw some bullshit up there and there's not much quality control. This one sounded pretty good though, so I said "fuck it." Plus I already had most of the ingredients, so I didn't have to do much store hopping either:

Needed:

2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken thighs or breasts. I'm a breast man, so I bought some chicken breast "tenders", which I hope will make them easier to shred.
1 can of cola. I used Coke because it was available and I'm half Mexican.
1 large onion, sliced thin. I diced mine.
1.5 cups ketchup. I ran out before I had enough for a full cup, so I had to drive to the store to get more.
1/2 cup mustard.

I dumped diced onions, the semi-frozen chicken breast strips, and can of Coke in before I had to drive to the store and get more ketchup. I got back and added the rest, covered the lid, and put it on "low." In about an hour that BBQ smell started filling the house, and it was pretty sharp. I opened the lid to peek in, and the sauces looked disgusting, but it smelled decent. About three hours in or so I decided to stir it all up and see how the chicken was cooking. I pried apart some pieces that were still stuck together (they were frozen when I dumped them in) and made sure they stayed nice and submerged. Also, time to get the buns out. This I guess would be a "sixth" ingredient.

Half an hour to go now. I just opened up the lid and poked the chicken with a fork. It still has that somewhat rubbery chicken breast feel, so I'm wondering how tender these things are supposed to be after cooking. When I've done beef the meat just easily shredded, so I don't know what to expect with chicken breasts. I may need to "help" the meat along if they're still somewhat tough when the cooking time's over by slicing some of the breasts down the middle and letting the hot juices seep into the center of the slits. Of course, since I got this recipe from the comments section, I have no idea what else I'm supposed to do. All I know is that I'm supposed to throw all this shit in the pot together, cook it for around 8 hours, and that they're supposed to be "great on buns!"

Time's up. The breasts were fairly tender, but I used a fork to cut as many of them in half as I can. I'm leaving them in for another hour or so to see if I can get these shits softer.

DONE. I brought out some small potato sesame buns to serve them on. Surprisingly, for a five-ingredient meal, this came out really good. The meat was tender, even though I did some additional shredding to fit the small-sized buns that I was using. They had a sweet taste and the meat was delicious. The sauce was pretty decent as well. It wasn't a thick sauce, but considering that it's mainly a sauce to soak the meat in for flavor, I was fine with that. The only downside came from the buns, which got damn soggy and hard to hold after slopping the meat on top of them. For a future meal I could either make a taco or burrito with this meat, or get firmer buns for the sandwich.

Overall, this was delicious and I'd definitely make it again. Even with white meat, it was juicy and good.

Preparation: Easy as hell.
Cook time: About 9 hours for maximum tenderness, but you'd make the best judge.
Ingredients: Five. Six if you want to count the buns.