One Batch Fried Chicken

 4 June 2022

Recipe from Cook's Country, June 2018

This review suffers from the distance between eating the food and writing about it. Fried chicken makes a good dinner and it is also good to have as a leftover for lunches. However, deep frying is a hassle so I am always up to try a recipe that avoids all of the oil that deep frying entails. This recipe was inspired by the fried chicken recipe developed by Colonel Sanders.

I started with close to 5 pounds of chicken ... I don't remember but I probably bought a whole chicken rather than parts. The published recipe is for just 3 pounds of chicken. The bone-in, skin-on chicken parts were placed in a brine made with buttermilk and salt for about 90 minutes, in the refrigerator. A coating was made with flour, white pepper, celery salt, garlic powder, ground ginger, Italian seasoning, baking powder, and salt. A small amount of buttermilk was added to this mixture to form craggy bits. The chicken pieces were coated with this mixture, placed on a wire rack set inside a baking sheet, and refrigerated for just over an hour. Vegetable oil was added to a Dutch oven to a depth of 1 inch and heated to 350°. All of the chicken pieces were added to the pot then covered for 10 minutes. The cover was removed and the chicken pieces were flipped over and cooked until they reached 160° for white meat and 175° for dark meat. Total time, including all of the hands-off time, was 3½ hours. 

The chicken was good though we found the coating to be a little tough and uneven. I can't compare it to KFC since I haven't eaten there in many years. The Dutch oven was just big enough for this large batch of chicken though the oil did boil over a little. The temperature of the oil never recovered to the desired 300° but that didn't seem to have a big affect on the result. Some of these minor issues are related to the amount of chicken that I cooked.