One of my favorite meals of all time is Chipotle Chicken Fajitas! Don’t worry it is not spicy at all! Instead it adds a sweet and salty element to the whole meal that is unbelievable! This is a meal we like to cook for company because it’s different but delicious.
How to Make Chicken Chipotle Fajitas on the Griddle
It all begins with the chicken, which is soaked in a brine, so it is tender and juicy. From there, we add peppers, onions, mushrooms to the grill. When the chicken reaches an internal temperature of 165 degrees, our homemade Chipotle mayo is added to make these fajitas amazingly delicious!
Introduction
Hello, there! Thank you for stopping by to talk about some delicious food! I wanted to take a quick second to introduce myself to you. My name is Kaycee Hobbs and I am the mama of seven lovely children who think they have to eat every single day! I am learning how to do this quickly and easily. Come along and see the method to our madness!
Brine the Chicken
For the last couple of years, we have brined our chicken because it tastes so much better. Instead of dry chicken that is hard to swallow, our chicken is juicy and full of flavor.
Brining is all about science! Basically, it is a saltwater bath that you soak the chicken in for about 8-12 hours prior to cooking. While the chicken is sitting in the brine, it is soaking up the water which allows it to hold onto while it is cooking.
Let me tell you how we do it. All you need is:
- 2 pounds of chicken breast
- 1/2 cup of salt
- 1 cup of sugar
- 8 cups of hot water.
Like all good large families, we keep our gallon ice cream containers. It is for situations like this that they come in really handy!
Sam, our sixteen-year-old, is the one who does most of the brining around our house these days. He places the frozen chicken into a clean ice cream container.
In a separate bowl, he measures out eight cups of hot water. You want to get the water as hot as you possible can so it can dissolve the sugar and salt.
He stirs the sugar and salt into the hot water until it is completely dissolved. Then he pours it over the frozen chicken. You want to make sure the chicken is completely immersed in the brine. If the eight cups are not enough, then just mix up another batch and add that to it.
He lets it sit for eight to twelve hours making sure it stays cool enough. The ice cream container can easily be stored on the bottom shelf of your refrigerator where it can’t leak onto anything.
When we are ready to cook the chicken, I drain and rinse the brine off the chicken, and we are ready to go! When I am done with this step in the preparation, I always make sure that I sanitize my kitchen area with bleach so that no one gets sick.
I like to do this in the very beginning so that we can make sure it is cleaned up properly and can move on.
Homemade Chipotle Mayo
Before we start cooking the fajitas on the grill, I make my own Chipotle mayo to season them with. It is really simple to make but it does something magical when we put it on the grill!
This is what you will need:
- 3 cups of mayonnaise
- 1 Tablespoon granulated garlic
- 1 5 oz. bottle of Cholula Chipotle Hot Sauce
The first thing you will do is mix the hot sauce and mayonnaise together then you will add the granulated garlic. It takes a few minutes to get everything incorporated together.
Once, this is done, I add it to a large squirt bottle so we can add it to the fajitas while they are on the grill without cross-contaminating anything. In the past we have brushed it on, but you have to be really careful and make sure your utensils stay clean and your chicken is cooked through before you add it.
Chicken
We recently purchased the Camp Chef PRO 90X so we can easily cook food in large quantities for our large family. You can read all about why we pick the Camp Chef PRO 90X here in this post.
For this recipe, we cooked about two pounds of boneless chicken breast. Rick heated our Camp Chef griddle and spread olive oil on it using one of the spatulas. When it was nice and hot, he put the chicken breast onto the griddle. Ah! I wish you could hear the sound of the sizzle! Wait, you can, by watching our YouTube video! Check it out!
His goal was to get the chicken to an internal temperature of 165 degrees. Once it hit that temperature, he sliced it up and began to mix it with the veggies.
Fajita Vegetables
The vegetables we used for this cook are:
- 3 onions, sliced
- 3 sweet peppers. sliced
- 16 ounces fresh mushrooms. cleaned and sliced
Before the chicken even hit the grill, we sliced all our vegetables and put them into a 9×13 aluminum pan. We use these pans often when we cook because they make cleanup and serving a piece of cake.
The onions were the first to join the chicken on the griddle. They need a little bit longer to cook then the peppers and mushrooms. After they had softened a bit, Rick added the peppers to the onions.
Now, if you watch the video, you will see that he had the chicken on one side of the griddle and the vegetables on the other side of the griddle. He was using the 24-inch griddle which was definitely doable, but we think that the 36-inch griddle may be better. Everything would cook faster if it had a little more space.
Once the peppers and onions, were soft, he added the mushrooms to the veggie mix. By this point, the chicken breast was getting to temperature, so he began to slice it and mix it in with the veggies. Gradually it all got cooked and mixed together.
It was time for the magic mayo that literally makes anything taste better! Well, not anything but you know what I mean! As Rick stirred the fajitas on the griddle, I squirted the chipotle mayo into the mix. I used about half of the bottle.
Rick just stirred them constantly until it was mixed well. Then he scooped them into a 9×13 aluminum pan so we could easily serve the entire family.
Serving Suggestions
This is what we served on our fajita bar for our family:
- Refried Beans
- Flour Tortillas
- Shredded Cheese
- Chopped Tomato
- Salsa
- Sour Cream
- The Leftover Mayo Chipotle Sauce
Refried Beans
We do a little something different to our refried beans to make them taste good! We add bacon grease! I know, I know, everything tastes better with bacon, and these beans are no different.
We opened a large can of refried beans, added about 2 tablespoons of bacon grease, and 1 teaspoon of garlic salt. We heated over low heat and simmered it until we were ready to serve. Trust me, beans will never be the same once you have tried this!
Flour Tortillas
Rick cleaned the griddle up after he cooked the veggies and chicken. This is a pretty simple process where he squirts water and then uses a spatula to scrape off the food residue until it is nice and clean. You can read about exactly how he does this in this post.
Okay, back to the flour tortillas, Rick added them to the griddle to warm them up and this happened pretty quickly. We used the fajita sized tortillas, so we were able to fit approximately twelve of them on at a time.
Buffet Style
Since we have a large family, we have so many different likes and dislikes, so we like to offer lots of choices for our kiddos. We served the Chipotle Chicken Fajitas buffet style so they could top it with whatever they liked.
Chicken Fajita Cheatsheet
Around here, we believe in making things easy for you and so that’s what we did! No, we are not coming over to cook, I would love it if we could, but we are giving you a cheatsheet so you can easily make this for you own family!
Subscribe to our mailing list and it will “unlock” the PDF for you to download! It has the list of ingredients, plus the direction for making every component in this meal. Thanks for reading! I hope you will give these fajitas a try!
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