At one time or another in the last three weeks, we’ve had 3-5 house guests at a time. John is a high school teacher, and has been “off work” for the summer, and we have spent a lot of that time being social with friends and family. I love having folks over, because it means I get to cook. I had a lot of fun this summer for the weeks we had John’s 16-year-old son with us.
I felt a lot of nights like I was cooking for my family, in kind of a June Cleaver/Donna Reed sort of homey comforting fantasy, but without the whole house dress and pearl earrings and perky housewife theme music. To celebrate “family style,” I thought a good fried chicken dinner would fit the bill. The Son declared it to be “amazing,” so I figured, WHY NOT SHARE!
I am not a southern belle. I grew up in Alaska, with a stop in the Pacific Northwest, and ended up living in Arizona for 23 years. Fried chicken, or the secret to great Southern-fried chicken, is something that always fascinated me. It took a LOT of trial and error over a lot of years to get to a point at which I felt comfortable and able to experiment some with the seasonings and techniques.
Here’s what I have figured out.
Yes, Virginia, the chicken matters. It really does. The best times I have made fried chicken is when I was frying up a bunch of pieces that were the same, or the same size — just thighs, just wings, just drumsticks, or a “proportional chicken,” — because then they are somewhat of a uniform size. This makes all the difference in the world in terms of cooking time and having all the pieces be ready at the same time. If you have a chicken that has huge double-size breasts, as many do nowadays, you need to keep in mind that it will take the breasts longer to cook than the thighs, legs, and wings. That’s rough, because the breast is also the piece that can dry out the most.
I actually like to try to pick out a whole chicken, and see if I can get one that is more proportional. Sometimes you can find a whole bird that is just kind of chubby all over, and not breast-heavy. The chicken I used here is a chicken from the farmers market, about a four-pound bird. Free range, which I think can really taste better because of what we’ve talked about before — muscles that get used more, taste better. Happy birds strutting around in the sun make for good eating. I scored this lovely bird from Patrice at Double R Farms.
If I can’t go the farmers market route, I get a good looking regular old chicken. I cut the chicken into eight pieces — two legs, two thighs, two breasts, and two wings. If your breasts are huge, you can try to cut them in half so the chunks are about the size of the thighs. Freeze the chicken back for soup! I have a big bag in my freezer where I keep pork bones, chicken backs, and the like for stocks when I am feeling ambitious.
WASH CHICKENY BOARD. WASH CHICKENY HANDS. SAFETY FIRST!
Brines and marinades, oh my. Poultry of all kinds benefits from a marinade or brine. When I have time, I will brine, and I absolutely will be writing about that. Short-time-frame, I am a fan of the marinade. Lots of amazing southern cooks use buttermilk to soak their chicken before frying, and I’ve used it. It’s awesome. I didn’t have buttermilk. I used vinegar.
Yes, vinegar! Regular old apple cider vinegar.
I “learned” about this odd trick from the label of a product I used to have in my pantry, an all-purpose chicken seasoning. The directions on the jar said to dip the chicken into vinegar and then sprinkle liberally with the seasoning. That sounds easy, so I went for it. Score!
I think it is probably the acidity (of the vinegar and the buttermilk) that does a job on the meat and helps the spices penetrate. To marinade this four-pound bird, I used a cup of apple cider vinegar, half a cup of water, and spices I thought would be good on chicken — equal parts of garlic powder, onion powder, salt, pepper, some dry sage and cayenne pepper. I like a little zing. It’s a tablespoon of each into that 1.5 cups. Mix it all together and dump it over the chicken pieces in a container that can go in your fridge for a few hours. Mix up the pieces so they all get covered by the marinade, and tuck them away to meld.
At this point, I wished I had gone through with my plan to make my own lard. I bet the chicken would have come out even better if I had done that and used THAT to fry my chicken! I used regular vegetable oil this time, but now that I have the creamy white stuff available, that’s my choice.
A few actual cooking tricks I’ve either learned or figured out for great crispy chicken, are simple ones but they really make a big difference.
1) Season your flour with salt and pepper. (Gluten free? Try rice flour.)
2) When you coat all the chicken, shake off as much flour as you can and then set the floured pieces on a rack (or something that can let the air circulate so they aren’t sitting in their own wet flour gunk) to set for a few minutes. This helps the flour stick to the chicken and make a nice crust instead of coming off in the pan.
3) Southern-fried chicken is cooked in a heavy, heavy skillet. Think cast iron. Dutch ovens work too, but remember we aren’t deep-frying the chicken. It needs to start on one side, and then be turned over to the other side. So, we don’t want to cover the chicken in the oil — it should come about half way up the pieces of chicken when they are all in the pan.
4) Make sure your fat is hot before adding the chicken (I test mine by sticking the tip of a handle of a wooden spoon into the fat — if it bubbles, you’re ready to go.)
5) Medium heat. Get your oil nice and hot, put in the chicken, keep it over medium-high for a few minutes to get the oil back up to a good temperature and then lower it to medium.
6) Don’t put a lid on the pan! A splatter screen is fine, but no lid! We don’t want to steam the chicken. Then you’ll have sticky chicken, and today we do not want sticky chicken.
It might seem like a lot to think about, but once you do it once you’ll instantly be in the groove. It will take 20-25 minutes (10-12 minutes per side) to cook the chicken through. Try not to move it around too much in the skillet while it’s frying, because that will affect the crust. Just let it go and do it’s thing. Use tongs to lift and check the browning, and if they start to look too brown or overdone (and not a pretty reddish golden brown) adjust the heat on your pan.
(There should be a picture of bird-in-pan here, but I got derailed during the frying process and didn’t get one.)
When you’re cooking the second side, you might find the legs or wings getting finished before other pieces. If they start to look like they’re browning too much, take them out and put them in a 250 degree oven. This will help keep them crispy and ready to eat while the rest of the pieces finish up.
If you end up with the outsides cooked before the insides, the oven trick works to being them up to temperature without burning the outside, after you take them out of the oil. If this is the case though, better make that a 300 degree oven.
I’ve decided it’s about patience. I have to really work not to flip them over and move them around and scoot them and check them. The pieces come out INFINITELY better if I can just keep an eye on them from afar and let them develop the goodness on their own. (PS: I finished this chicken in the oven)
See how there’s not even a fork in this picture? We’re all family here, dig in.
