Pan-fried chicken

Fried chicken. Not something you need to get from a bucket, nor indeed from the deli counter of your local grocery store. And don't even think about buying some breading mix, because that's just silly. The Colonel's secret blend of herbs and spices is much more marketing than it is the reason for the company's success. You don't need a recipe, you hardly need to measure, you really just need to get in the kitchen and make some chicken.

Start with a chicken, either whole or cut into parts. If whole, cut it into parts. Then soak in buttermilk for an hour or so. While the soaking is going on, prepare your breading mixture. The important part of the mixture is that, for 1 cup of flour, use about a tablespoon of kosher salt. Feel free to throw in a teaspoon of this spice or that herb as suits your fancy.

It looks like we have some garlic powder, asperso (essentially fancy Italian poultry spice), and some various chiles in our bowl of breading. Next, we have the breading process. Remove a piece of chicken from the buttermilk and let most of the buttermilk drip off.

Toss into the breading mixture, coat, and tap off excess flour.

Set to rest on a rack.

Continue until all of your chicken is ready.

Depending on your breading technique, your hands will be relatively clean, or you will have Club Hand.

Melt some shortening (or pour in some high-smoke-point oil) and heat to 350°F. Make sure you have enough oil to register the temperature on your thermometer.

When you are at temperature, add your chicken. Carefully. Lay the chicken in the closest point to you first, and release so that the rest of the chicken falls away from you, so the oil splashes back.

Cook for about 7 minutes, or until it looks something like:

Flip the chicken, and cook for another 7 minutes:

Put onto another cooling rack, upside down in a jelly roll pan, with newspaper or paper towels between the rack and the pan, so that the oil will wick into the pan. Finish cooking your chicken in batches.

Comments

[meg]

This is overkill, so don't judge too harshly, but the end result is amazing. My technique for extra crusty-crispy fried delicious chicken is to marinate the chicken in pickle juice for 24 hours, then dry it off, dip it in buttermilk and egg, dip it in whatever flour-spice mixture you like, and then repeat the last two steps twice more (three times in the buttermilk, three times in the flour mixture). It's excessive, but fried chicken is excessive by definition.