Healthy Chicken Parm Vibes Made Easy on the Woodfire Grill!!!

🍗🔥 Need a weeknight dinner that doesn’t take forever but still brings big flavor? Dad’s got you covered! In this video, we’re taking some massive Wild Fork chicken breasts, giving them a flavorful brine, and pairing them with roasted cherry tomatoes, garlic, and fresh basil. The Woodfire adds that perfect smoky touch, while a little provolone and pecorino Romano finish things off with melty, cheesy goodness.

⏱️ In under an hour, you’ll have a healthier twist on chicken parm vibes without the heavy breading. Juicy chicken, smoky flavor, pasta tossed with roasted tomatoes, and a plate that looks like it came from an Italian kitchen—but made easy on a weeknight!

⚡ What you’ll see in this cook:
– How to make a quick 5% brine that keeps chicken juicy
– Dad Dust seasoning magic 🧄🧅
– Smoking and searing on the Woodfire for perfect results
– Roasted cherry tomatoes with garlic, basil, and olive oil 🍅
– Topping it all with provolone + pecorino Romano 🧀

👨‍🍳 Recipe:

Easy delicious recipes with Dad humor

📖 Want more? Check out my Woodfire cookbook Bad Jokes Good Food—packed with recipes, photos, and yes, plenty of bad jokes.

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Hello and welcome to Dad Got This where answer the tough questions like what’s an easy weekn night meal I can make in my ninja woodfire and why don’t chickens do well in prison. Second one’s easy. They hate being cooped up. I love cooking barbecue long cooks where you get to really finesse the food. Maybe you have some drinks while you’re doing it. It’s a good time. But you can’t do that every day. Sometimes you just need to make dinner. Let’s do that. Let’s make like a chicken parmesan-ish roasted tomato type pasta. That sounds good. I don’t know what to call it. It’s not really chicken parm. It’s kind of like a healthier version of chicken parm. And to do that, we need to make a brine. For chicken breast in particular, I am a big fan of brining. It just adds a bunch of juiciness, a bunch of flavor to your chicken, and can help bring some life to a rather boring protein. A chicken brine is pretty simple. You want a 5%ish salt solution. So, get yourself some water. Figure out how much 5% of your water would be in salt. So, I’ve got water. I’ve got a scale. It’s set to grams. I’ve got about 1,00 g of water, which means I need about 50 g of salt to make my 5% salt solution. I’m using sea salt. It seems to be a really good balance. I think table salt is actually too concentrated and would be too salty for this. I suggest using sea salt. This is all you really need to make your brine. But if you want to try to spice it up and add a little bit of flavor, here’s some of the things that I like to add to my brine. I like to add some white sugar. I’m going to add about 10 g of white sugar. I like to add some dad dust. Dad dust is 50% granulated garlic, 50% granulated onion. splash of MSG. Another 10 grams of that. And then you can add any herb you want. I’m going to add a little bit of dried basil. Two or three grams. This is really a lot easier to do if you have a kitchen scale. I’ll put a link down to one in the description. It’s just so much easier than trying to just rely on measurements. And then just whisk it up until it seems mixed. You want all the salt and the sugar to be dissolved. Some people will boil this and then add ice, but you’re messing with your ratios by doing that. I just like to kind of leave it out at room temp here. Whisk it enough until I see that it’s dissolved and it usually is fine. This works really good for chicken and pork. Those are mainly the two proteins that I like to wet brine. I don’t wet brine beef normally, so chicken and pork are good for this mixture. Now, what you’re going to do is get yourself some chicken. I got big old chicken breasts and I stuck them in this mixture, but I did that last night. Let’s go grab it. All I did, stick them in a ziploc bag, put it in a bowl in case it leaks, and I stuck it in my fridge. That’s all you got to do. Do that overnight. You will have much better chicken than if you didn’t do this. These happen to be some of the biggest chicken breasts I have ever seen. I get them at Wild Fork in a freezer bag, and man, they are massive. So, for this demonstration, I’m just going to cook one of them, but you can cook as many as you would want. The first thing we’re going to do is try to remove some of the brine and the moisture from the chicken. Just give it a pat dry. You will notice a lack of herbs in my brine. I forgot to put in the basil last night, so we’ll just put basil on it. Now, for seasoning, we’re going to hit it with a little bit of avocado oil. You could get away with extra virgin olive oil, but it’s not the best for cooking. So, I like to use a little bit of avocado oil, and then I just finish my food with the extra virgin olive oil in most cases, and I like the way the flavor profile and everything comes out. You can sometimes get a little bit of a bitter taste if you cook with olive oil, especially since we’re going to try to give this a little bit of a sear later. This chicken’s pretty even, but as you can see, we’re nice and thin over here and a little fat over here. Let’s take care of that. We are going to use a little mallet and just hit the fat part. And now, as you can see, we are way, way more even. We’re going to take it. We’re going to hit it with a little bit of dad dust cuz I love this. And it goes on just about everything I cook. Some pepper. This is a pepperc corn mix. It’s got green and pink and a couple other peppercorns in it. It’s pretty nice. A little bit of dried basil. Nothing crazy. We’re going for kind of an Italian flavor profile on this. That’s it for our chicken. Now, we are going to do some cherry tomatoes to go with this chicken. Let’s go grab those. I have a bowl. I have some cherry tomatoes. This is one pint, most of a pint cuz I use some of them for something else, but mostly a pint of cherry tomatoes. Hit it with some oil, little bit of dad dust, pepper, basil, and because these weren’t brined, we want a little bit of salt. good pinch of salt with sea salt. When I say a pinch of salt, I literally mean taking these three fingers, grabbing as much as you can, and pinching. That is, I I guess what they consider a pinch of salt. It’s what I consider a pinch of salt. And because I love garlic, I’m going to take three nice big cloves of garlic, mince them into it. Grab a spoon. There you go. Let’s go set up the wood fire. For this first stage, we are going to set the wood fire up for a smoke. We’re going to do it at about 250 degrees Fahrenheit just to add a little bit of smoky flavor. This chicken is pretty thin, so it’s not going to be in there very long. Grab your pellet hopper and fill it with pellets. I am using some charcoal pellets and give it the dad shake. The dad shake either compacts the pellets and makes them burn better, separates the pellets and gives them lots of air and makes them burn better, or does absolutely nothing and just makes me feel like it burns better. I still do it every time. Now, we’re going to go put this in the woodf fire. I have my air fry basket and my flat top in there at the moment. Now, since I’m not using my favorite smoking peacon pellets and I’m using the charcoal pellets, I’m not going to put the food in in the ignition setup. You can get a little bit of a burned acrid taste by doing that with these pellets. I’ve never had that happen with the smoking peacons, but I’m going to avoid it with these. Now that we’re ready, we’re going to throw the food in. Keeping the chicken separate from the tomatoes. See you in 30 minutes. Our 30 minute smoke is up. Let’s see how it looks and check the temp. That went a little quicker and a little hotter than I wanted. We’re at like 160. I think we’ll still be okay since we brined it. So, let’s take them out and go to our final step. Now, we’re going to set it to grill high and get a little bit of color on this and melt some cheese. It’s been about 8 or 9 minutes. Let’s see what temp we’re at. We’re only at about 350, but I just want to get a quick sear on this. So, I think we’ll be fine. Clear it up with some oil. [Applause] [Music] Let that oil heat up a little bit. Pop that chicken down. Drop a weight on it. And also get these guys on there about a minute. Flip that guy over like that. We’re going to top it with some proolone. And then we are going to switch the wood fiber over to broil. 500° F. It’s going to broil for about 4 minutes. [Music] This is just how I like to clean my flat top. I pour some water on it while it’s hot and I hit it with a silicone scraper. Most everything comes up and then it’s an easy wash in the sink with some soapy water. Home stretch here, folks. This thing is almost done. This is some fresh basil that my wife grows in her garden. Very lucky to have someone with a green thumb in the house because it is not me. I kill everything. We’re just going to take this basil and rough chop it. If you don’t have fresh basil, you can skip it, but it just adds a really nice freshness to the dish. We’re going to add our fresh basil. A nice glug of a quality extra virgin olive oil. That a toss. Look how nice and beautiful and fresh that looks. This is just somericolor rotini pasta that I made according to package directions. You can use whatever you like for a pasta. Take your chicken. Pop a couple on top of the chicken. That amazing olive oil and finish it with some Pecorino Romano cheese. I like Pecarino Romano over parmesan. Got a little bit more of a bite. I like it. And there you go. A wonderful, easy, fresh chicken meal. Like 45 minutes, maybe less than an hour. You could do it faster if you skip the smoke step, but this looks great. Let me get some pictures and then I get to try it. Beauty shots out of the way. Now we can dig in. See what our chicken looks like on the inside there. Still looking juicy. Not really overcooked. Oh, cut. Nice. Little tomato. Little chicken. Cheers. M. Oh, man. I was worried the chicken was going to come out overcooked. It didn’t. It is absolutely perfect. M. Yeah. Fantastic. No notes. I was originally thinking I might change the way I did it. Smoke it less. grill it more. No, this I’m 100% happy with. I get all of my chicken parm vibes other than that crispy crunch, but I’m trying to eat a little healthier, so this makes perfect sense for me. If you would like the recipe, it is going to be on my website, dadgotis.com. Link in the description. If you are enjoying this content, please do the likey subscribe thing. YouTube loves it when you leave a like. I love it when you leave a comment. I answer just about every comment in my comment section. You really want to support the channel, consider becoming a member. 24-hour early access to videos, shout outs, producer credits, sometimes you get extended member cuts, all kinds of fun stuff. But if you can’t, subscribing would be enough. So, I hope you enjoyed this quick little weekn night woodfire meal. If you’re looking for more woodfire recipes, I have a cookbook. I wrote a woodfire cookbook called Bad Jokes, Good Food. It should be linked in the description. It should be out by now. If not, please stay tuned and I’ll be making an announcement very soon. It has like over two dozen of some of my best recipes. a couple stories, a bunch of bad jokes, and some great photos. So, if you’re looking for that and you’d like to support me, please pick one up. With all that out of the way, I guess there’s only one question left to answer. Why was the chicken good at guitar? Cuz he was really pluckucky. Yeah, pretty bad. Dad might tell horrible dad jokes. Make fantastic woodfire weekn night meals. But one thing dad will never do is an outro. So, that’s it. Bye. This is the part where I thank all of my members. You guys are the absolute best. Thank you so much for your support and rock on. I don’t know why I said rock on, but rock on. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]