Fried Chicken: Demystified
When my parents were first married, way back before they’d even thought about me, my mom tried to make fried chicken. She bought a whole chicken, because that was cheaper than buying on already broken down and money was of course an issue being newlyweds, and cut it up. She’d never done this before. Cut ahead to dinnertime and my dad ridiculed her chicken pieces for being naked (the breading fell off) and unrecognizable. She never attempted fried chicken again. Growing up, my chicken always came in a bucket. I occasionally got some made by my Granny, but I preferred the deep fried commercial stuff.
Recently, I had some fried chicken from my aunt who is the master of all home cooking. She’s taken to using boneless chicken breast strips for frying. I don’t know why I never thought that I could fry chicken that wasn’t a whole chicken that I had to cut up. But this week, I decided that it was time. I planned to make a chocolate cake later in the week and it calls for buttermilk. So does most of the fried chicken recipes I’ve seen. Kismet!
So, I put my chicken strips in a ziploc bag with enough buttermilk to cover them and left them in the fridge to hang out until the next night. Most recipes just call for soaking the chicken for a couple of hours, but if I do that after work then I’m cooking dinner at 9pm. One thing I didn’t do and should have, I should have salted the chicken before it went in the buttermilk. Or added some salt to the mixture. My chicken needed a bit of salt when all was said and done.
Fast forward to the next evening. I mixed up flour and seasonings. I just added some random spice blends (cajun, greek) and other spices that I thought would work (salt, pepper, paprika, garlic powder, onion powder, cayenne) and stirred it up. Without wiping off the buttermilk, I flopped each chicken strip around in the flour, trying to pack it on. Then I set each one aside on a rack. Once all of the pieces had been breaded, I ran each one through the flour again, once again letting them sit on the rack for a few minutes. This is supposed to help the crust to adhere.
I brought some oil in a wok to 350ish degrees (F), someone in a book told me to toss in a bit of bread, the oil is hot enough when the bread fries. Then I gently placed each chicken strip in the hot oil. Now, the most important part – walk away! Go make your side dishes or wash up your flouring dishes. If you have to touch it, just give your pan a light shimmy to make sure that nothing is sticking. The more you fiddle with the chicken, the more you knock the crust loose. So, I waited until it got pretty brown on the first side (the oil was deep enough that most of the chicken was covered) before gently rolling the pieces over. Once the chicken is nice and GBD all the way around, move it to a paper towel lined plate. I stuck a thermometer in the thickest piece to make sure that it was 180F. If it isn’t, you can bake it for a few minutes, but mine was perfectly done. I think that’s probably due to not having any bones and all of the pieces being roughly the same size.
My chicken wound up being delicious! I feel so accomplished. It only took me 40 some years to get over my fear of frying.