Let’s get started, but settle in, because there are several details you’ll need to dial in to get this right.
Plan ahead. This takes a couple of days, but don’t panic. The active time per day is pretty short.
Step One: Choose The Right Chicken.
This is harder than it used to be. As Granny showed us back in the heyday of fried chicken, one went shopping for birds in one’s yard. Granny would look for young, small birds when selecting them for fried chicken. If she was roasting or stewing, an older, tougher bird would be in her sights. But fried chicken doesn’t cook long enough to tenderize a tough old bird and needs a youngster.
Nowadays, we most often rely on the modern food chain for provisions, which has wildly changed chicken in the last few decades. Fried chicken has been so popular for so long that smaller, younger chickens are referred to as fryers at your local grocery store. They are typically between two and a half and three and a half pounds. Do not be fooled into thinking bigger is better. You want a smaller, younger chicken, for sure. Look for small fryers.
But even that is problematic in the modern poultry world. Chicken has been extremely popular in the United States for some time, particularly the lean white breast meat. As the giants of meat production thought about how they could maximize profits, reduce expenses, and most importantly, increase yields for the chicken’s most valuable part, chickens were bred to produce larger breasts, sometimes to the point where that genetic manipulation resulted in birds that were unable to even stand up. For some time now, the Cornish Cross and its descendants are the only chickens you will find at most grocery stores.
This means your local grocery likely sells a chicken with unbalanced physiology, which bears little resemblance to the birds in Granny’s yard and will not cook the same way as hers. Today, without adjusting your butchery and cooking in some way, those super thick breasts will be raw in the middle while starting to burn on the crust. The cut described below, which splits the breast into two pieces with a part of the breast still attached to the wing, can help alleviate this.
Luckily there’s a workaround for those of us with a decent local food network or a conscientious butcher at our disposal. Many small producers are raising chickens from breed lines that were never corrupted by modern industrial manipulation and have a more natural composition. They are known as heritage breeds. Look for Freedom Rangers, Rhode Island Reds, and Wyandots, to name a few…
They are often raised on pasture instead of in barns, improving their flavor and quality of life and making them more closely resemble the yard birds from back in the day. This extra freedom to move about will also make the legs and thighs a bit more of a challenge. They will certainly require a very full fry to make the leg and thigh tender.
Prepare to pay handsomely for such birds. But if you’re going to go through the extra effort and mess outlined below, I say it’s best to go all in.
Step Two: The Right Cut.
There are two common fried chicken cuts: the three and four piece. (Some places might fry the leg and thigh together, but it’s not common enough to discuss here further.) Both are an entire half chicken, with the three piece cut, leaving the wing attached to the breast and the four piece jointing it.
We like the four piece cut. In particular, I like to not separate the wing at the joint but rather include a small piece of the breast meat, which evens out the cooking time a little and makes the wing a little more substantial. If you’re stuck with the giant Cornish Cross supermarket birds, cutting the wing further down the breast instead of at the joint can help make cook times more consistent by making the breast cuts smaller.
The four piece cut we’re looking for is: leg, thigh, breast, & wing. Lay the chicken on a cutting board and split it down the middle, through the breastplate, and then through the middle of the spine. Some people may choose to remove the spine on either side, but for me, including it makes for more fun nooks and crannies to pick crispy breading off. Removing the spine makes cutting and portioning easier, but Nana and Granny would never have done it. There’s too much deliciousness there.
Cut off the leg and thigh in one piece, then separate at the knee joint. You may wish to trim the small rib bones and excess fat from the thigh.
Send your knife through the breast about an inch from the wing, and use both hands to push through the rib cage and spine if you haven’t removed it.
Repeat with the other side and pat dry with a paper towel.
You can, of course, skip all this and buy a cut-up chicken, or proceed with the recipe only with your favorite cut(s).
Step Three: Marinate.
It was common to find Appalachians marinating their fried chicken in buttermilk. Many menus, including our own, actually call it out. Buttermilk fried chicken has some marketing heft to it, but it also has a very real impact on the final product.
Buttermilk unsurprisingly takes its name from the fact that it’s the byproduct of butter making.
To make butter, fat-rich cream is separated from whole milk, then goes through lactic fermentation and is churned, solidifying the fat to be separated into butter. What is left behind is buttermilk, which is essentially a fat free, slightly acidic, protein rich whey. Sadly, modern buttermilk is artificially acidified, but we are lucky enough to have a butter maker not too far away who produces real buttermilk.
So our marinade, like the ones made when butter was made at home, and buttermilk was always around, made tons of sense. Same for biscuits, pie crust, the next day’s breakfast of cold buttermilk poured over day old cornbread…
Modern food science often calls into question the value of long or acidic marinades. One of the criticisms, or rather debunked myths, I agree with is that long marinades in acidic ingredients help tenderness. Buttermilk has enzymes and acids that can contribute to tenderness. Its mild acidity allows for longer marinades, but it’s still true that those enzymes don’t dive deep enough into the chicken over a relatively short period of time to have much effect. Tenderness is better achieved through thorough and proper cooking.
Another concern is that the salt and seasoning in marinades do not actually penetrate the meat very deeply over the course of hours or even a couple of days. But you would have to be walking around blind without a cane to not see that long marinades do have an important impact on texture and deliciousness.
For one, the fact that a marinade only penetrates a few millimeters in a day or two, and not, in fact, all the way to the middle of what you’re marinating, is pretty meaningless considering the bite you’re likely to take, includes the extra seasoned exterior and the not so exposed interior alike. As you chew, you commingle the intense exterior and the meek interior. If you don’t give the marinade any time to penetrate and adhere to the skin and meat even a little, it’s useless. It just washes away with the excess. Who knows if it makes it to the meat or not? Letting it sit for a while at least increases the likelihood of consistency.
Also, the marinade at the surface will go through some protein bonding. The proteins in meat, when agitated (especially in the presence of salt), create a sticky film called myosin. Myosin then, in turn, bonds with the other newly introduced proteins, like those present in buttermilk. Those whey proteins mingled with the proteins hanging out on the chicken. The salt and spices help it cling to the chicken before we dredge and secure those flavors in at least the first few millimeters, which is miles better than nothing.
These benefits are something generations of southern cooks just knew with the benefit of generational muscle memory.
One of the most common compliments we get is that our white meat, the breast, which so often disappoints once the flavorful breading is eaten, is delicious and well seasoned down to the bone.
So don’t skip that long marinade. At The Southerner, we do not serve chicken marinated for less than 12 hours. Twenty four hours is better.
Step Four: Dredge.
The salt we use to season the chicken in the brine is sufficient to relieve the need for it in the dredge, and salt in the dredge can also inhibit the caramelization of the breading during frying.
But the seasoning is not. We use the same fried chicken rub in the marinade and the dredge. Soaking in the liquid marinade for a day or two allows those spices to marry and mellow. Adding a second dose to the dry rub adds complexity by letting its sharp edges poke through.
There are two schools of thought when it comes to dredge. One says dredge and fry right away. The other says dredge in advance, long enough to allow the dry flour to hydrate and become a batter of sorts. We live in the latter camp.
Pressure frying, in particular, is problematic with just-dredged chicken. The added atmospheric pressure in a pressure fryer causes the flour, which has had little chance to adhere, to explode off the chicken and become fryer detritus. Skillet frying is almost equally volatile, as the escaping moisture from the chicken just added to hot oil creates a roiling cauldron bent on breaking things.
Dredging a little in advance allows the flour to hydrate and emulsify with the water, starches, and proteins from the chicken and its marinade, which means the crust stays on the chicken.
If you want to take things to the top level, you will dredge long enough for the flour to hydrate, then dry again. Removing that last bit of moisture will produce better-rendered skin and a crispier crust. Still, you’ll have to watch it more closely than your nearly ripe avocados to catch it at the perfect moment.
To avoid overthinking it, dredge your chicken about two hours before you want to fry it. When you don’t see any more dry flour on your chicken, it’s time to cook.
Step Five: Fry.
The fat in which you choose to fry matters, maybe most.
In the heyday of Appalachian fried chicken, lard would have been preferred and is never a bad choice. Professional chicken fryers have long suggested that the fat you fry in is a great opportunity to add flavor. In fact, frying chicken in a mix of whatever fat you have on hand, the more diverse, the more delicious, speaks to what likely happened in Appalachian kitchens as a matter of necessity.
Every stovetop like Granny’s included a can or crock to collect rendered fat. Not a drop would be wasted. Nothing. Not a single calorie. The idea that this would have made their food more delicious was a happy byproduct of frugality.
Also, fats that have been used once (or more) have characteristics that are clean, while unused fats are not.
We have a West Michigan competitor whose claim to fame is that they use fresh oil in their fryers every day. Their chicken is very good, and this SOP makes sense since their goal is to produce uber-crispy chicken. The truth is, the newer your oil, the crispier your chicken will be.
But again, our goal is not super crispy… it’s super flavorful.
So, for us, oil with some age on it is ideal.
I always get a little twitchy when our fryers are new. That beautiful, glistening golden oil sure looks nice. The chicken is light colored, delicate, and crispy. Still, everyone who has worked in our kitchen knows the best chicken is coming out on day two or three, when the oil darkens and picks up the flavors of the fries that came before it, and the chicken looks a little too craggy and dark.
Scottish fish and chips fryers know this well enough to save back some of the previous batch of oil when they change their fryers to seed the new oil to be damn sure they never serve something fried in “clean” oil.
One of the reasons we mainly eat fried chicken in restaurants these days is the nuisance of deep or skillet frying at home. The amount of oil required is intense. If you don’t reuse it, it gets expensive and wasteful pretty fast, not to mention the splatter you’ll find in every nook and cranny for weeks after. And saving and storing the oil brings its own headaches.
If you don’t make fried chicken at home on the regular, like the Appalachians of old, it’s kind of a hassle. But if you decide to include it in your somewhat regular rotation, you have the chance to reach historical gustatory heights by cultivating your fryer oil, like some nurture their sourdough starter, scobies, or vinegar mothers.
Think of it like making an infused oil. Gently warming olive oil and adding some bruised basil and garlic is cute and all, but…
If you fry something in peanut oil, maybe you made tonkatsu, eggplant parmesan, or chicken wings, save that extra oil. That oil smelled like nothing before you cooked something in it. Now it smells fucking delicious, infused with whatever flavors you added to it, plus the changes it undergoes during cooking as fats break down and become more complex. A few days later, you cook some bacon for breakfast or make confit duck or carnitas that leave behind some deeply flavored fat, which should by no means be wasted. Add that rendered fat to the pot. Every one of those flavors contributes. Just be careful to avoid adding fats with a low smoke point, which might burn over 360 degrees.
Now you’re living like an Appalachian. That fat will be the fat you call on for fried chicken or a myriad of other things. If you can’t afford butter that week, that fat will end up in your cornbread or your molasses cookies, and they will be better because of it. The fat you have on hand, infused with the flavors of everything you have cooked and eaten for who knows how long, is now a powerful ingredient in your kitchen that literally no one else on earth has. Your children will remember it because it belongs to your kitchen alone.
Step Six: Cook Thoroughly.
There’s a bit of a misconception that dry chicken is the result of overcooking. There’s a weird truth in this, at least where breast meat is concerned. If you cook white meat to 155 degrees and let it rest, it will finish over 160 and be safe to eat, juicy, and flavorful. But literally, every other cut is inedible at that temp, tough and sinewy and bloody at the bone.
The truth is, there is a dead zone for moist and juicy and it lives between just done and very well done. That zone between 160 degrees and 180 or so is no man’s land and leaves joints bloody, skin less than perfectly rendered, connective tissue still tough, and all the meat that isn’t still undercooked, mealy, and dry.
Cooking to 190 to 203 degrees, as one would when smoking a chicken, will be sure all the joints fall apart easily, no blood in the thigh and legs, with rendered skin and crispy dredge and moist, tender, flavorful meat, even in the breast.
Think of it like you might think about braising a tough cut of beef. About an hour into simmering, the beef will be fully cooked, but try to grab a bite, and you’ll find that it’s still inedibly tough and dry as a bone. Continue to cook, allow the fat to render, the connective tissue to break down and soften, and the muscle fibers to give up their juices and proteins, relax, and then reabsorb those liberated juices and fats; you find where delicious lives.
It’s better to think about fried chicken with the mind of a braise more than, say, grilling, where you’re trying to hit just done. The challenge with fried chicken, of course, where your aim is to crisp up the skin and not burn the dredge while still allowing enough time for the chicken to essentially braise, is quite the balancing act.
Enter the lid.
When you drop your chicken into the skillet, your oil should be around 360 degrees. Depending on your stove, the temp will drop precipitously when the cold chicken hits the pan, and that’s good. You want to cook your chicken at around 300 to 325 degrees (braising temps!) for the majority of its time in the pan.
Putting a lid on your chicken after you drop it does some good things. One, it helps keep the splatter at bay (to be fair, maybe that ship has already sailed, but at least a bad situation is not getting worse). Two, it will help keep the temperature of your oil from dropping too far and making your chicken soggy with fat. If your pan is volcanic after you add the chicken, actively bubbling and bouncing, you’re in good shape. If the oil looks quiet, lazy, and limp, you’re in trouble, and you need to raise your heat quickly.
The lid will also keep the top of your chicken, which should not be entirely submerged in oil, cooking in the trapped steam and headed toward tenderness.
It took me a while to get used to the idea of frying chicken with a lid. After all, trapping steam in the pan is the enemy of crispiness, right? But the truth is, the long cook provides plenty of time to produce crispy and fully rendered skin and dredge, and the leg up it gives in ensuring fall-apart tenderness for the dark meat makes it a must. Remove the lid after the chicken gets flipped, about three-quarters of the way through the cook. This leaves plenty of time to evacuate excess moisture and finish up the crispy skin.
Rest.
Do away with the plate and paper towel, which will only create steam and ruin your crispy delights. Instead, rest the chicken on a cooling rack in a warm oven (170 degrees) until ready to serve. Be sure to rest your chicken for at least five to ten minutes before eating, but ideally, you will serve your guests not too long afterward.
Or don’t!
It’s very traditional to let your chicken cool on your kitchen counter and serve when hunger or social circumstances demand. My feeling is if your chicken isn’t delicious the next day, you have work to do.
Fried Chicken
Marinade:
- One whole 3 lb. or less young fryer, cut into eight pieces (see above)
- Enough buttermilk to thoroughly coat (about 10 to 12 oz.)
- 1 Tbsp or so Southerner fried chicken rub
- Salt
Toss the chicken and the rub together, then add enough buttermilk to thoroughly coat the chicken with a little left to pool around it. Weight everything. Add 2% salt by weight and park it in the fridge for a day.
There is a very good reason why you want to be precise with the salt. Adding too much rub, pepper, or garlic to a dish will stand out as a teachable moment but will not ruin it. But it doesn’t take more than a few grams of salt in either direction to leave a cook in ruins. Too little leaves it flat, flavorless, and forgettable. Too much means, at best, your first bites are exciting, but soon ends in your guests running for cover. Salt to taste is the biggest lie in recipes. You should find a % by weight that suits your taste, stick with it, and measure carefully, especially when cooking in large batches or when salting meats before cooking when taste testing is not an option. Feel free to add rub, herbs, and spices as the spirit moves you. But obey the rules of salt.
Dredge:
- 2 cups all purpose flour
- 2 Tbsp Southerner fried chicken rub
Combine the rub and flour well.
Remove the chicken from the marinade and leave the excess liquid behind with a little shake. Toss the chicken in the seasoned flour until every crevasse is coated, then set aside on a parchment-lined sheet pan until the flour fully hydrates, about two hours.
Warm your cooking oil over medium-high heat in a cast iron skillet to 360 degrees. You want to cook the chicken in an inch and a half or so of fat. It shouldn’t actually cover it completely.
When you reach 360, start to drop the chicken in, in what we call in the biz, presentation side down (the skin side). The temperature of your oil will drop dramatically, but that’s okay. Don’t panic, and don’t crank the heat to get back to high frying temps. Put a lid on the pot and leave it alone for ten minutes. It’s okay if steam and fryer oil mingle for a bit to kind of “braise” the chicken and slow the browning so the crust doesn’t overcook before the chicken is done. The lid will capture steam and help the fryer oil return to temp faster, but not too quickly! You want the oil to be between 300 and 325 degrees for the remainder of the cook. You may need to fry in batches depending on the size of your skillet.
Let it cook until it’s mostly done, and turn and finish until the other side is browned nicely. If you get it right, the “presentation side” should be crispier and darker where it made contact with the pan. Those familiar with home skillet fried chicken will look to this as a sign of quality. Rest on a sheet pan lined with a mesh baker’s cooling rack in a low oven without stacking (under 200 degrees). Give it a good ten minute rest before serving.