Chefs talk to me..... fried chicken.

[al6517]

Hey Jeff : Oil temp is definitly critical 350-375 min, after defrosting I lightly salt the meat and let it rest in the fridge for an hour or so, the salt will draw out some moisture in the skin and add flavor to the meat. Pat dry the meat before breading and only put the chicken in the fryer when the oil is hot, if you don't the meat & skin will absorb the oil and cook soggy and fatty. I know these well known tip's will help.

AL

 

[jaj121159]

I cooked fried chicken last week. Soaked for 48 hours in buttermilk with seasonings of your choice, and two table spoons of Kosher salt and one tablespoon of sugar. Drain the buttermilk then dredge in plastic bag with flour and more seasonings and set on a bakery cooling rack. Then go back and dredge again. Let sit on the rack for 1 hour before frying. Cook in a large deep frying pan with about two inches of vegetable oil at 340 degrees and put the chicken in at 375 and adjust your burners. A candy thermometer works well to monitor the oil temp. Cook about 8 to 10 minutes a side.When removing from th oil, put back on cooling rack with paper towels under neath. Let stand four or five minutes after cooking.

This chicken was outstanding. I have made great chicken before. Fried chicken is a family tradition. My mom was from Kentucky and I was made a Kentucky Colonel at birth, so the colonel's chicken is still the best.

 

[Brunty_Farms]

Quote:
That's the answer I was looking for... I kind of figured there was more too it. Thanks for the dry salting, that pulls out the moister in the skin I'm assuming...

What I did was I triple battered it dipped in egg not milk... did not really let it sit too much before putting in the oil. The oil was 350 when I dropped them in... oil temp kept at 350 after a slight dip after first putting them in.

Definitely not the scald, if I over scalded there wouldn't be skin left on the birds after they came out of the plucker.... these had good skin. The breading was perfect, and the actual chicken was perfect too..... just the skin wasn't crispy like I thought it would be. I'm going to try the salt and letting the pieces rest before frying. I think fried chicken is a bit of an art but I'm willing to keep trying. Thanks for all the good tips...

 

[Ahab]

Ahab wrote: You asked for a chef. I'm amateur, not professional, though my son is--cordon-bleu trained. This fried chicken is the first thing he wants to eat when he comes home to visit.

Brunty wrote: That's the answer I was looking for... I kind of figured there was more too it. Thanks for the dry salting, that pulls out the moister in the skin I'm assuming...

What I did was I triple battered it dipped in egg not milk... did not really let it sit too much before putting in the oil. The oil was 350 when I dropped them in... oil temp kept at 350 after a slight dip after first putting them in.

Definitely not the scald, if I over scalded there wouldn't be skin left on the birds after they came out of the plucker.... these had good skin. The breading was perfect, and the actual chicken was perfect too..... just the skin wasn't crispy like I thought it would be. I'm going to try the salt and letting the pieces rest before frying. I think fried chicken is a bit of an art but I'm willing to keep trying. Thanks for all the good tips...

And then Ahab wrote (and apparently offended the BBB quote-tag gods and thus must create his own):

Deep-fried chicken and pan-fried chicken are two entirely different things, and produce different results. Deep frying needs to happen in enough oil to submerge the chicken and be held at 350 - 375 degrees: cooler than that, and the crust absorbs oil; hotter than that, and the crust browns before the chicken cooks.

But my imperfectly made point, and that of my great-grandmother, grandmother, and (as learned behavior) my mother, is that deep frying isn't the ideal method for chicken, especially not chicken with bones in it, and especially not chicken with a bit of chew, meaning, pretty much, anything not a cornish-cross hybrid that spent more time eating than looking for something to eat.

The old-fashioned chickens my grandmother and great-grandmother cooked had to be fried slowly to dissolve intramuscular collagen (though she wouldn't have phrased it that way; she'd have said, "Hit don't git tender 'less you gentle it along"), in the same way that lamb shanks must be slowly braised and not grilled quickly like lamb chops. Deep-frying's high heat and short cooking doesn't tenderize chicken meat; slow pan-frying does, in an economical half-inch of oil (or home-rendered lard). It also renders out most of the fat concentrated in the skin: this, more than anything else, is what keeps the skin (not the crust, the skin) from become crisp; this is what keeps it from becoming rubbery, and this is also what helps tenderize the meat within the skin.

In pan-frying, because the chicken isn't submerged in oil, the flour-milk-flour crust absorbs far less of it. And there are no eggs in the crust--the proteins in eggs also absorb oil from the frying, whether you're pan-frying or deep-frying. An egg-wash (typically flour-eggwash-flour) crust may absorb less oil in deep frying than a simple flour-milk-flour crust, but the problems remain: the skin beneath the crust is rubbery, the meat beneath the skin is cooked too quickly to dissolve the collagen and tenderize the meat, and the crust itself is too thick relative to the meat. At least for my tastes. But then my tastes formed, in part, when I was a kid watching all those good church women march up to the covered-dish table at the church picnic, and set down their plates of ham and fried chicken and potato salad, and seeing, with some pride and more than a little understanding, that my grandmother's plate of her mother's (and for all I know her grandmother's) fried chicken was an empty expanse of crumbs before anyone else's even had a dent in it. And there'd still be a couple of black-coated buzzards hovering over her plate, wetting their fingers and dotting up the crumbs one at a time.

As for dry-salting versus brining . . . When Alice Waters and Thomas Keller popularized brining chicken (partly as a way to deeply season the meat, and partly as a way to impart taste into essentially tasteless industrial chicken), everyone jumped on it, especially Cooks Illustrated. But even CI is now backing off brining chicken (they haven't yet begun dry-salting their pork, but they're trending that way), not because it isn't effective at seasoning the meat deeply, instead of merely at the surface, but because soaking in water makes for soggy skin, unless you go to elaborate lengths to dry it. And, logistically, brining is a royal pain.

So I went back to my great-grandmother's method, of rubbing the chicken with salt and seasonings 24 hours before dinner--"Hit's got to have time take the salt," my grandmother used to say (and left unsaid: the chicken needed 24 hours to work its way through rigor mortis, because all her chicken dinners started the same way: a wrung neck and a rapid-fire plucking whose whole process never exceeded 5 minutes). I salt chicken the morning of the day before I eat it, in a covered pan, and then dry it for anywhere from 4 to 8 hours on a rack in the fridge until I'm ready to cook it.

Last fall, the New York Times came to roughly the same conclusion with their holiday-turkey-cooking special: Dry salting works as well as brining, and in some details (skin consistency) it works better, and it's a lot less work.

For turkeys, I let "hit take the salt" for around four days, using a skinny 1 tablespoon per 5 pounds of meat, followed by a 24-hour drying period. Last year's turkey was our best ever. Whole ducks I let go about 2 days, although I'm far more likely to part out ducks than cook them whole, unless they're small and wild, which need nothing more than 15 minutes in a 500-degree oven.

 

[DIYSeattle]

I can see this topic getting touchy lol. We have brined birds for a long time before it got popular, also deep frying them too. Brining a frozen bird to thaw is the best way I have found to season all the way through. Whether its turkeys or chickens or whatever. After its been in the brine for a day or two its drained and left in teh bucket in the fridge overnight to dry out some.

Peanut oil makes for a golden crispy fried whatever it is. We fried all kinds of things when I was growing up, my grandmother especially, dove, quail, rabbit and other wild game, porkchops, tomatoes, eggplant, and lots of things you wouldnt think of.

After it comes out of the oil it needs some papertowels or newspaper to rest on for a moment to help soak away some of the grease off it. It can get soggy if you leave it in a pile on a plate or bowl too.

 

[Brunty_Farms]

I think your misunderstanding that outside was very crispy... that batter was perfectly done and so was the meat.... the skin in between however was cooked just not crispy. Making it not edible... it was nasty.

I cooked it in 100% peanut oil and did use paper towels to soak up extra oil.

 

[Brunty_Farms]

I deep fried it then.... I had about 6 inches plus of pure peanut oil. So I shouldn't deep fry it? I kept the temp at 350 the hole time which was about 10 minutes. Everything was perfect but the skin..... I think I might try a few new ways next time and see which one turns out best.

 

[TimG]

Ahab,

I've been thinking about experimenting with fried chicken for a while and your posts may have been just the push I needed to get started. Where in Maine do you live? Just in case I need a lesson...

Tim

 

[beerman]

Wet or dry chicken will not result in rubbery skin when deep frying. It sounds like your temp of the oil was good. How old was the chicken ( age you butchered it)? What kind? How thick was the skin before you fried it? If you coating was way to think it can result in the skin being a little rubbery not inedible tho. Just fried about 25 cases of chicken tonight. Been a chef for 20 years

Brian

 

[Ahab]

Quote:
I understood that your outside was crispy, and the meat was done, and that your problem was rubbery, nasty skin. That's pretty much always the problem with fried chicken.

Perhaps I'm explaining it wrong. Deep-frying, especially with a thick crust (I believe I remember you saying you triple-battered it), will almost always leave your skin rubbery unless you take extraordinary measures. A piece of deep-fried chicken cooks fully submerged in oil for roughly 15 minutes, at between 350 and 375F. The crust browns beautifully, the meat cooks quickly (unless it doesn't, in which case it's nearly raw at the bone), and you get a predictable and reproducible product in a short amount of time. This is why restaurants almost invariably deep-fry their chicken: speed, eye-and-tooth appeal, labor savings. The skin can be a little rubbery and gross, but that's considered acceptable collateral damage given the benefits. (Although one of the restaurant's benefits, maximizing use of the deep-fryer they keep going all day, isn't one most households would see as a benefit; we'd see that as, What am I gonna do with all that oil? But a restaurant has all that oil already sitting there, kept at 365 all day.)

Pan-frying chicken, in around half-an-inch of oil, and at a much lower temperature (325F), and for a much longer (and more labor-intensive: all that turning, all that covering and uncovering) time, renders the fat and moisture from the skin, in the same way that pig fat rendered at low heat produces clear lard and crisp, nearly fat-free cracklings and if at high heat--365F, say--the lard turns amber, and the cracklings have burned exteriors and incompletely rendered, rubbery interiors. Restaurants mostly don't pan-fry chicken, because it takes about 45 minutes, and during that time a stove burner is pretty much tied up. There's no way to hurry it, and so only small soul-food restaurants who know the genuine article will typically go to the trouble, or high-end restaurants with either a "southern" or a downscale "ironic" theme. The place where a "chef" would work, which very definitely isn't the same thing as a cook.

If you insist on deep-frying chicken, the best way to get both a perfectly cooked inside (though there'll be little or no tenderizing action, because of the speed and heat) and a crisp skin and crust is to make your outer coating as thin as you can. The thicker it is, the more likely it will leave you with a rubbery skin. The more successful attempts I've seen with deep frying chicken involved little more than a quick soak in milk (thinnest crust) buttermilk (thicker crust) and then a _single_ shake in seasoned flour. Double-flouring, wet batters (unless they're very thin, a la tempura batter), and any coatings involving egg typically cook to the desired shade of brown before the skin has a chance to render its fat.