Transcription
The crunch says everything. I'm Frank Proto, professional chef and culinary instructor, and today I'm going to show you how to make fried chicken with my method. You're going to get crunchy, juicy, tender chicken that's never dry. This is Fried Chicken [Music] 101.
This might be controversial, but I like to use boneless chicken thighs. The thigh has lots of flavor to it, has some fat to it, and it doesn't dry out that easy, and it gets nice and crisp when you fry it up. People might say, "Chef Frank, why boneless?" In order for it to get a nice crispy crust and be cooked all the way through, I like to take the bones out. I'll bone them myself. If you like bone-in chicken, this recipe still works; you just need to cook it a little bit longer.
Time to bone out my chicken thighs. This is a firm boning knife. What I like to do is get in there alongside the bones, open it up, pinch under the bone, run my knife through. Save these for stock; don't throw them away. Get any cartilage off, trim off any extra skin. I do want skin on there, but I don't want a lot of extra. Cut this in half, and I just think it's a better portion size. Now, some might argue, "Oh, that's just a nugget or a chicken finger," but chicken fingers and nuggets are not made with thighs with the skin on. This is not a nugget; this is not a chicken finger. I stand by my word. Okay, my chicken is prepped. Now it's time to make my brine.
A brine is basically a salty solution that we're going to marinate our chicken in. The brine is going to tenderize it; it's going to add flavor; it's going to add some saltiness and seasoning that's going to allow our chicken to hold on to moisture. What I like to do is mix my brine in a bowl before I put it in my chicken to make sure all of my ingredients are distributed really well. And what I have here is some buttermilk. Now, buttermilk is a cultured milk; it has a lot of acidity; it's got some tanginess. I like to add hot sauce to my mixture as well. This is Louisiana hot sauce; I think it tastes great. You can use whatever hot sauce you have. Garlic powder. Now you might say, "Hey, Chef Frank, you're a fancy chef, why using garlic powder?" I really think garlic powder is a great convenience ingredient. In order to get the punch that this gives, I'd have to add a lot of fresh garlic, and I think garlic powder does the job. Some mustard powder. Mustard powder might be one of those ingredients that you're questioning. I think mustard has a great sharpness to it; it adds a little spice to this, just flavor that everyone's like, "I know that flavor, but I'm not sure what you put in here." And then, of course, salt. This is a brine, so we want a fair amount of salt.
So once I have all these things in the bowl, just whisk it together so it's combined really nice. Make sure everything melts—the salt melts in there—and we don't have any big lumps. Once it's combined, all this can go right on top. Make sure the chicken is covered with brine. So if you have to make a little more, make a little more. Chicken, when you put it in a bowl, tends to stick to itself. So if you don't move it around, you're going to have the outside of these two pieces of chicken brined and the center with no brine. So I like to just mix it up to make sure my chicken gets coated really, really well. The most important part of the brining process is to let it sit. I do at least 12 hours. Now, if you don't have 12 hours, that's fine, but if you want to maximize that juiciness and tenderness of the chicken, you need at least 12 hours in the fridge.
The chicken has been brining for 12 hours, and now we're going to dredge. Basically, we're taking our wet chicken and coating it with dry flour. The whole point of doing this dredge is that the flour mixture is going to coat our chicken, form a nice crispy crust, to seal in the moisture, to ensure a juicy fried chicken. First thing I want to do is season my dredge. I'm going to add about a couple tablespoons of salt here. If we don't add salt to the dredge, it's going to be a little bland. And then I have some fresh cracked black pepper. I like using a whisk for dry ingredients; it distributes things really well. And then we can just take our chicken out of the brine and put it right into the dredge. That brine is kind of sticking; I want that; that's going to help my flour stick to those pieces of chicken. So just drain it lightly, place them into the flour. Work caution here; don't just start dumping a lot of chicken in here. I do two or three pieces at a time. If you add a lot of chicken at once, our flour gets really too clumpy, and it gets really difficult to work with. 1,000 pieces in there, I'm not going to be able to coat it really well. Make sure that we get it into all the cracks and crevices, give it a light shake, and then we're going to put it on the rack. I like to use a rack for this part because it allows the dredge to evenly absorb the moisture from the chicken. I try not to let them touch too much. So we're going to let this first dredge of flour soak into the chicken. We want to let this sit so that the dredge gets a little sticky and wet, and this is going to ensure that our crust does not slide off the finished piece of chicken. If it's wet and sticky, don't worry, it's going to be okay because I'm going to do a second dredge before we fry so that we get that really nice thick crispy crust. One important thing here is not to get rid of your flour at this point. The brine that fell in there kind of wet some of the flour, and we got these nice little lumps. This is going to be great when we do our second dredge, 'cause those lumps are going to give us nice crunchy pieces.
So we've finished the first dredge of the chicken. We're going to let it sit here for about 25 to 30 minutes, which gives us a lot of time to set up our fryer. We have our chicken that has absorbed all of that first dredge, we have our dredge, and we have our hot oil. I chose to use a cast iron. Cast iron pans are really dense and retain heat. When you fry, sometimes when you add the chicken to the pan, you get a dip in temperature, and it makes your chicken greasy and soggy. The cast iron lets us hold on to that heat and maintain a nice even temperature throughout frying. So I'm going to take my chicken—you can see that it's nice and sticky—I'm going to put it in for the second dredge. I'm going to get those nice big chunks, those nice big bits. Give it a light shake, but don't shake it off too much, 'cause that flour is going to be our crust when we drop into the fryer. We drop away from us so that if it splashes, it splashes away from us. You can adjust your heat if you feel it's too high. I think I got a really nice heat right now, and we're just going to let it fry. Leave it alone. Once we start to see it getting brown on the bottom, we'll give it a flip. One of the most important things that you want to watch for when you fry is bubbles. If you see bubbles, that means moisture is cooking out, and it's sealing that chicken in—oil is not getting in. If you drop this into the pan and there's no bubbles, you're going to have greasy chicken. So you want to make sure that you always have some bubbles. All right, so it's been about 4 minutes, and we're going to flip it over so the other side can cook. I'm flipping away from it as well so I don't get splashed. This batch is ready to go. Drain it really well so we're not dripping everywhere, right onto a rack. The reason I want to put this on a rack is that it won't be sitting in its juices and it'll remain crispy. If you put this on a plate, the chicken's going to steam from underneath, and your chicken's going to get soggy, and we don't want that. So put it on a rack to rest, drain it really good, and then you fry your next batch. If I was to take this chicken and not do the second dredge, all the spots where it was wet would actually burn. So that second dredge is really important. Watch what's going on; I'm looking for a nice even brown color on the bottom before I give it a flip.
So my chicken is done frying. Look at it; it's got that nice craggly crust on the outside. I know that it's juicy in the middle because I brined it. I just can't wait to get this on a plate and eat it. My fried chicken takes a little time, takes a little effort, takes a little bit of love, but look at it—it is gorgeous. Who would not want, want to have a piece of this fried chicken? Put up to my microphone. Can we hear this? That is the sound of crispy chicken. That wasn't a big enough bite. Hold on. The crust is super crisp; the chicken on the inside's super juicy; the seasoning is all throughout the chicken 'cause we let it brine for 12 hours. I think this is the perfect fried chicken. I know frying at home can be intimidating sometimes, but if you follow my method, you follow my technique, you're going to have tender, juicy, and crispy fried chicken every single time. [Music]