Nothing says spring like a basket of home made Southern-like fried chicken. Well, almost Southern-like fried chicken. On March 15th, MeatHenge hosted a birthday party and what turned out to be a real Meat Fest. Other than the birthday girl we had a guest, John Bell from Alabama. He offered to make us some of his fried chicken, sounded great to all of us. Well, we thought we were watching pretty closely. Turns out it isn’t as easy as it looked. John’s Fry Cook Fu is stronger than we knew.
It was Thursday late afternoon and time to start dinner. I figured this was as good of a time as any to try John’s chicken.
I know many, if not all of you giggled when you saw how simple it looked and nothing out of the ordinary reared its head. Pull the skin, no seasonings, roll it around in an milk/egg wash, roll in flour and maybe back & forth a few times. Deep fry. How tough could this have been?
Well, I wasn’t able to get it.
I started off well enough, with a cardboard wall around my electric skillet. A tray with flour and one with a milk/egg mixture and mostly skinned free range chickies.
Some of them I dipped twice, some three times. I always started with the liquid first, then the flour. I used corn oil instead of Canola, I liked the flavor a bit more.
Everything looked fine.
Don’t you think? See? Yum!
Yeah, it was okay. But it wasn’t what I was looking for. If you check out the last shot below you’ll see a completely different crust. It was crazy crust man !!! Mine was more like a bready coating that didn’t stick. Nothing special.
My wife, who’s smart an junk, figures he didn’t add the yolk from the egg in the wash. Which would make sense because his wash wasn’t really yellow. Mine was. Maybe I should go back to Canola, maybe I should have floured the chicken first, then wash. This is going to take another time or two at least.
I will have to keep trying until I get what I want.
p.s. Here, this is what John was able to do with his CRAZY crust.
I’m pretty sure John uses whole eggs. On the other hand, I’ve watched him do it a number of times and I still can’t get it right.
SEE !!!!
If you go take a look at March 15ths entry, and zoom in on his layout. You can nearly see his wash is white, while mine is clearly yellow.
Albeit, he used more milk than I did. But I wasn’t doing two chickens, just one.
I’m going to try flouring the chicken first, see if THAT will glue down the crust.
He had that CRAZY crust …
Okay, I added a photograph at the end showing John’s crust. This way you don’t have to search all over M.H. to get the action you need.
I just talked to John and as I thought, he uses the whole egg. How much did you beat the egg/milk mix?
I used a wisk and beat it … wisk like.
Which means he didn’t beat it, with a wisk. Must have used a fork …
And I think I should try using the canola like he did. He seemed specific in that and I chose corn. I truly didn’t think it was that big of a deal, but apparently it is. Thanks Professor Zounds!
John Bell, here. I’ve cooked this chicken in all sorts of oil…I just use canola because it lessens my guilt about eating fried foods. Same with the skin–I take it off to make it “healthier” (note the quotation marks). But here’s the deal:
Get the oil nice and hot. At home I usually crank it up to around 400 or 450…altho, as I recall, the temp at the party was around 350 and that worked just fine. Put an ENTIRE egg (minus shell) into a bowl of milk (I use skim because… well, you know). Mix it up with a fork. It doesn’t have to be completely blended…I usually have little islands of yellow floating around. Skin the chicken (optional), then dip in milk/egg, roll in flour, dip in milk/egg, roll in flour. Drop each piece one at a time into the hot oil. Space ’em out a bit so they don’t stick to each other. While they’re cooking, move ’em around a bit to let them cook evenly (also to dislodge those little “crunchies” that float to the top so you can scoop ’em out, salt ’em, and crunch ’em). When the individual pieces look done, take ’em out and eat ’em. Really…there’s no big secret! If *I* can do it, ANYBODY can!