Easier Fried Chicken

From Season 11: Southern Fare Reinvented

Why this recipe works:

Crackling-crisp, golden-brown, and juicy—what’s not to love about fried chicken? In a word, frying. Heating—and then cleaning up—more than a quart of fat on the stovetop is more trouble than mo...(more)

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We wanted fried chicken with a super-crisp crust and juicy meat without resorting to quarts of oil.

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Serves 4

A whole 4-pound chicken, cut into 8 pieces, can be used instead of the chicken parts. Skinless chicken pieces are also an acceptable substitute, but the meat will come out slightly drier. A Dutch oven with an 11-inch diameter can be used in place of the straight-sided sauté pan.

Ingredients
Instructions

·         1. Whisk 1 cup buttermilk, 1 tablespoon salt, hot sauce, 1 teaspoon black pepper, ¼ teaspoon garlic powder, ¼ teaspoon paprika, and pinch of cayenne together in large bowl. Add chicken and turn to coat. Refrigerate, covered, at least 1 hour or up to overnight.

·         2. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 400 degrees. Whisk flour, baking powder, 1 teaspoon salt, and remaining 2 teaspoons black pepper, ¾ teaspoon garlic powder, ¾ teaspoon paprika, and remaining cayenne together in large bowl. Add remaining ¼ cup buttermilk to flour mixture and mix with fingers until combined and small clumps form. Working with 1 piece at a time, dredge chicken pieces in flour mixture, pressing mixture onto pieces to form thick, even coating. Place dredged chicken on large plate, skin side up.

·         3. Heat oil in 11-inch straight-sided sauté pan over medium-high heat to 375 degrees. Carefully place chicken pieces in pan, skin side down, and cook until golden brown, 3 to 5 minutes. Carefully flip and continue to cook until golden brown on second side, 2 to 4 minutes longer. Transfer chicken to wire rack set in rimmed baking sheet. Bake chicken until instant-read thermometer inserted into thickest part of chicken registers 160 degrees for breasts and 175 for legs and thighs, 15 to 20 minutes. (Smaller pieces may cook faster than larger pieces. Remove pieces from oven as they reach -correct temperature.) Let chicken rest 5 minutes before serving.

Technique

·         A Better, Easier Approach to Fried Chicken

We fine-tuned the first part of our fried chicken recipe to achieve well-seasoned meat with a thick coating tailor-made to turn craggy and crunchy—then revolutionized how we cooked it.

1. BRINE IN BUTTERMILK

Soaking the chicken in seasoned buttermilk both enhances flavor and ensures that the meat retains moisture.

2. COAT IN BUTTERMILK

Adding a little buttermilk to the dry ingredients of the coating creates irregular texture, which translates to extra crunch.

3. START ON STOVETOP

Frying in 1 3/4 cups of oil jumpstarts a super-crisp coating with minimal cleanup.

4. FINISH IN OVEN

Transferring the chicken to a 400-degree oven allows it to cook through without overbrowning.

Technique

·         Oil Shortage

Property frying chicken from start to finish using traditional methods requires lots of messy oil. Our hybrid stove-to-oven method cuts it way back.

TRADITIONAL WAY

5 cups oil

OUR WAY

1 3/4 cups oil

Technique

·         Salting the Milk

In fried chicken recipes, soaking the chicken in buttermilk is a standard approach that helps tenderize the meat (mainly the outer layers). But is adding salt to the buttermilk really necessary to ensure meat that’s also juicy?

EXPERIMENT

We cooked four batches of chicken side by side. Three of them were soaked for an hour, one in a solution of buttermilk and salt, one in only buttermilk, and one in a plain saltwater solution. The fourth was not soaked. All of the chicken was dredged in flour before frying.

RESULTS

The unsoaked chicken was dry and tough. The saltwater-soaked chicken was moist but a bit rubbery. The chicken soaked in plain buttermilk, while tender, was not terribly moist. Only the chicken soaked in salted buttermilk came out both tender and moist.

EXPLANATION

Buttermilk and salt play equally important roles here. Buttermilk contains lactic acid, which activates the cathepsin enzymes naturally present in meat as it penetrates mostly the outer layers of the chicken. These enzymes break down proteins into smaller molecules, tenderizing the meat. (We’ve found that strong acids such as wine and vinegar can break down so many proteins that the meat turns mushy, but the lactic acid in buttermilk is too weak to have this effect.) Just as in a traditional brine, the salt helps change the protein structure of meat so that it can retain more moisture as it cooks, producing noticeably juicier results.