On the principles of good fried chicken, part 2.

Aaaaaand as promised, here's part two of Sunday's discourse on the finest food this life has to offer: fried chicken.

Let's talk chicken pieces.  Out of all the cuts that can be derived from our feathery friend, my stock and standard is the thigh, minus the pelvic bone.  Easily acquired in bulk at your local supermarket, easily skinned, very simple to manage.

Why the thigh?  First off, the only parts of its body the modern farm chicken even comes close to using are its legs.  That means the thigh and leg have the deepest chickeny flavor out of all the pieces.  As for construction, I mentioned earlier that the ideal piece of fried chicken has proper meat-to-crust consistency.  That means the drumstick is out (besides, it's got that tendon that always gets stuck in your teeth).  The breast is all sorts of misshapen and you lose half your crust to the ribcage anyway.  And wings?  Are you serious?  Trying to southern-fry a chicken wing results in a sad, overcooked wad of meat clinging to a bones that make up 30-50% of the thing's mass.  Not worth it.  No, if you want a proper piece of fried chicken, look no further than the chicken thigh.  It has the second-highest meat-to-bone ratio and just the right amount of collagen.

Yes, collagen.  It's not just for pulled pork, you know.  That magical connective tissue that dissolves into gelatin with sustained exposure to heat.  It's this, combined with the thigh's natural fat content, that makes this particular cut less likely to dry out in the crucible of your skillet.  Still, as with any brutally high-contact cooking method, you'll need as much moisture insurance as you can get.  Which is why brining, that newfangled prep technique everyone's been talking about, is never a bad idea for any relatively short-term dry heat cooking.

Brining works through some pretty fundamental hydration principles, using capillary action to draw salinated water into the muscle tissue (think of it as meat-irrigation).  What this means is that not only are you hydrating the meat before cooking, you're also allowing flavonoids in the brine to infiltrate the meat, seasoning and flavoring your working materials before it even meets the heat.  Of course, this act is essentially meaningless for things like soups, stews, and braises (because you're doing that anyway during the cooking process), but for roasting, sauteeing, and frying, it's a good way to prevent dehydration and uneven seasoning.  So if you've got the time, brine your chicken before you fry.  You won't regret it.

So you've got your meat prepped, your crust has been properly addressed.  It's time to cook.  The most basic conundrum with frying anything is and always will be getting your protein to the right temperature without burning your crust.  You can find cooking times and oil temperatures aplenty on the interweb, but rest assured, the only way to get the right time and the right temperature on your particular range is practice.  It's just the way it is.  That being said, to what temperature should you bring your chicken?  Well, let's look at it clinically.  Salmonella, by far and away the most common chicken-borne illness, dies at 167F (75C).  And as someone who has had the horrific experience of having salmonella, I strongly advise you to surpass this temperature to avoid the week-long cataclysmic two-point eruption that is this baneful infection.  I'm serious.  Sure, carryover cooking can buy you a couple of degrees of leeway, but with pieces of meat this small, you cannot count on the same 5-15 degree buffer larger cuts afford.  Take it to 167, then get it out of the oil.

Why not be safer and keep going until you hit 175 or 185?  Of course you could do this, and it's probably a pretty good idea from a safety standpoint.  But the longer and hotter you cook proteins, the more they bunch up, squeezing out all that moisture you worked so hard to inundate your meat with like a wrought sponge.  And not only is that moisture going to leak out of your meat, it's going to leak into your crust.  So use your judgement.

Which brings me to my final point.  Let your fried chicken rest.  Resting is an extremely important part of the process.  Not only are you letting the excess grease drip away, you're letting the proteins of your freshly-abused meatstuffs relax, enabling it to reabsorb some of the moisture it's been clenching out of itself.  Plus you're enabling temperature equilibrium, which is always nice.  And you're not biting into a 180 degree chunk of lava-like moistness, which is also always nice.

Woo.  Okay.  I think I'm done.  I hope those of you who've managed to stick it out this far have found something useful and/or informative.  I'm gonna go back to making fart jokes on Twitter now.

Cheers, guys.  See you tomorrow.