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.
