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

[Ahab]

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Glad it worked. The only secret ingredient is cast iron and time (and a lid for half the cooking time). Seasonings are totally up for grabs--whatever fires your palate.

 

[2pinkmom]

Made the chicken last night, Ahab. My husband, who never much compliments my cooking, wandered in and took a bite? "Wow, that's the best fried chicken I've ever had!" he said. A couple things I need to work on for the next time: 1) I didn't have a big enough cast iron pan, so I just used a heavy skillet. Will get a bigger cast iron, because 2) I had a devil of a time regulating the oil temperature. My stove is notorious for that. Castbiron would help. 3) didn't have peanut oil. Used canola instead. Good, but peanut is probably better.

But, yeah. If i never make better fried chicken, I've done really well. And there was very little mess, thanks to the low oil temperature.

 

[HHandbasket]

I don't know about the different recipes because I use 3 ingredients in my fried chicken coating: Flour, salt, and pepper. And it comes out perfect every time.

Three keys to getting it right:

1) Use medium heat and cook it thoroughly. You get good skin crispyness and juicy goodness cooked all the way through. Setting the fire too high can cause the skin to be rubbery or, worse yet, for the outside to be done and the inside still half raw!

2) Use the right oil. Different cooking oils have different "flash points" (the temperature point at which the oil will catch fire). Olive oil is not the best oil for frying chicken, and neither is canola oil. Corn oil or a corn/vegetable oil blend will give you good texture and will hold the temperature evenly to help the food cook more evenly. Seriously and truthfully, good old-fashion Crisco or Wesson oil (NOT shortening) works best. If you gotta use shortening, use Crisco rather than a generic brand for frying chicken. I'll use other brands for baking, etc., but for frying chicken... Crisco all the way, baby.

3) This is the most important factor of all. To get the BEST results for cooking fried chicken on the stove, use a cast-iron skillet.

Another thing is that when we had an electric stove, my chicken ALWAYS came out rubbery. God bless gas stoves and the ability to control your flame height!

 

[Ahab]

Glad it worked out. The thermal mass of cast iron evens out temperature swings and, in my experience, is essential for good crust formation. It's an unanticipated blessing that decent cast-iron skillets cost less than indifferent disposa-ware from the Big Box. Hanging over my stove are four cast-iron skillets, from 8 to 14 inches, and they're all in constant use.

Temperature control is also essential--too hot and the crust is done before the skin renders its fat; too cold and everything ends up squishy and horrible. My grandmother just eyeballed it, as did my mother. But because I'm technologically dependent and am untroubled by contradiction, I use a laser thermometer that looks like Buck Rogers' ray gun, aiming it at a hundred-year-old skillet sitting atop a woodburning cookstove.

Peanut oil isn't essential and can be, unless you find the right retailer, a bit pricey. But of the "healthier" oils out there, it provides, for me, the best taste. Canola oil works fine, but to ratchet up the flavor I need to wind the old bacon grease into 'er, and that kind of destroys the self-delusion that my version of great-grandma's fried-chicken is healthier than hers, cooked in 100-percent raised-and-rendered-on-the-farm lard.

 

[2pinkmom]

The crust got a little browner than I would have liked, but it sure was good otherwise. Skin was perfect, meat cooked through to the bone, not a trace of grease. I'm so glad for this thread. I come from a family that's like Trace Adkin's Country Boy song - "daddy wore a tie, Mama never fried a chicken...". I'd been wanting to try frying chicken again, and y'all gave me the courage to do it!

 

[TimG]

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Same here, I actually cut the cooking time from 40 minutes to 30-32. I think this might have been because of temperature fluctuations for both of us. I noticed that the side I cooked first came out very nice, the side that cooked down for the second 10 minutes turned out darker. When I went through the 3rd 10 minutes (uncovered) everything appeared to even out. One batch that cooked for nearly the full 4th 10 minute segment was too dark. So, I did a combination of cutting the cooking time for each turn from 10 to 8 minutes and not cooking for the whole 4th segment.

All the chicken was cooked through.

I expect it was because the temperature dropped initially when the chicken was put in the oil and then got past 325 on the way back up. More even temperature provided by a cast iron skillet would probably help a lot. A gas or wood burning stove would probably help too, but that's something I'm not going to be able to change just for fried chicken!

 

[Ahab]

Generally, if your cooking time runs longer than the one I use (and mine do too sometimes), it means either the temperature climbed ttoo muchhrough cooking, usually because the cast-iron pan wasn't preheated sufficiently before putting in the oil; or the chicken pieces were smaller than the ones I typically fry. My maternal ancestors were arch-eyeballers, and when the chicken was done, they could tell by looking at it. THey could also tell when the oil was too hot because the chicken was browning too fast, and when the oil had cooled because the sizzle didn't sound right.

I can do that okay-ish, too, but I'm a lot more okay with my temperature probe (which comes, I believe, from a Mac tool supplier and is meant for monitoring exhaust system temperatures).

Never cooked on gas, so I don't know if there's temperature creep through the process, but in the summer, when it's too hot to fire the woodstove, I get perfectly acceptable results using an electric cooktop. I just set the know halfway between 3 and 4, let the iron pan heat for 10 minutes before putting in the oil, heat the oil to 325 for five minutes or so, and then go right at it. I might have to adjust temps based on how the chicken looks over the first segment; the thermometer doesn't do much good in this phase, because the chicken influences temp swings too much. Cooking on wood is remarkably easier, if you've been at it a while. I know that a typical chicken-frying wants four sticks of oak or five sticks of ash, about the size of my forearm, and if the sizzle is sounding a little anemic I might have to slide the pan over onto the firebox for a minute or two before moving it back to the front lid.

(Note that, typically, the smaller pieces and breasts are done first. Necks, then legs, then breasts, then backs, then thighs. Because I'm old and lazy, I often just fry thighs--everything's done at once.)

Of course, there are way easier ways to fry chicken, but then the original poster asked for a Chef's input. I'm not a chef, but my son is (or was, he finds it more entertaining these days to make craft beer), and this fried chicken recipe is his favorite by several orders of educated-palate magnitude. Of course he was raised on it. And that, more than anything, influences what chicken eaters perceive as being The Proper Fried Chicken.

 

[Smoky73]

I make a mix of seasoned flour and crushed corn flakes, fry on the stove top till brown and then cook in the oven on a rack in a pain until done.

 

[TimG]

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Size of the piece wouldn't affect how quickly it browns and gets to that about-to-be-burnt-brown stage, would it?

 

[Ahab]

Actually, size of piece does affect how quickly it browns. A thin piece browns quicker than a thick piece. I had to think about why this was for a long time--were I not, as my grandmother used to say, wired up all wrong, I would simply have done what she did, which is to keep a sharp lookout, knowing that it does what it does when it does it without caring why.

What happens, I theorize, is that the cold inner mass of a thicker piece of chicken serves as a heat sink (or perhaps more accurately, heat buffer) for its outer layers. The outer crust of a thick piece, still red at the bone, might be running at pan-temperature of 300 degrees but a few fractions of an inch in might be running at 110F, while a thin piece (a breast versus, say, a neck) might have reached 160F at the bone already. The browning/rendering of the subcutaneous fat happens from both sides when the inner meat warms into cooking range--which I'm guessing is around 125F.

Timing is all rules of thumb and feel--which I didn't dwell on in the earlier recipe because most people seem to want absolutes in life, and the times given, with most chicken cuts I cook, with the pans I cook with on the stove I cook on, work out pretty evenly. Still, I do take out the skinny pieces earlier, and the breasts (breast meat goes stringy when overcooked because it has no intramuscular fat; when they're done, they're done. And I do that mostly by sight and sound--of course, I've been watching that chicken cook for 62 years and been cooking it myself for 44, so for me it's all on autopilot. (I still set the timer, though, because at 62 sometimes your autopilot loses its lock.)

But if you're getting black, burned spots (an earlier poster), it isn't a question of thick versus thin: you've either got your heat too high, or your skillet is too thin (or not cast iron).