Food Theory: I SOLVED KFC's Secret Recipe! (KFC Chicken)

So has anyone ever discovered Colonel Sanders'

secret

recipe

, a blend of 11 herbs and spices? Dozens and dozens of people claim to have

solved

the world-renowned mystery, but which of them, if any, should we believe if we believe the colonel's own nephew who used to mix the spices himself as a child the scientist who analyzed chemically the KFC ingredients in a laboratory or should we believe KFC the multinational corporation that has nothing to gain and everything to lose if the

recipe

becomes public knowledge who claims to this day quote not one has ever been right, Well, don't fear the theorists because current

food

theory

will answer everything.

We're putting the most legit contenders to the test, as well as our own spoiler alert. I think we have it. Hello guys, welcome to

food

theory

where we are today. you're doing something very scary actually cooking cooking food oh my god and not just cooking whatever food we're cooking maybe one of the best kept

secret

foods in all of history colonel sanders secret recipe what do you think the secret is matthew i think the secret the secret is love, oh man, and I heard he was thinking they were like little clippings from his beard that had fallen into the

chicken

batter, so I think you can all agree that KFC's 11 Infamous Herbs and Spices they are one of the most famous secret recipes in food history and we have found many different recipes that say they have cracked the code and today we are going to put them to the test, yes, so we have five different recipes that we are going to try today. um, some of them are crowdsourced, some of them come from food scientists and some of them even come from colonel sanders himself. question mark, let's get started, yes there is a lot to cover today and a lot of

chicken

that needs to be fried, so let's stop throwing our around the bowls and start cooking while we throw our bowls into the ring, it's important to note that recreating the recipe KFC's original is a bit like hitting a moving target, people have been trying to get the recipe right since before I was born and for that long.

The taste of KFC chicken has changed to some extent, the 11 secret herbs and spices almost certainly haven't, but we know for a fact that KFC has modified other aspects of the recipe and preparation process, such as adopting new frying oils that contain less trans fats. Even the late Colonel Sanders believed that his recipe had been altered to a notable degree during his own lifetime; shortly after selling Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1964, he began to express his displeasure at perceived recipe changes being made under the new owner of KFC as a result of some of the recipe contenders us.

We're looking today and looking to recreate the Colonel's true original recipe before KFC Corporate took over. Other recipe contenders seek to recreate the taste of the original KFC recipe the way we've known and loved it for decades. In recent years, KFC has adopted. soybean oil as your preferred frying oil in many places, especially here in the US, as we will be comparing our contending recipes to contemporary Kfc fried chicken and soybean oil, we will also be frying all of our contending recipes in soybean oil . I will mention that Kfc is well known to fry their chicken in pressure fryers, which not only fries the chicken faster but also gives Kfc fried chicken its distinctive extra crispy texture.

Unfortunately I didn't have one of those in the kitchen so today's contenders recipes will be I have to settle for the air fryer Steph and I promise to judge them not on the texture but just on the taste and also to be fair our chicken was totally crispier. Just saying now, without further ado, let's put our first contender to the test, this recipe was developed by author and TV host Todd Wilbur, so Todd Wilbur, for those who don't know, is actually famous for recreating famous recipes. He's made the Big Mac. He's made Wendy's Chili. He's made a ton of famous secret recipes that you technically shouldn't.

It can be made at home, including the original KFC recipe. Do you really need someone to recreate the Big Mac? The commercials tell you what is in it. Special sausage, cheese, pickles, onions and sesame seed butter. Well, there are two burgers. Special sauce. Special sauce. What's that? It's just thousand island dressing. I don't know what he made too, Mrs. Fields cookies, anyway, I thought that was interesting, that doesn't sound delicious, I know I love this man, why can we hire him? I feel like this is a person who should be on On this channel, he is already a best-selling author who has been on every major talk show.

He doesn't need us, but he's been on YouTube before we can badly animate a figure of his for years? That sounds like a high value proposition. We should call him, we should call ourselves, Todd Wilbur, well, first let's see how his recipe works and then, yeah, okay, good point, now the reason we started with this recipe is because Todd Wilbur, in addition to being a guy who has enough talent. having made a career hacking recipes really seems to have done the legwork to get the recipe right in 2011, wilbur's tv show top secret recipes visited kfc's pressure fryer supplier and wilbur spoke to a friend and business partner he knew personally to the colonel. the cherry what is a telecherry tldcg say a cherry pepper what gives it the aftertaste this, of course, added to wilbur's research and trial and error efforts, but perhaps most useful of all is the fact that the findings by wilbur were adapted into a full version.

Step-by-Step Blown Recipe The same cannot be said for other contending recipes in today's episode. Seriously, some of them are basically a list of ingredients without quantities or anything curious. This ingredient is completely prohibited in our house. Stephanie had a traumatic experience. a kid with black pepper completely banned, so this is actually the first black pepper I've tried in over a decade because I've been married to things, that's right, not even in salad or pasta, nothing, not even in soup, just don't Don't use black pepper here, nothing sir, say when, remember sir, you can say when, when the breading and frying were finally completed, it was time to compare Todd Wilbur's recipe with the KFC original, I should make KFC First, it is a delicious vertigo.

I definitely get some pepper, I definitely get some kind of aromatic something in there, but I don't really know what it is and it's mild, it's funny that 11 herbs and spices don't contain much. To be honest, I'm mostly just tasting pepper. yeah I get pepper I get pepper in the back but I don't get a great mix of spices interesting let's try todd todd come on here we go here we go this is the man who literally wrote the book on the secret. recipes counting on you oh we made great fried chicken wow so yeah first impression our fried chicken is great good job so good it's so good I'm so happy this is true wow the taste is what What does it matter, I'm not really understanding it.

Lots of pepper in this one like I did with Kfc. I like it a little more to be honest but I think Kfc has a different flavor to this one. Yeah, I don't feel any of that, like the black pepper I feel on the back. kfc final on a scale of one to ten kfc matching what rating would you give todd wilbur? different there, I have to have somewhere to go, this is the first, maybe I'm braiding it too well artificially. I tried to aim for the middle, so I had room on either side now for recipe number two, which isn't exactly a recipe per se, it's actually a lab result published by author William Poundstone in his 1983 book, Big Secrets. .

That's right, this guy had a lab perform qualitative analysis on a sample of KFC's scramble mix to identify each ingredient present. What is noteworthy about the Pbstone finds. was that the lab did not find 11 herbs and spices even close, in fact, the lab results identified only four ingredients, total flour, salt, black pepper and msg, yes, houndstone verified that the seasoning blend it tested was the only one seasoning involved in the preparation process, no. no additional substance was found in the entire sample, not a single grain, and yes, the laboratory was able to identify every ingredient present in the sample, so according to the big secrets, there are only three seasoning ingredients mixed with the flour for breading from KFC, which is a long way off. of the 11 herbs and spices, especially considering that salt and message aren't technically herbs or spices at all, steph, I know one of the things that you and I have always talked about with food theory is that we wanted having the ability to analyze recipes in a lab oh my gosh I want to send everything through a mass spectrometer yes if any of you have access to a mass spectrometer please contact us we want to tap into coke's secret recipe diet and other things, yes, we promise.

We'll give your institution a shoutout, so if there's any university out there that needs shameless self-promotion, we're here to be shameless with you. She knows how to use a mass spectrometer. I can use it safely. I promise that now I will prepare fried. Chicken at Houndstone was much more challenging than preparing Todd Wilbur's recipe. What qualitative analysis and the great secrets of the laboratory did not provide were the proportions. The laboratory was asked to identify all the ingredients present in the sample, but they were not asked to determine the quantities of those. ingredients, so steph and I were on our own to determine the correct amounts of each seasoning ingredient, we made an educated guess borrowing ideas from similar recipes, but still, the stone pound really left us hanging, this is how much I love to Stephanie. don't make her touch the black pepper at all how cute this is my gift to you stephanie i appreciate it today is the day food theory graduates to become a chef oh food theory you're growing up to be a channel recipes legit andrew from mugging with babbage we're coming for you mugging with babish not at all careful here comes the food theory he's not afraid no not even I'm not even scared just thinking about him I eventually got over my fear and went back to work after coming back -getting familiar with the original KFC recipe, Steph and I bite into our William Poundstone-inspired fried chicken and you see the rest from an accuracy standpoint, yes, from an accuracy standpoint, an accuracy rating of one to ten, mine is a four or five on this one, wow, minus, yeah.

I think it's less. I was going to say mine is still a four, it's about the same level of accuracy. You've got that salty taste, but congratulations, you've got flour, which is how you make fried chicken, yeah, but yeah, okay, okay, now it's next. The Fair Poundstone laboratory test was carried out almost 40 years ago. The original KFC recipe may have changed slightly since then. Also Steph and I probably guessed the proportions of the ingredients a little wrong, but hey, that's kind of like the old Pound Stone, after the fried chicken seasoning it sounds like. It was someone's mango and a game of 99x laser tag, this one is really fascinating, which is apparently why colonel sanders was so disappointed with the fact that the kfc corporation watered down their recipe or the instructions they were giving to franchisees of that name that went to an external provider.

The Marion K Spices company and said, Hey, make me this spice recipe and then encouraged all the people who were in the KFC restaurants to follow this spice recipe. Yes, it's actually here. It's bottled. You can buy it to this day. Yes, you can buy it, but. It has to be called 99x because the KFC corporation got into a lawsuit with these guys to basically say, "Hey, stop it, don't get out of here," which maybe meant they were on the right track. No, I feel like this has been personally promised. I think this is what will get him out of the ballpark.

It also solidifies Harlan's reputation as a difficult guy to work with. I'm going to sell my company to a bigger company but I'm going to try to undermine them because I'm not happy with the work they're doing, fascinating so the story behind 99x seems really promising but it has one problem: we don't know the recipe for 99x , all we know are the ingredients they have listed. on the packaging as required by the FDA, so we know that this spice mix contains monosodium glutamate, white and black pepper, finely flaked salt, sage, coriander and other natural spices, but that's it, it means that if 99x ends being the perfect flavor, the Colonel's Secret is Still pretty safe, Marion K includes a short, almost cryptic recipe on her site and that's what we're going to try today.

I must say that Ilove the fact that one of the spices we use today is called 99x, it's like the hardest cooking spice ever, so clearly you can see a lot of black pepper, it smells really good, it's actually super fragrant. I'm surprised how little spice you really need in fried chicken for it to taste good. It was probably the biggest. I'm surprised since we've been working on this until now. There seems to be nothing here. Nothing, it's just a lot of flour. Mary and Kay's recipe was so easy to make and we are ready to put it to the test 99x in no time.

We always try the original KFC chicken recipe first, then the contender, this one is actually much closer and there are no two nothings, it's not too salty, it's not too spicy, this one is very close, in fact it's very very close , so on the precision scale of one. At ten I would give this one like an eight, maybe I can feel the difference, but I'm not entirely sure all the time, which tells me it's like above. there it's like an eight, yeah, I think if you gave me this In a blind taste test, I would have a hard time telling what is different from KFC.

Yes, I think the 99x, without a doubt, is the closest thing we've done so far. it might be my favorite so far it's my favorite so far yeah, I really like this one. I would recommend that recipe over the other two partly because it's so much easier, you just buy one ingredient, you're set, and then it's here. Great, this one is also super crunchy just tossing it, so the only thing I would love to have seen with this is actually this blend, but with the 99x turned up a little bit with the ratio a little bit higher in the spice category. with just a little more I feel like it would be like a 10.

Yeah, I feel like you could get it right there because right now it's a little more subtle than what I'm getting from KFC, you know what? I'm not sure I'd like it more if you did. I really like this one, it's really good, better than KFC. Oh really, I also like the former better than KFC. I just really like fried chicken. KFC is throwing away. under the bus, I know, I'm sorry, now the story behind our next contender recipe also looks really promising In 2016, the food world was rocked by an article in the Chicago Tribune Joe Leddington, the nephew of Colonel Sanders himself, came forward with this handwritten recipe found in an old scrapbook passed to him by his aunt claudia price, who was harlan sanders' second wife, while the note is not written in the colonel's handwriting, joe claims it contains the Correct ingredients and proportions for the Colonel's secret mixture and Joe should know that he actually worked at Harlan's Diner as a child and claims to have even mixed the herb and spice mixture himself.

Now the chicago tribune tested this recipe themselves and determined that the capital t's in the recipe refer to tablespoons, not teaspoons, they stated that the recipe tasted quite similar to the original KFC recipe as written, but when they took the freedom to add msg, the recipe became virtually indistinguishable, so we took their word on both fronts, used tablespoons and added msg. The Chicago Tribune also prepared its chicken with a buttermilk egg bath. Instead of the skim milk egg bath we've been using so far since its results ended up being virtually indistinguishable, we followed its steps to the letter, this is a lot of seasoning compared to all the other recipes you've made, this one is one a lot, the ratio of flour and seasoning is very different four, four tablespoons of paprika, this is going to be a very spicy chicken, wow, it's going to be a really intense recipe, it's very different from all the other recipes we've made so far. literally a completely different color than the rest of the chicken it's wild, it's red, it's yellow, it's brown, you can actually see the seasoning in there.

I'm really excited about this one, so am I, this one is going to be good, I think the recipe calls for four tablespoons. of paprika, which makes the breading much darker than what we found in the previous recipes. I promised that the color is not because it stayed in the fryer too long, but rather that it stayed in the fryer exactly the same length as all the others of these tested and also the breading had a very good consistency when it reached our mouths, okay , so Matthew, here's what I'm going to say about this, yeah, which you probably won't find relatable, okay, but I grew up here in North Carolina, yeah, I used to go from time to time to places like mom and pop where I would serve like mom and pop fried chicken, sure looked darker, sure tasted spicier and was more similar to this than any of the others we've tried, interesting so it seems like a southern style mom and pop recipe to me , I miss him. about this one is and what i don't fully understand i feel like it should have more flavor than it does, it seems like it's saturated with spices and flavor and you saw how much spice and flavor was in that mix and i bite into it and it doesn't have much flavor there , the buttermilk has made it super juicy, I will say yes it is super juicy, the meat is really delicious but it is definitely not kfc on a scale of one to ten, does it match kfc?

It's like a three like a two, yeah, because I rated it a four before everyone else did much better. I can't believe these results, I'm actually surprised, now it's important to note that if this recipe is in fact authentic, it could well date back to the 1950s or even the 1940s when the colonel was still developing the recipe. It could be an example of the Colonel's true recipe as he conceived it before the KFC company licked its fingers in the mix. The fact that it doesn't match the look or taste of contemporary KFC chicken should be taken with a grain of MSG.

Something similar could also be said for our next recipe known as tc34d. It also seeks to recreate the colonel's OG recipe instead of the fried chicken sold today by corporate KFC, but what you have to understand about tc34d is that it is a recipe meticulously and I mean meticulously crafted by the hive mind of the internet if there is a secret, The Internet will find it, break it and solve it and So there was a group of devoted KFC fans trying to solve the secret kernel recipe and these guys were not only happy with solving it, but they were getting to the level of finding out which part of the world these ingredients came from geographically, I mean simply.

Take a look at this recipe, it is not enough to add 5 16 teaspoons of ginger. They ask you to find ginger specifically from Jamaica because the flavor profile is slightly more precise. Ready to add 0.020 grams of cardamom. Better make sure it's Guatemalan. First, it definitely wasn't easy to find all of these ingredients, even with the help of Google. I couldn't help but wonder if Colonel Sanders really gave a damn whether his white pepper was Malaysian or not when he was making his recipe at a gas station, but hey, I'm not going to stop until I've tried this incredibly detailed recipe for myself. same. tc34d is believed to be a product of a now defunct internet forum, kfc.forumup.co.uk, which is inactive today because members believed it cracked the recipe some time ago.

For years, this dedicated group of internet sleuths used all the information available to decipher the colonel's recipe, which meant adjusting the recipes through trial and error in their home kitchens and absorbing every scrap of information available to them. For example, this photo posted by KFC shows the 11 herbs and spices stored in the vault at KFC headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky. Forum members absolutely curated this photo and made sure their 11 herbs and spices matched the color of the vials in the image prompt. those letters next to each ingredient in the tc34d recipe ultimately refer to the vials with corresponding letters, as can be deduced from the titration method used for these recipes, tc34d is not the only one that these forum members came up with, just Turns out he's the only one. that's the most famous, but there's certainly no unanimous consensus that it's the most accurate.

There are dozens of other recipes developed on these forums that deserve consideration, and otherwise we simply don't have time to try them in today's episode. So how excited are we? to try out the crowdsourced recipe that harnesses the power of the entire Internet on this terrible emotion. I'm so sorry folks, this recipe calls for Tahitian vanilla bean, how could you not be excited about this? So after trying KFC's original recipe we took a bite. tc34d no, no, no, that doesn't taste the same at all, not even close, there's more ginger, not even close, there's more paprika, that I can taste those things in the first place, which means they're not accurate, but no, okay i feel like it's tasty actually but it's a very different fried chicken oh yeah internet team super crazy what you guys are doing you guys are like it has to be jamaican white pepper maybe you should have focused on get the 12 verbs together with the lemonade, almost like people. who do analysis on the internet to complicate things they ask you how you are just you have to say you're fine so Stephanie when it comes to crowdsourcing on a scale of one to ten what's the combination for kfc it's like one sorry guys, TRUE?

As if it weren't, I swear we followed your recipe, we wanted it like we were on the Internet team, we supported the Internet team, yeah, this just wasn't the case, this is not our day, yeah, the group thinks that It wasn't really working, I would say so. maybe it's a maybe it's a two maybe it's a one it's under true, sweetness is the thing that vanilla what are you doing in there? Vanilla really screwed it up now it's worth repeating that tc34d's goal was to try to recreate the colonel's pre-personal. corporate version of the secret recipe, so the goal of the recipe was not so much to match the taste of contemporary KFC chicken, but I must say that the taste of the tc34d was very different, it was not bad, it was very tasty, but for me it just It didn't seem to be related to KFC's original fried chicken recipe in any discernible way.

Tahitian vanilla is really sweet and that sweetness really came through in the recipe in a way that didn't really match my expectations of what southern fried chicken usually tastes like, so that leaves us with a very clear winner in terms of the potential for coincidentally, the 99x clearly took it by a wide margin, so that really solves the problem because the whole problem here is that it's a secret recipe and we've

solved

that secret. recipe using a secret spice, so okay, it solves, it doesn't really solve it, but it does solve the problem, which is that you can't recreate the original KFC recipe at home, in fact, you can get very close to where you take it. .

With it and you can recreate KFC at home, however, there is one final ingredient we have to try. Recently KFC and all their marketing madness decided hey, why don't we launch a soap opera style romance called Recipe for Seduction starring Mario Lopez as Colonel Sanders? We actually covered this in film theory today, so if you haven't seen that episode, check it out. There is an icon. There is another. There is an icard in one of the corners. Probably in this corner. Yes. Probably in this corner. And in a recipe for seduction there was something that we thought might be a hidden code alluding to a secret ingredient that none of these recipes cover whenever colonel sanders is cooking in the kitchen or whatever is associated with citrus, a kind of magic plate of citrus fruits out there, it's very strange.

Again we went into a lot more depth on this in the film theory episode, but we wanted to give it a try. We are citrus, the secret ingredient that KFC is trying to communicate to us through its made-for-TV soap opera special starring Mario López. I know we just left no stone unturned and wanted more fried chicken. Well, I know this sounds scandalous. Matpat honestly expects you to believe that Colonel Sanders put fruit in his recipe. No, but KFC Corporate did it long after they bought the company from the core. Remember how KFC started using soybean oil to reduce trans fats, while citric acid, the chemical that gives citrus its distinctive bitter taste, can be added to soybean oil to make it last longer and that's exactly it. what KFC started doing in recent years they even say it on their website.

Now citric acid has a strong flavor. Is it possible that it affects the taste of contemporary KFC chicken even though it is just an additive to the oil and not an explicit ingredient in the recipe? It was a recipe for seduction. trying to tell us something by mixing over 70 fruit cameos into a 16 minute mini movie there's only one way to find out folks so here we go folks this is our latest batch of fried chicken this is the 99x recipe plus the secret ingredient of citric acid from the soap opera a recipe for seduction first we try the original kfc recipe one last time before moving on to the grand finale this is with citric acid wow is that the secret ingredient I'm imaginingthat tastes a little bit closer, tastes a little bit a little bit closer tastes like it's a nine now I think this raises it to a nine I think this is what it can't really be mario lopez wouldn't do it because it tastes a little bit closer It's a little bit closer, we're making it up no, I don't think we are no, it's got I don't know what's weird, it's really weird, but I thought this was going to be such an anticlimactic episode that we were going to get there and be like No, there's no difference, but I swear it's a little closer, yeah, yeah, wow, no way, huh, that's fascinating.

I think we've run into him. I think if you take the 99x recipe, you increase it just a little bit. Add a little bit more, so yeah, a little bit more than the proportions from the recipe that we got online plus a little bit of citric acid from the recipe for seduction in the oil. I think you have it. This is KFC. I think you made KFC. It's really nice. Guys, it's great, I really recommend trying it at home if you don't have an air fryer. I think you could achieve very similar results with the air fryer.

I think we've probably gotten as close as humanly possible to KFC's secret recipe without actually getting access to KFC's secret recipe. I'm pretty convinced too. I think that's it guys, what a successful episode. It was a great success in many ways. There you have it folks, the secret recipe for KFC 99x plus a little citrus. acid who knew who knew we did it yeah or at least we just found out it's just a theory a food theory bon appetit oh disgusting we didn't plan we're the same thanks for watching the theorists yeahIf you're hungry for more Kentucky Fried content, be sure to check out the other KFC themed episodes we uploaded today at the same time as this episode.

No, KFC didn't sponsor us, but if they wanted to, we'd be totally open. The movie theory episode goes back to that made-for-TV romance movie starring the Colonel himself and gives you more details on how we arrived at citric acid as a secret ingredient, and the game theory episode looks at KFC's interesting foray into gaming consoles. games. you're welcome kfc the least you can do is just send us a high powered chicken powered computer that's no joke that's what it is and now we're talking about it in game theory if you'll excuse me. I have to play a ring-shaped adventure to try to burn off the billions of fried chicken calories I just ate.