I might have mentioned before that I'm a pretty big fan of fried chicken. It's not just a food item to me anymore; it's a totem, a fetish, something I've spent more time thinking about than my finances (which speaks either to my obsession with fried chicken or my massively irresponsible approach to money. Either and/or both). I've woken up in the middle of the night with the impulse and walked to the corner store to pick up a quart of buttermilk to get some prepped for the next day. I told myself I was going to pick up some Popeye's today, and to prepare for it, I ordered some for dinner last night.
So yes. Mildly obsessed. And one of the reasons it's so easy to be obsessed with it is it's friggin' everywhere here in the states. It's at the deli counter, it's in the freezer section. It's at the haute cuisine restaurants in the hearts of our cities and the fast food joints peppering the suburbs. And for every place that gets it right, there's about six that get it completely wrong.
Over the years, I started picking apart what I look for in good fried chicken. A crispy crust that holds its crunch over time. Moist, flavorful meat. Sounds like basic principles, easy to carry out. Why, then, do so many places fall short? Whether it's dry, flavorless flesh or soggy, tepid crust, it's incredibly easy to fuck up fried chicken.
The crust. Crunchy, but not tooth-shatteringly so. Flavorful in its own right. It should adhere to the chicken itself; it should provide an even distribution so that each bite is a careful balance of meat and crust. And above all, when bitten into, it should cleave to your teeth. Nothing's sadder than biting into a piece of fried chicken and coming away with half the crust dangling from your lips.
The crunch is easy enough to address once you understand the principles behind what makes something crunchy and what makes something soft. Restaurant standard breading procedure (flour dredge, egg wash, bread crumbs) falls short here, particularly when working with bone-in chicken. For one, the bread crumbs will burn, since they are, unsurprisingly, made of already-baked bread. This means the flour within is already cooked, and a hair's breadth away from burning when exposed to hot oil for the fifteen minutes or so it'll take for the chicken to cook through. Furthermore, whole eggs aren't the smartest idea. Ever bite into a brioche? Wonder why it's so soft and pillowy? It's because the fat content from the yolks prevent it from getting crusty and chewy. Egg whites, on the other hand, are primarily protein, which makes for an excellent snap when properly fried; it's why it's a standby in tempura and other batter-based frying techniques.
While it's generally accepted that cornstarch adds crunch and flour adds weight, there's still the question of panko. Produced by basically wizardry, these flaky breadcrumbs are crisped without further toasting, keeping them an arm's length from the aforementioned burning problem. However, since it's still a finished product, it will still burn earlier than straight raw flours. Use with caution when frying whole pieces.
As to the pull-away conundrum, I've found that, most often, the biggest culprit is (and brace yourself for a little blasphemy) the skin. Think about it. Cooked, it comes away from the meat in one big chunk of fried, leaving behind nothing but bare meat and broken dreams. And yes, chicken skin is insanely delicious. But it's delicious when it's exposed directly to heat; buried as it is under your carefully constructed crust, it becomes pallid and rubbery. This is why I usually skin my chicken beforehand, season said skin, dredge it in a little cornstarch, and use it to test the frying oil. Also I eat it while I'm cooking.
One of the key points in fried chicken that consistently gets ignored is how it's treated after it's been fried, and this is a sad, sad thing. So many recipes call for letting the pieces drain on paper towels, or the more clever paper bag. Unfortunately, this means your freshly-fried, just-out-of-the-oil chicken is being placed in direct contact with a surface. This means any juice oozing out of the chicken and any steam coming off of the crust is going to be trapped in direct contact with the crust. And the enemy of crunch is what, class? Moisture. Me, I like to let air circulate around the chicken during its rest. That means a cooling rack over a sheet pan on the counter.
Why not in the oven to keep it warm slash finish cooking? Because your standard gas oven runs on natural gas, or methane (CH4). And said methane combusts using oxygen. And that looks a little something like this:
CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O
That's right, water vapor. And as I mentioned before, moisture is the enemy. And yes, electric ovens don't have this issue, but you're still stuffing your freshly-fried chicken in a necessarily air-tight chamber. Circulation is the name of the game here, and you're not going to get that in a closed space.
All right, this post is getting way too big for its britches. Swing on by over here for part 2!
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