Popeyes Crispy Chicken Sandwich

popeyes

chick-fil-a that's always the

chicken

sandwich

battle and for me there still hasn't been a clear winner, at least from what I can tell from all the people I've surveyed on all the online forums, now it seems too much in the air. In our last video we beat up that

crispy

chicken

sandwich

, but I was completely honest about this fact: I am and always have been a Popeyes kind of person and I think I know why, first of all, their seasoning It's fantastic, it's a very filling

crispy

chicken sandwich, but there's one thing that stands out unlike any crispy chicken sandwich I think I've ever had and that's that beautiful crunchy texture.

There's a really cool and simple trick I'm going to show you to achieve. that incredibly beautiful crispy fried chicken, it's actually very creative what they do to fry the chicken, but first we have to go buy a sandwich, so let's roll, so now we head to Popeye's. Funnily enough, I was having a quiet morning and thought this is it. Perfect, it's not that far, the Chick-fil-a took us about half an hour to drive there and this will be a mile away trip. Whatever, guess what the heck we literally passed a store before our Chick-fil-a? the one we're going to watch today, so this is our drive-thru series, it has to be a drive-thru and there's a million

popeyes

, there's one just a stone's throw from my apartment, but again, just for you drive-thru series, we're driving the 6.9 miles or whatever to get back to that popeyes right next to that chic-fil-a, so I guess this is a good thing because you're really comparing apples to apples here, you've got the chicle-fil-it's right next door from Popeyes and I feel like it's just that way, let me talk a little bit about the Popeye's chicken sandwich as we're heading over here right now, so the Popeye's crispy chicken sandwich thing is so fascinating.

For me, it's not just the seasoning, but how special they make it with how crunchy it is in there. When you look at a piece of Popeye's chicken, it has that perfect crunch around it, like little pieces coming off the chicken. almost like something grows out of each piece in this really cool and unique way, it's like these crystals that shoot out of it and each crystal is super super crunchy, it's this little golden nugget that you can crush and get that extra texture and flavor. And I think the way they fry the chicken is a cut above any other fast food restaurant, it just doesn't even come close and that's why I choose Popeyes every time I have my eyes closed, no problem, open your eyes for win every day and to be totally honest with you, this is one of those restaurants that I actually get a little nervous going up against because there's a good chance their sandwich is a little better than mine.

They've reduced it to a tea and think about how many. Of these things they've made over the years, I've probably only made a crispy chicken sandwich. 100 150 times in my life I'm competing against the millions and millions and millions of sandwiches that have probably been made in the past, so it's going to be tough but we're getting close, I think it's right around the corner, so We arrived at Popeyes. Chicken sand is here. The chicken sandwich. It's a really good sandwich, as I mentioned, but now. It's about the test and we're literally sitting basically in front of Chic-Fi-A.

This is a battlefield. Here we are literally in the middle. I have literally never seen a truck in all the time I've been through the drive-thru. that big step for the props for this guy to get a sandwich he knows what he wants he's going to get a sandwich crumble it even the crumble truck is in line look how big that thing is so Popeye's is a pretty simple menu, obviously, but you know, it's, it's, it's really good stuff ten two can dine six piece tenor meal I never get offers here I feel like you have to be able to pick up that beautiful crispy chicken sandwich you have to eat the sandwich itself it's just fire sea and land no, no, thank you no Here, hello, yes, hello, could we please have two spicy chicken sandwiches, oh just one sandwich please, okay, anything else and then three of the regular crispy chicken , without the combination, two red beans and rice on the side, please, and then two? cookies and that's it thank you 28 what was it 28 69 thank you very much how are you yeah thank you sorry not much action here what I like is that they are also making the sandwiches fresh right, they really are made to order not quite fast food though It's kind of fast, thank you, oh, thank you very much.

I also have a question. This is way better than Chick-fil-a. True, it is much better. Yes that's fine. Thank you so much. I just need to confirm. I always try it. Always ask everyone, so thank you very much, have a good day, so I don't know if you can see it, but Chic-fil-a is down there, past that truck, past the McDonald's, this is where we were last time, so apples to apples here. People, this right here is gold, this is real gold, I mean, they're fried to golden and crispy perfection, of course, but I'm protecting this with my whole life here and I like that that lady voted for Popeyes , I know it's a little biased, but she really seemed like such a nice sweet lady and I appreciated her vote, so I never believed or didn't eat a Popeyes cookie.

I'm also dangerously hungry right now. I'm not going to look at the camera or anything that's really Well, it's a good cookie, very dense, but it's a good super spicy cookie. The other day I went to a really good restaurant. Okay, one of the first times I've eaten somewhere since the beginning of Cobin's and it's supposed to be. one of the best restaurants in the country I'm not going to name what it is I'll just tell you all my reviews I took a small notebook to the restaurant a little hidden I was just taking my own field notes there Because it was such a good place, all my notes For most dishes they were fantastic, but they didn't do a good job with the temperature.

I think temperature and food are super underrated, it's a really important part of food that people don't think about. a lot of having very very hot and warm food when it's supposed to be hot and having very very cold and cold food on ice if you've ever tried to eat an oyster when it's not on ice, it's not as good, it's not crispy, the temperature is important. nail temperature at popeyes and so on, we've secured the back now there's a lot of popeye chicken sandwiches here that are regular crispy and that's the spicy one with the s in there now, the first thing I'm going to say is I like the The bag that the Chick-fil-a came in is better, it's one of those cute paper bags that has a very cute perfect logo, but at the end of the day, I actually care more about the sustainability aspect, so I don't know which is more sustainable, but I guess again the plastic that goes with the fil-a chick is probably not the best.

Now the couple other things in here are two packets of honey, it says Popeye's Honey Sauce, but if you turn it around. It really looks like normal honey. I'm curious what honey sauce means. I don't know, try it. It's just normal honey. It's great, honey. Wow, third ingredient in high fructose corn syrup. Now here I have red beans and rice. A long time ago someone showed me that this was a favorite at Popeyes and at first I laughed thinking how can red beans and rice be so good, but let me tell you, it may not look good, but it is pretty good.

Possibly one of the best seasoned things I've ever had at a fast food restaurant. It's completely amazing, so hear me out and next time you go to Popeyes, get the red beans and rice, but for now it's time to crack open one of ours. sandwiches the fact that this was put in a bag squashed a little and still looks like that means popeye is doing something right look how crispy and flaky all that chicken is that's what I aim to replicate today more of that beautiful crispy chicken sticking out from the edge here and a beautiful fluffy brioche bun.

I also like a good amount of sauce on them, but before we take a big beautiful bite of this sandwich, let's start with ours so we can compare them head to head, we'll start here by dividing and cutting our chicken now, as you can see, I'm using this board right on top of my main cutting board because not If we want to have all that chicken everywhere, we'll flatten it out so it's a nice flat piece and then we'll cut the perfect sandwich-sized portion, making sure it has a relatively uniform thickness. This piece is ready to roll.

I'll do the same thing with this big guy here cutting that chicken breast in half and doing his best to get a few sandwich-perfect pieces of chicken again. That's another beautiful piece. Once our chicken is ready, we'll place it in a bowl and then add equal parts buttermilk and pickle juice, which is my special trick for brining chicken. You'll notice this is the first thing we'll do once we get home just to make sure it's brined for a while. I'm doing this before we even make our bread to show you how tender I want this chicken.

At this point, we'll let our chicken sit and brine for at least an hour or so or until we need it now. To make our bread, we'll start by making something called tang zom, essentially it's similar to a roux, almost this kind of milky floral solution that will give us a really nice light and fluffy bread if you look at a lot of different brioche recipes. You'll see this used about 50 times and I'll test it here today to see if it's worth starting. We're going to start with a quarter cup of whole milk and two tablespoons of water and then once we turn on the heat, we're going to whisk while we slowly sprinkle in two tablespoons of bread flour, now over medium-high heat, we're going to let this stir until make it nice and thick, you should see it get nice and sticky like this and once. it's in these lumps, you can set it aside now to make that bread.

We're going to start with three-quarters of a cup of warm whole milk and then into that milk we're going to put two and a half tablespoons of sugar, which I'm going to add slowly. Whisk to try to let it dissolve. I like to think of sugar as food for yeast. It will allow the yeast to wake up a bit along with that nice warm heat that we've provided with our warm milk. Finally we go. to add a tablespoon of active dry yeast whisking as we pour so it disperses evenly, you never want to pour unmixed yeast because it clumps up very easily and then becomes a big pain in the butt.

To let it sit for about five minutes so it wakes up now, once our yeast has risen a little bit, we're going to add three and a half cups of bread flour and then just a small pinch of kosher salt and then we're going to let this start whisking now. , once it starts to slowly incorporate we will add a whole egg plus a yolk and let it start to mix as well, make sure to scrape the sides of your bowl as we want everything to be incorporated. as possible now here we have our sticky flavors which we're then going to place directly into the mixture and try to let it disperse evenly and now after this we're going to slowly crumble in about three tablespoons of cubed butter, this is where the brioche gets that really buttery texture once you're done kneading it for about 10 minutes, remove the dough, then press it back to make sure it's nice and soft like this or soft like a baby's bottom, which is how I like it say and then place it in a greased bowl now I think you know the drill but we're going to cover it with a nice damp towel for about an hour and a half to let it rise a little bit now when we wait for the dough to rise we're going to Make a really easy aioli here for our sandwiches and I know I say easy all the time, but this time I actually mean it, with lots of mayonnaise.

I know we make almost everything at home, but the truth is that mayonnaise is one of those things that I don't make. I don't do it much at home. I just want to be honest with you that it's easy to make, but why not use it in a squeeze bottle? If it saves you so much time, now you can stop there. That's what they do with Popeyes, it's literally just mayonnaise, but I'm going to spice it up a little bit. We'll add just a little bit of lemon zest first, which will give us that really nice light tartness that we all know and love in the food afterwards. that's just a pinch of salt and a few freeze-dried scallions, now we're going to mix this very well and so we get a thick, creamy sauce that we can put on the bottom of each of our popeye sandwiches. this in the refrigerator for later, now that our bread has risen, look at that beautiful thick dough.

Normally I make it in a much smaller bowl and it spills over the sides and looks like this beautiful muffin, but today we kept it in a big bowl so it doesn't leak everywhere. Now our first step here is going to be the sprinkler board, which is some bread flour, which we're going to get this beautiful baby out of and noticehow light and fluffy everything is. look at the whole bottom here and dropping it now we're going to shape it into a little log here, making sure it's very easy for us to cut now I'm going to go in with my bench scraper and divide it into equal parts. here as I am We'll make about eight muffins with this, but you can definitely change this depending on what size you want to make them.

We've done this before, but we'll move them to the side and remove all the flour from the center of our cut. board and then taking one piece at a time we start pinching the bottom of the dough so it's nice and smooth on top once we've pinched the whole piece of dough and it starts to look like soup. ball of dough like this, we'll put the pinched side down and roll it out on our board until it's nice and smooth and tight. You've created the perfect bun and it just needs to rise a little again, but it's ready to roll.

Do this with the rest until you have a bunch of perfect buns now we have all our beautiful buns laid out let's cover this again for about 15 to 20 minutes or so to let them rise again and then we'll be ready to bake now to start on our bowl with the chicken and the buttermilk, once it's had enough time to brine, we'll add some garlic powder which always smells so incredibly good a little bit of onion powder looks like I've got to fill both and a little paprika Now I'm going to whisk this gently and try to coat our chicken with these beautiful colors and flavors.

You should almost get this nice light orange hue in the buttermilk. and at that point your chicken should have a nice seasoning, obviously it's got that pickle juice, that beautiful buttermilk, this just adds an extra level. Now we're going to jump on our dredge, we're going to go in with half a cup of everything. special flour, as well as a full cup of cornstarch or potato starch. I'm going to use potato starch, then I'm going to whisk this together and combine it nice and well combined, at which point I'm going to add a good pinch of salt. as well as the trick to getting those extra crispy bits that you see in a piece of Popeye's fried chicken and that is to add just two or three tablespoons of our buttermilk liquid into that dredge.

Now when we whip this up, you should have all of these delicious ones. lumps that will stick to the edge of that chicken and make those crispy edges when you fry them, just a simple extra step, but it adds so much texture to the final product now, once we heat up the air fryer, our chicken will be ready to dredge at this point, our buns are finally almost ready to cook for now with just a tablespoon or two of water, we're going to crack a whole egg to make our egg wash, you know we have to have an egg wash on top of these brioche buns to make that beautiful golden crust that we're all looking for here, so once the egg is well beaten here, we're going to use our nice culinary brush and lightly paint it over the top of each of our buns.

I'm going to use a lighter egg wash than the typical one nowadays, as I'm really curious to see how the color changes depending on whether the egg wash is just yolks, how much water there is, etc., ultimately I'll find out which one it is. that perfect beaten egg. and I will let you know that my job is essentially to do food research for you, then you can take what looks good and do it and you can look and laugh at the things that don't look so good. I say it all the time, so I'm going to say it again because it's true, if you don't have one of these culinary brushes, I would buy one now, they are so much fun and they are one of those tools in the kitchen that I love. using them every time I have to take them out now that we've preheated our oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit and we're going to let them cook for about 15 to 18 minutes or so or until they're golden brown and beautiful.

Everyone's oven is different. so make sure you keep an eye out for them because after doing all this work on these muffins you don't want to come out with a bunch of black bricks, let's send these over and let's get in our beautiful, oh our beautiful muffins while our bread is in the oven and we've started To preheat our deep fryer or if you don't have a deep fryer, just use a large pot or heavy bottomed pot on your regular burner, it's time to dredge our chicken one at a time. To get those beautiful well-seasoned pieces of chicken out, drop them and press them into that flour and really make sure they're nice and nice and coated.

I'm happy here because I can already see that all those lumps are sticking to my chicken, but press it down here and make sure it's coated well like this, once your chicken looks like this, you should be ready to go ahead and fry. Try using one hand to scoop out the wet dough and the other to dredge it dry. We will do the same with the rest of our chicken until everything is complete to fry our chicken. We'll do what I always do and fry it twice first. We slowly place that chicken at 325 degrees Fahrenheit, letting it rest gently on the bottom.

I like to call this part the actual cooking stage of the process where the chicken is fully cooked and sits a little. We'll let this sit for just a few minutes depending on the thickness of our chicken and then we'll fry it again at 375 so it's completely crispy once the chicken looks like this, which I will say has those nice textures similar to a piece of Popeye's chicken, We'll let this sit aside while we heat the oil to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm up to 375 and it's double frying, let them bubble and crisp up just a few minutes until golden brown.

Once they've been running for a few minutes here, they should be beautifully golden, like that, I must say guys. I think we could have nailed the Popeyes chicken. I'm going to place them here on my rack and immediately hit them with some salt. What I like about the shape of these now is that the salt sticks really well between the chicken. ready to go now these shiny boys have come out of the oven we're just going to let them sit and rest a little bit to make sure they cool down a little bit so we can cut them up but boy oh boy do they look. soft hey we're not filming right okay oh my gosh they feel so good so warm now sometimes I like to just show you the chicken when we fry it and it looks this good this chicken right here is iconic it's perfect , it's fat with a ph, you know what I'm not really going to say anything else about it, just watch and listen, I feel like this crisp factor is going to speak for itself, I don't have many words for this muffin here other than the fact that which is beautiful, I'm going to gently cut it open this beautiful boy, that right there is a wonderful, incredible bun to start building our sandwich, we're going to go down with some of that aioli here spreading it generously around our bun to make.

I'm sure there is plenty for everyone. I'm a big fan of having lots of aioli. It's one of those things that tastes so good and never hurts. Just add a little more. Now what I noticed about Popeyes is that they put it on. on the top and bottom of their buns, which I absolutely respect, so I'll do the same, that's a good non-lazy move from Popeyes. Next, of course, we'll put in our piece of chicken and I smile as I hold it. this because at the end of the day I'm very proud of it the color is off the charts the salt has stuck perfectly to those last bits of oil that stuck to it after we took it out of the fryer it's crispy it's beautiful it's the perfect piece of chicken fried, we'll gently place it on our bun and then feel free to stop me here if this is a strange move, but we'll place the pickles on top.

I'll be totally honest. Guys these are not homemade pickles today and yes I'm embarrassed but I want to be transparent they are not homemade and sometimes I guess that's okay like I said I didn't know popeyes were going to be so far away and we only have limited time on the day once our beautiful Popeye sandwich is almost assembled, we will place the bun on top and there you have it, the perfect Popeyes classic crispy chicken sandwich. I feel like our sandwich here really speaks for itself, it's absolutely perfect. and holding these side to side I feel like we did a really good job of perfectly mirroring Popeye's chicken, I mean their flakes are definitely a little bit lighter, but I actually like how ours turned out now, of course, when it comes Of that, there is only one way to find out who the real winner is.

First we try Popeyes. I just noticed that there are herbs on his cross, there are herbs in his mass and I can never show you this because they are very small and I don't know. what they are i don't know if they're supposed to be there a little weird i've never seen it before let's try it sorry for talking with food in your mouth but it's a real classic i don't know what it is about popeyes, but i know it's good, I mean, it's really good, the seasoning is perfect, the buns are crusty and mediocre but good, and they don't seem to toast the buns, which is why I didn't do it either and in fact sometimes I like the slight sponginess and that kind of carelessness when it comes to making a sandwich like this, it's really tasty and it's so light and fluffy on the inside with every bite, plus we already have the crunch of the chicken and all the butter we need. brioche show, okay, Popeyes definitely wins over Chick-fil-a, but that's not what we're watching today, we're seeing who gets the win between Popeyes and us to start with, let's put that sandwich down, oh baby, that looks good.

Things can get a little complicated here, wow, that's really good, I mean, that's really good. When I look inside my sandwich, I see the juice coming out of the chicken, it is very crunchy and the aioli, although simple, takes up much more. level of fact we've introduced something into our sandwich here that popeyes unfortunately doesn't have and that's sour just a little bit of lemon zest is all it took to get it from here to here you know if you don't believe me and you just want to see what i mean by that next time you order popeyes or chick-fil-a or any crispy chicken sandwich you can get, shave some lemon zest, that's all I ask for, see what that does to the sandwich, maybe.

It won't be for you, but I think so. To be honest, I was a little worried today, but I think we beat Popeyes on this one. The sandwich is simply a dream come true. I love you, thanks for watching the video, don. Don't forget to subscribe if you're new here and if you do, congratulations for joining this food group, but don't forget to hit those notifications too. I'm talking to a lot of you that I know that watch the videos or maybe. I won't be part of the notifications again, what are you doing? I'm going to finish probably the best crispy chicken sandwich I've ever made and I'll probably eat all of these rolls too because they're so good, but I'll see you next time