The Crispiest Fried Chicken | Kenji's Cooking Show

Hi everyone, I'm Kenji and we're going to make some

fried

chicken

, so this is based pretty well on the recipe from my book The Food Lab, although I've modified it a little bit based on the way I made it. we make. in um wurst hall um so there's a lot of ways to make

fried

chicken

, you can, you can batter it, you can dredge it, this is a dredging style of fried chicken, so you'll get a wet brine and then a dry coating and then we'll fry it, so I'm going to start by doing this dry layer right, so I'm going to use about a cup of flour and you'll see why I'm doing this right now instead of you.

You know later on, when we fry it well, I'll

show

you in a second about a cup of flour, about three-quarters of a cup of rice flour, okay, then a couple of teaspoons of baking powder, give that baking so it's more light and then a large amount. a pinch of salt, okay, so I'm going to set that aside and now I'm going to make a spice mix, so there aren't 11 secret herbs and spices in this one, it's just a few, but they work well together and I really like them. a tablespoon of paprika, this is a type of hot paprika, so if I was using regular mild paprika, I would also add a pinch of cayenne pepper if I wanted a little heat, but I also might not heat it up at all, um. a couple of teaspoons of oregano, a couple of teaspoons of garlic powder and you can look at all this, do it however you want, you don't have to keep anything consistent and a little bit of black pepper.

I have a lot of black pepper in this bowl from when I was grinding things, but I'm going to end up adding a little bit of black pepper, which is like the main seasoning here, so about two tablespoons of ground black pepper, now I'm just going to mix that mixture together. spices with a pinch of salt with about a tablespoon of salt and also mix this whole spice mixture together, by the way, it's a good kind of all-purpose seasoning, like you can do this if you're going to roast chicken or, you know, roast a steak. barbecue, this would work well there, now I'm going to take about two-thirds of this mixture and put it directly into that flour dredge, so that's going to be our dredge mixture, this is what we're going to cover. our chicken at the end now we're also going to make a brine batter basically so that the brine consists of buttermilk.

If you don't have buttermilk, you can use a mixture of yogurt and regular milk, like half and half, that will work. okay, with a cup of buttermilk that I'm putting in here, I'm going to add an egg, then I'm going to add the rest of this spice mixture and about another tablespoon of salt, so you actually want this to be quite salty, so this this mixture it does two different things, so the whey in it is acidic, which will soften it a bit, but really the whole point of this brining step is that you want to be salty enough to start breaking down some of the muscle. fibers and the chicken and that allows it to retain moisture better, uh, when it's fried later and that's important because we want our chicken to stay juicy, the buttermilk is there mainly to give it a little bit of flavor and also because it adds viscosity so that it sticks to the chicken and to that end I'm also going to add a pinch of the dredge mixture and that will thicken this just a touch so it sticks better so what we have here is something like that. of a cross between brine, marinade and batter and that's exactly what we're looking for, so now I'm going to put all of this aside and I'm going to work on my chicken because you need chicken to make fried. chicken I'm starting with a whole chicken um, that's by no means a necessity, you can make it with whole thighs or legs, you can make it with white meat, dark meat, whatever you prefer with bone and skin, but again, you can make it boneless if you prefer uh it doesn't really matter this the magic is really in the kind of mixture dredged into the frying process oh so to shred a chicken I start by cutting the skin between those joints okay then I turn it over to the whole bird.

Over the top you want to stick your leg out until this joint comes out here, okay, and then take your knife and continue along the spine. There's a little piece of meat here called an oyster and you want to make sure you get it because it's nice and juicy. Okay and then it just goes right between the bones and there we have a leg. Same for this guy, get the bone out and make sure you get the oyster. There you have two legs, so for the fried chicken we're going to get this. whole wing with a little bit of breast meat attached like this, they're ready to be coated, okay, like this, I like to have that little nugget of meat attached so that the bones go into the breast, the breasts give you a little bit of something.

Another thing to hold on to now we're going to split the back of the chicken, so hold it upright like this knife is going through those bones. It should be nice and easy, and you can basically just tear it off with your hand and then just use your knife where necessary, okay, that's our chicken tenderloin that we're going to use for broth later. Now we're going to divide the breasts once in half, like this, these are some big pieces of skin that will become those. Scoop out the broth as well and then again in half, okay, and finally we're going to divide the drumsticks and the thighs so that when you move it around you can find where the joint meets, okay, and you want your knife between those joints. so and if you have a little false start, you can always take out the knife and restart it, but you should be able to find that joint pretty easily, so now we have how many pieces of chicken that is, one, two, three. four five six seven eight nine ten ten pieces of chicken, okay, I'm going to throw this in to make sure everything is covered well and then what I'm going to do is transfer this to a container. use a can as a chamber with a lid or maybe if I have a big ziplock bag you can do that but put it in a container and let it sit in the fridge overnight at least overnight you can go up to a couple. nights I've done this up to two or three nights and it actually comes out even better, juicier the longer you let it sit in this marinade, the juicier it will get, you know, until it starts to rot, okay, that's it, so My hands are dirty, so I'm not going to do the snap, but I'll see you all.

How should I do this? I'll see you all in a couple of minutes because I realize I want to

show

you this trick for putting things in Ziploc bags. So when you put things in ziploc bags, it's very easy for the ridge, the ridge, the edge and the seal to get dirty, so what you do is you just open it, turn it over, like this, like this, okay, and then you can put everything in there and it's okay if something leaks a little on the edge, as long as it doesn't get into the area with the seal, because then at the end, once you're done doing all this, you turn it over and you're done. .

Well, it's nice to do too because it keeps the bag open and ends up being shaped like a cube, which makes it easy to do things like pour in the rest of the marinade without it falling everywhere. Okay, I'll even leave it like that while I wash my hands, so now we unroll this and to get most of the air out of the ziploc bag, the way I do it is I seal it not all the way, but almost completely. So, as you know, there's an inch or two left at the end here, then you lay your stuff out horizontally, squeeze the air out the side.

It doesn't have to be perfect for something like this, but you want to squeeze out the air. mainly on one side and try to get it all out through that little space and then close it now that you have a nice sealed bag, the marinade is there, it's in good contact with the chicken and it's ready to go in the refrigerator. So now I'll definitely see you in another minute because I'm going to show you something else. When you put things like this in a ziplock bag in the refrigerator, make sure you always put them on a tray or in a baking dish or something. the plate first because in case there's a leak, you want something to catch it so it doesn't spill all over the inside of your refrigerator, so now I'll definitely see you during the night, so okay, the night's over.

Now it comes. the fun and messy part so we're going to fry this now so I have my bowl of seasoned flour here and I'm going to open this up and we're going to use it and then I have this paper bag and I'm going to use this paper. Bag method, um, which I like to do at home sometimes, um, so the first thing we're going to do is get our hands dirty, so don't worry, you'll wash them at the end, which I want. What I do is I take a little bit of this wet marinade and put it in the flour like this, just drizzle it in now.

This is a trick I learned. I talked to a friend of mine who used to work at a fried chicken fast food place. and what he told me was that as they dredged the chicken, the batch and the flour that they dredged the chicken in, as they made more and more chicken throughout the day, the flour would start to form these little clumps because of the excess. marinate the buttermilk that went into it and those lumps would actually stick to the chicken and make the later batches of chicken better than the first because they add all these kind of extra nooks and crannies, so what we're doing is artificially get the flour to that stage, so we're just going to sprinkle in a couple of tablespoons of that mixture so that the flour gets a little bit clumpy, so you see, you'll see it build up a little bit, that's what we're looking for now we're going to add our chicken I'm going to add one piece at a time, make sure it's well coated with flour so they don't stick and there aren't any dry pockets. remaining flour or sorry wet chicken we want everything dredged well and then when the bowl starts to fill we're going to throw them in this paper bag it's just a shopping bag okay let me continue now there are different types of Schools of Thought on whether you want to let your sick chicken sit and rest after it has been in flower or not.

I've tested this pretty extensively and what I found is that if you let it sit and sit, the flour starts to hydrate. um eventually it starts to form some gluten and what ends up happening is the flour mixture gets a little tough and the coating gets tough so I actually prefer to fry it right after dredging it so I have all my chicken. Into the bag I poured the rest of the dredge mixture in there like I said, don't worry about dirty hands, we'll clean everything up after we're done, pinch the top, pinch the top like this, set it down and then just shake it out. because that painter on TV would say, "I'll beat the devil," that's what you hit his brush right and yeah, okay, so we covered our chicken.

Now I have my fat here. This is rice bran oil. um, you could use peanut oil. use shortening, you could use lard, you could use vegetable oil, so what we're going to do is double fry this chicken, so we're going to fry it once let it rest and then we're going to fry it. I did it again and I'm looking to have a temperature of about well, I was looking for around 325, this is probably 340 350, that's fine. What's going to happen is when you add the chicken, the temperature will drop and we want the final temperature. after it goes down to about 275, 250 to 275 degrees and that will be for the initial

cooking

where the chicken will basically be cooked through and then we'll raise the temperature again and fry it at the end, fry it again at the end. so when you add food to a hot fat you should always lower your hand down, don't drop it from above because you know fat can feel scary and if you drop it from too high it will splash, that's how you burn you want to go down hand to the surface and gently lower the food you always want to leave it on the bottom a little so it starts to settle before you drop it completely that way it doesn't end up losing too much crust it doesn't stick to the bottom it's okay we'll probably include half of this for this first batch.

I don't know, maybe we can include everything if we try, yeah. go with that for now, okay, so we'll fry the rest of this later. I'm going to wash my hands so you can see, I'm

cooking

, I'm frying in a wok. I think a wok is the best container. for frying, you can also do this in a dutch oven if you want, but walking has some advantages, one of them is that it has these flared sides, you know, and because of those flared sides as you go up in height in a walking , its volume increases non-linearly, so with a pot with straight sides, the higher you go, the volume increases linearly with the height of the pot, meaning that if your oil starts to bubble, those bubbles will actually start . go up the sides and you could have that kind of spill, whereas with the wok, because of the flared sides, as the height increases the oil bubbles rise, but then they spread out, so it's never really much safer for me to fry. a wok that fry on the straight side of the thing, um, although those wide sides also make it easier to get in there and maneuver foods around that we're not going to get right yet because we want to let them sit.

Sit a little bit, we want the crust to start setting before we start getting in and playing, perfect, we're around 275 slightly. Done, we're good, I'm going to adjust the flame as I goto try to maintain that temperature all the way until the chicken reaches around 155 degrees in the center, the breath is around 155 degrees, the legs and thighs will reach around 165. maybe 175. Okay, and that will probably take around, I don't know, probably 10 to 12 minutes or so. um oh, people have asked me about this thermometer that I use here. This is an oxo instant read thermometer, they don't make it anymore. so you can't really get this thermometer anymore, but the thermometer that I recommend the most is the thermapen um, the thermapen, the thermapen like the mark 5, I think it's available now, it's a relatively expensive thermometer, it's like you know that you will run probably 80 bucks, maybe 100 bucks, but it's top of the line, instant read, super accurate, it's a great thermometer, if you want to stick to a budget you can get the thermopop, which is about 25 bucks, give or take, read a little slower.

Less accurate, but still a great thermometer. The reason I'm using this one too is because I lost my thermopen when we moved to Seattle last year, but I'll probably buy a new one very soon. Alright. I'm going to let this go, I'm going to let it go untouched for a few minutes and then I'm going to flip the pieces very gently using, in fact, it's probably ready to gently flip right now, let's take a look. Let's go with some of those first ones we stayed in? A couple of minutes have passed. Okay, the reason you want to stir it well first of all is to promote even cooking, but I also don't like it when my chicken sits on the bottom. and it kind of gets if wherever it's in direct contact with the metal it's going to cook a little bit faster, so if you don't turn the chicken, it's going to end up having kind of dark spots on the crust, which I don't like. loves. the look or the taste so I like to keep it moving a little bit but you want to be very gentle at this stage you really want to dive in and turn it very gently so you don't lose the crust.

I want that crust on the skin to have that cosmic unity, so I'm going to let this fry basically do what I just did for the next few minutes until it comes up to temperature and I'll see you then, so I'll see you again in about 20 minutes. It's actually been about 20 minutes less, much longer than I expected because these chicken breasts are really huge, which I should have taken into account, but I already removed the leg from one of the legs and the wings that it went with before because they reached their temperature, uh, but these chicken breasts, ah 152, they're getting close, um and then what I'm doing is, oh, that guy did it right, what I'm doing is how are the pieces.

That's it, I take them out and don't worry if they're not super crispy at this point, they're not supposed to be and as the space in the wok clears up, I've been adding the remaining bits so I've got two. more pieces of chicken in there, the thighs and then as more space clears, I'll add the remaining pieces and continue, so basically you just want to keep the chicken, you want to monitor it, you want to take it out when it gets to its uh. target temperature for each piece, again, that's around 165 for dark meat, at least um and at least 155 for light meat, um, in this particular case, it doesn't really matter if your chicken goes a little over your target, you know that often If you're roasting a chicken, for example, if you go over the target temperature, the meat gets very dry when you've been salting it all night like that, that acts as a protection against dryness, so even if you go over the target temperature .

The goal is a little, your chicken will still end up pretty juicy, so don't worry about that, but you want to hit the minimum at least and again, don't worry, if it's not crispy, we'll get to that shortly. here we go, that one is ready, I'm going to continue frying and I'll come back to you when everything is ready, so I'll see you in 15 minutes, about 15 minutes, um, okay, so all my chicken is up to temperature. I'm just taking out the last piece now and like I said, these crusts aren't going to be extremely crispy at this point, in fact they're going to be quite delicate so you have to be very careful with them, so I wouldn't recommend them by the way.

Using tongs for this process, you want something like this, a flexible spatula that you put under the chicken and actually move it around without the risk or at least minimizing the risk of scraping that crust because you don't want that to happen, although it can still happen, for of course, you still have to be careful, but I don't know if you can see this, but you see how nice and craggy these chicken pieces got super craggy, so now, to make them crispy, so at By the way, at this stage , the reason we're frying twice is because when you fry the chicken once and this is true when you're, whether you're frying chicken or onion rings or you know whatever you're going to do. anything you want to form a nice crust on that doesn't get soggy when you fry it, once some of the moisture will come out and evaporate, that's what causes all the bubbles when you fry things, that's the moisture that evaporates and that's part of what will make the crust crispy, but it still has quite a bit of moisture underneath the meat itself and in the bottom layers of the crust that you never really make out, so the chicken sits. that moisture could start migrating outwards and that will soften the crust pretty quickly, so what you want to do is let the chicken fry so that it's fully cooked and then let it rest a little so that the moisture has a chance to start to come out again and you can see that the ones I took out at the beginning are actually a little soft and that's all the moisture from the bottom that comes out and is absorbed. that crust and soften it again and that's good because now what we're going to do is fry it a second time at a higher temperature and we're going to get that moisture out again all the moisture that went in that crust is going to come out again and you're going to end up with an extra dry and extraordinarily crispy crust.

This is a trick I use when I let you know something like American Chinese dishes where you are frying. things and then put them in a sauce, kind of like general sewing, you know, I think, andrew ray, uh, gorging on babish, he did a version of my general sewing chicken recipe on his channel, where you can go watch it and I'm pretty sure. he also does the double frying process there, I'm pretty sure he does, maybe not, but if he doesn't, you should make it even crispier, it will keep, you can get it in sauce and it will stay crispy, you know, during the overnight in the fridge, you can microwave it with sauce and it will still be crispy, so at this stage you can take the chicken and you can fry it again straight away, which I'll do with a couple of pieces. just to show you or you can let it sit until you're ready for dinner, which is what I'm going to do with the rest of the pieces so I can feed my family tonight.

It's actually relatively safe to skip the fried chicken because after all, you fried it first so it's sterilized, it's got that crust on it, so there's nothing that can get into the meat. In fact, that's one of the reasons why fried chicken is such a great picnic food because even at room temperature it has a pretty long shelf life and yes, so you can let it sit for several hours and then fry it again right before of the dinner. You can also put it in the refrigerator and fry it, fry the pieces however you want, it takes a little longer to fry when you do that, but worst case scenario it takes my um my restaurant, well I'm not the chef there anymore, but the restaurant that I opened to him was the chef of um, the chicken that we make there, we fry it twice and we refrigerate it overnight between the frying stages and that actually allows a little bit of excess moisture to get out into that crust so that when you you fry the second time it's really really crispy and that's how we get our chicken so crispy there, but what we're going to do now is I'm just going to fry a couple of pieces just to show you the results and also so you can try it out, so that for the second fry we want the oil to be hotter, we want the entire frying to be done between around 300 and 325 degrees, so if you are making a large batch of chicken, you will want to have a couple quarts of peanut oil , this is rice bran.

Peanut oil works very well. Canola oil works well, but you want a couple quarts of oil and I want to heat it higher than 300 to 325 because when you add the chicken, the temperature will drop, so now I'm only going to do a couple pieces, so I'll probably I can bring this up to 325 and because I'm only adding a couple of pieces and they're still relatively hot out of the fryer, the oil will hold the temperature just fine, but if I were refrigerating them overnight or making the whole batch at once, I would probably heat the grounds to 375 or so so that as I add the chicken pieces it ends up at around 300, at least 300, I mean I like to have one of these on hand when I'm frying so I can skim it. and make sure the oil stays clean, at least relatively clean, if you're lucky enough to have a deep burner, you know it's a countertop fryer, or if you have a restaurant where you have a real fryer.

Well, one of the big advantages of a restaurant style or even countertop fryer is that the heating elements are actually raised above the bottom of the oil container, whereas when you're cooking, when you're frying on a countertop on a stovetop, the Heat comes from the bottom and therefore anything that falls into the oil ends up at the bottom of the container, no matter what the pan is, no matter what type of pan you're using, and that causes it to burn, which can cause your oil to break down faster, whereas with a restaurant style fryer or a countertop fryer, the heating elements are above the bottom of the oil, so when something falls off the chicken or whatever and it settles at the bottom of the pan, it doesn't fit. direct contact with the heating elements, so they don't actually burn that easily, so our oil is around 3 45 right now.

I just tried it. I'm going to carefully place a couple of pieces of chicken back in, we'll do that. that type and we'll do this type now, this frying stage will only take a couple of minutes, especially since this chicken is already quite hot, if it came out of the refrigerator, it would, I think at the restaurant we set the timer for three minutes um and there is where the chicken eyes are for big chicken breasts like that, you would probably do four or five minutes, you don't have to let it get back to the same temperature the second time, letting it get to the top just so it's hot enough to eat in the center is fine, what you're really looking for is to get that nice golden, ultra crispy crust, there are the fries, I'm going to prepare a little landing bowl so that when you take the fried foods out of the fryer, some people tell you that the Whether you put it on a rack, I actually like to put it on a paper towel because it removes some of the excess oil, whereas on a rack you have to rely on it dripping. and the oil doesn't really drip that well from fried foods, um, it gets soggy again when it sits, so you'll want to soak it up in one of these in a little bit, at least we call them diaper trays at the restaurant. but um in a bowl with um paper towels or a clean kitchen towel um put it in there, wipe off the excess oil and then you can transfer it to a rack if you want it to rest and if you like a lot of chicken and you want to cook it in batches, you can put it in a pan with a rack like this and store it in a 200 degree oven and it will stay nice and crispy as you cook subsequent batches I think.

We are there, sometimes they spit on you. Okay, let's turn this off for now. Oh boy, let's get a plate for this so you can see what we're working with. It's hot. I didn't season. I should have always seasoned things just when. They come out of the fryer. I had an old chef who used to say "I don't care if you're frying dog shit." Well, he didn't say "shit," but he said in other words, "I don't care if you." you're frying dog poop as soon as it comes out of the fryer, you season that dog poop.

I'm going to season hot food while it's hot. What does that look like? Oh man, okay, this with a drizzle of hot honey, perfect for you to see how. crispy that crust can you hear it um dude dude ed levine i would say that's serious fried chicken crispy juicy oh man delicious i don't know where the dogs are i'll go get them come on come here shaboom you're going home okay boy sit down hey don't jump sit down , good girl, okay, double crispy fried chicken, extra crispy, cosmic unit, look, this is the cosmic unit that Ed used to refer to between the skin and the crust, the skin doesn't come off the crust, it sticks and that's for that overnight buttermilk soap, okay guys, girls, non-binary friends, I'm going to get dirty for a while, see you later, bye.