Making Joshua Weissman's Chicken Sandwich

Well, well, well. Oh, how the tables have turned. Because today we are making Joshua Weissman's chicken sandwich from his new restaurant better. I'm pretty excited about this. Now let's go! So for those of you that don't know, Joshua Weissman just opened up a new fried chicken restaurant here in Austin, Texas called Ben & Lynn's. And here I've got basically everything he serves in the restaurant. So let's get Marcus in here for a second opinion and give it all a taste to start. Okay, Marcus, here we go. Now my wife just went and picked all of this up. She was our secret shopper and she ate most of the fries on the way home, which is a little bit upsetting, but also a good sign for the fries. I air fried them a little bit. Well, they're great fries. They're really good. Oh, they're battered and I actually prefer battered fries. Yeah, they have this light, crispy edge and the interior is very like creamy, almost like mashed potato, which is exactly what I'm looking for in a fry. We're not here to dog Joshua Weissman, all right? If it's really good, we're gonna say that. If you guys watch our channel, you know we're honest about these kinds of things. Love the fries, man, that's great. And they traveled all the way here. They're still good. Oh, if you need proof, it's the fact that only seven of them made it back. Okay, so for the sauces, we have Ben and Lynn's honey mustard ranch and the yam yam sauce, which is the sauce they dip the chicken in if you order a dip. We don't have any fries, but we got the nuggets too. Let's try the Ben and Lynn's. Interesting. To me, it tastes like there's like chicken, maybe chicken bouillon in here. You taste celery salt? Could be celery salt too. The thing I like Off-Rip is it tastes different. It does taste different. It looks like it's gonna taste like every one of these chain orange sauces, but it does have its own unique thing. I mean, it's good. I'm a little like torn on that. You might love it. I could see you not liking it. It's unique and it is good. It's definitely not bad. There's something in there I can't quite pinpoint. Let's try honey mustard. I like the honey mustard a lot. Let me try one of these. The honey mustard's excellent. I don't know what kind of honey or mustard he's using, but the combo here is really nice. I think there's a little bit of yellow and maybe like a fancy mustard too in there, but like the flavor of that is really nice. And I don't usually even like honey mustard if I'm being honest. So that's quite good. By the way, the nuggets themselves, nice. Good flavor, juicy. The batter looks really nice. Obviously, they would be crunchier if we ate them at the actual shop versus getting takeout, but the taste and flavor is really nice. Dude, how is the ranch? Joshua Weissman's gotta make good ranch. And he do. Nice. It's a heavy dill ranch and it's really good. Nice thickness. Not too thick, not too thin. And now the yam yam sauce. Wow, look at that. I like the look of it because it dips nicely, but it doesn't just like fall away. Hmm, that's good. It's a sweet, spicy sauce. I think there's a lot of honey in there. It's very sweet, very honey. It's almost like hot honey, like a version of hot honey. I think that's probably what yam yam sauce is. I don't know if that's a made up thing or if it's like that already exists. Isn't there like a yum yum sauce thing? That's like mayonnaise. It's definitely mostly honey. I would say this is a very positive start. All the sauces are a little bit unique and delicious. Nothing to really complain about here. They're all good. I'm still a little torn on the Ben and Lynn sauce. Out of all the sauces, like I would say that might be my least favorite. Yeah, I agree. I would rather have just regular comeback sauce. To be fair, you could love that sauce. It's just, it is specific as hell. The honey mustard's a great honey mustard. The ranch is just good ranch that's heavy on the dill. Delicious. I mean, if you're Joshua Weissman, you can't mess up ranch. Great ranch. All right, let's check out the sandwiches. Got an egg shape to it. A little hard on the wrap, maybe. Let's dissect the dry one here. So that's the Ben and Lynn sauce. Big old fried chicken thigh in there and a bunch of pickles on the bottom. Simple sandwich, but I like that, you know? Fat, acid, it's all there. Should be good. Let's try that one. All right, let's see. Dipped one. So same exact thing here, except it's been dipped in the yam yam sauce. Nothing really more to say about that. I just want to hold it like this for you, just to imagine yourself being me right now tucking into this thing. This is what you're getting. I love the shine and the look of the yam yam sauce. And here's the dry one. Now keep in mind, these are takeaways. Let's get a look at the chicken itself. Wow, you can definitely tell he brined it because look, it's shining. It looks very juicy. Yeah, you can tell he's done a lot of R&D on the chicken itself because that's damn juicy. Hey, what are we going to try first, Marcus? You gotta go regular. Go reg? Here we go. I like the bun too. I'm assuming he's making them. The bun is nice. Obviously we got it to go. It's machete. Yeah, my biggest gripe with this, obviously it's something you need to eat at the restaurant, but the piece of chicken thigh itself is too thick. Like if it would have been flattened out more and had a little better ratio of breading to meat, I think that could do it a lot of good because all that juicy chicken is steaming the coating from the inside out. We didn't eat it right at the restaurant, but the flaw with covering it in sauce and then wrapping it and then taking it, like no one taking it to go is going to have any different experience. It's mush. There's no crunch. Yeah, there's zero crunch on it right now. But to be fair, that is what Joshua Weissman does on his Butt Better series is he never eats it there. It is good. Was I expecting maybe a little bit more, a little bit more crunch to hold up even on a to-go order? I think the nuggets held up good. I think it's more of the issue with the sauce. The nuggets traveled good and they were crispy and you dip it in the sauce you want. That's so far a better experience. I mean, if you were to get fried chicken from like Chick-fil-A or somewhere else, like would it be crunchy when you ate it? I don't know if I'm judging it more because the hype is so much, but I feel like it wouldn't be this soggy. And I think that Chick-fil-A doesn't put sauce on their sandwich specifically, so this doesn't happen. So again, before we take a bite of the dipped one, to me, like the chicken needs to be not quite as thick. Hmm, this one was crunchier. I got a crunchy bite on this one. My wife went straight from the restaurant, straight back here. Probably been 15, 20 minutes, like from the time it came out to the time I'm eating it. So it's really not that long. I like the yam yam sauce. As a flavor, it's nice. So the chicken's definitely brined. I don't know if I would say it's over brined, but like I'm not a, personally, I'm not a huge fan of brined chicken. It can sort of start creeping up to that texture of like ham, where it gets a little bit too hard. This one's like, for me, like on the verge. Yeah, I think buttermilk does a good job tenderizing without changing the texture of the chicken. It gives it this rubber bandy thing, which when I'm thinking about it. That last bite I got had that majorly. I isolated chicken on one bite. And obviously with all the accoutrement, you can't tell as much, but when you're doing what we're doing and dissecting it, it does have that snappiness that I just don't like with brines. What I think is, I like the nuggets and the sauce array with fries better than I do like the chicken sandwiches. The sauces are all unique and they're really good. We would need to try a chicken sandwich at the actual shop, but the sauces are fire. Fries are great. Getting a sandwich to go covered in sauce with brined chicken, steaming inside of this wrapped up thing, steaming inside of a bag. Yeah, you're gonna lose some crunch and some textures. It does taste good. And I bet if you were to eat it there, it might be like 30% better, but we stand by our points about the brined chicken and the thickness of the chicken itself. That's the other thing. I like putting my sauces on the sandwich as opposed to this is covered in the sauce. And it is a little overwhelming, I guess, because it is honey. I can see that the yam yam flavor does take over like a little bit. So just as a quick recap here, sauces are awesome. Fries are fantastic. Nuggets are really good. And the sandwiches need just a little bit of work. Chicken thighs slightly over brined and just too thick. It doesn't fit in that sandwich well. And also when your chicken is that thick, it's just doing more steaming, which sort of ruins the breading and sogs up the sandwich a little bit. The dipped fried chicken sandwich in the yam yam sauce is nice, but that yam yam sauce does become quite overwhelming and the whole thing becomes pretty darn sweet. Having said all that, it is a good sandwich. Marcus here is passionate about fried chicken spots here in Austin, Texas. And so Marcus, what do you think, given that the cost of the undipped sandwich is $12, dipped is $14, like would it be somewhere you frequent? The only thing I had was the advertisement for it was like, this is the death to fast food, but I don't really consider it comparable because it's like, you're gonna pay 20 bucks if you go here. If you want a sandwich and fries and then drinks, sauces, it's gonna be like $20 meal. It's more of a like fast casual type of comparison. So you can probably get a chicken sandwich for half the price. Is this twice as good as everyone? So if we had to give it a score, we would go 8.9 out of 10 for the sauce, the fries and the nuggets. Yeah, and then probably 7.2, 7.3 for the sandwiches. Out of 10 for the sandwiches. I don't want this to come across like it's bad cause it's definitely not bad, but now we're gonna take home all of these points and do our best to build our own fried chicken sandwich and let's see if we can beat Joshua's. That is the name of the game, baby. It's butt better. Okay, my friends, the time has come to make our own fried chicken sandwich. And I'm very excited to share this recipe with all of you today because I've been working on this specific mix since I was five years old. And that's obviously a joke. I find it really funny when people say they've been cooking since they were five. Look, we all mixed a little cookie dough with our tiny grubby little hands when we were little. Okay, it doesn't count. And instead of using chicken thighs for this sandwich, I opted for breast instead. I don't know about you, but I just prefer breast over thigh for a fried chicken sandwich because the sandwich itself is already so heavy. One of my biggest problems with Joshua's sandwich was that big hunk of meat in the middle. Like it didn't look like it had been pounded at all. So what we're gonna start by doing is pounding out these chicken breasts to get them one nice even thickness. And there's a couple different ways you can attack this depending on the size of the chicken breast itself. Like for instance, this one is huge. And what I like to do is just sort of eyeball the shape. I'm looking for a round patty. So I'm gonna just cut like that, trim some fat over here. And then with this, I'll just hold my hand flat and I'm gonna slice this directly in half to give me two pieces. Because if you have a really big breast, you can definitely get two out of one. And then check it out with the end here, we'll take off that little triangle tip, slice this in three. And then we can marinate this with the rest of the chicken and use it to make nuggets if we want. So for a smaller breast like this one, I mean, if you wanted a small chicken sandwich, you could definitely split that one in half too. But for me, I would just cut it like this, maybe square that up a little bit, make another little nugget over here. And then once that's pounded out, that'll just be good for one chicken sandwich. Simple as that, now let's get to pounding. I'll just get some parchment down, lay in our chicken, bada bing, bada boom. And we'll take a little meat mallet and just do some light tapping. And if you feel like there's a thicker end on one side, like right here, just divert your firepower a little bit there. Tap more here and less here. This only takes a minute. And even if you feel like these are kind of thin, by the time you dredge it up and fry it, like it's just so much bigger. You can really get away with doing less chicken. You can always just take a little peek and you can flip like this too. All right, those look nice to me. What I'm gonna do now is just get them into straight buttermilk. Shkwada bing, shkwada bang, shkwada boom, shkwada chow. And I'll tell you what, I really, really, really like buttermilk as a tenderizer. I kind of switched on brines a few years back. Obviously, if you're making like bacon or pastrami, then yeah, you should definitely brine and cure your meats. But with brine proteins that you just cook, like a piece of chicken, I just don't like that snappy sort of hard, like approaching ham texture that it gets. And after doing my own thorough testing on chicken breasts using various tenderizing techniques, I just found buttermilk and yogurt to be the best. Having said that, if you do wanna cure them or brine them, I would just lightly salt your chicken and let them sit in the fridge for like 10, 12 hours, and then just proceed with the recipe as normal. But try buttermilk. On another note, if I'm being honest, I really don't like making the kind of YouTube videos where I try every single one of Gordon Ramsay's frozen meals or I taste every single bottled ranch at the supermarket. It's definitely not where my heart is. And so I'll just ask you to drop a like on the video, subscribe to this channel, and turn notifications on so I can continue doing what I love, which is just really good home-cooked recipes for you. And if you wanna go a step further, I have an awesome ebook linked in the description if you like written recipes. And we also have an incredible members community here on YouTube called The Sioux Chefs. If you wanna learn more about that, just click the Join button and watch the trailer. Now back to the sandwich. Now while that chicken tenderizes, we can go ahead and make our dredge. And I called out the big guns for this recipe, which is my older brother, Sean. I've dabbled with a lot of fried chicken with success. Having said that, my older brother was literally selling fried chicken at his restaurant in England for a long time. And he basically gave me some pointers on this technique and recipe so we could make sure our fried chicken sandwich is a cut above. He's an amazing chef who worked in a lot of one and two Michelin star restaurants for many years. I'm gonna put a link to his page down in the description. And if you wanna follow along with a chef who is really doing it, like right now he's working at a restaurant where they are going for three Michelin stars, definitely go check him out because it is not the usual fodder you're gonna see on YouTube food channels. And so here's the basic recipe, guys. It's 80% all purpose flour and then 20% potato starch. And that potato starch is key here because it's gonna give us a better crunch and also give us a crunch that will stand the test of time and wetness. And by wetness, I literally just mean the dip that you'll be putting your chicken in after it's fried. Now to that, we add garlic powder, onion powder. By the way, this detailed recipe will be in the description and I'll have it in the American system Highly suggest you make things using grams. It's much more accurate. It's just plainly better. A whole lot of black pepper, a whole lot of salt, a whole lot of paprika, just regular sweet paprika and a whole lot of baking powder. And that is our dredge. All we gotta do is give this a really thorough mixing. And now we're gonna be making a wet batter because with this specific technique, the chicken will go back and forth between the wet batter and the dredge, which will result in a very crispy, crunchy coating. Now what we're gonna do is crack two eggs and we'll just start by beating these and then we're gonna mix in just a little bit of buttermilk for now, about a cup. And now check it out. What we do is add one cup of the dredge we just made. I'm doing it like this because it's just easier to mix than if I were to add all the buttermilk first. You can essentially make like a fine paste here. Perfect. And now we'll stream in the rest of our buttermilk. Just doing it this way will make sure you don't have many lumps from the get-go. And there's our wet and dry batter complete. I'll go ahead and stick the wet batter in the fridge until I'm ready to use it. And in the meantime, we can go ahead and start making our dip. And for that, I'm gonna be using one of my favorite ingredients of all time, which are Calabrian chili peppers. I actually bought these at the supermarket. If you can't find them near you, I'll put a link to some that I like to order online in the description. So what I'm gonna do here is actually take the oil the Calabrian chilies were sitting in, couple teaspoons down there, and we'll kick this on about medium heat. And now depending on what brand of Calabrian chilies you buy, they may be already pre-ground or whole. Mine were whole and I just ground them up in my spice grinder. And what I'm gonna do is sort of bloom these chilies in their own oil. And you might as well do this because you do deepen the flavor of the glaze and it's a very simple process. Just about two minutes of toasting and I'm gonna add my honey and I'm using a really light honey like this. If the honey is too dark, you can definitely have some really intense flavors. And I really just want more of the sweetness and the sticky glazy aspect of the honey. And I'm adding just a little pinch of salt here, not too much, you'll see why in a sec. Now I'm gonna let that bubble for just a minute and then I'll turn the heat all the way down low and we'll start adding little cubes of cold unsalted butter. And once that first round of butter is worked in, then just add a couple more cubes and just repeat this process until all the butter's been worked in. Next, we're gonna add our soy sauce which will add a lot of umami and just bring the salt level to the right point. And finally, some plain white vinegar which will bring the much needed acidity to this glaze. And you'll see now it's pretty thin. We need to let this cool down to room temp where it will really thicken up and just be that perfect texture for glazing a piece of fried chicken. The last thing we gotta do before we fry up our chicken is make an amazing mayonnaise to go with our sandwich. And let me tell you something, this recipe is an absolute banger. It brings the much needed umami and salt to the sweetness of that glaze and together they're just so good. So I'm starting with mayo and to that we're adding gochujang which if you've never tried, it's like this fermented rice chili paste. It's incredible. I'll put a link to the one I use in the description. White miso which is another big umami bomb. Sesame oil. And then all we're gonna do is grate in one garlic clove and just a little ginger as well. And then we're just gonna give it all a really good mix. I get a lot of pleasure out of just like mixing something red into a mayo. Looks really cool. And when you use miso and gochujang in mayonnaise it actually makes it thicker. So what I like to do is I add a touch of white vinegar as well as a little touch of water and just give it all a really good mix. And that little bit of vinegar will bring the acidity back to where it should be. And to me this is a really nice thickness for mayo. I hate when they're too thick so for me like this is just really nice. As this sits in the fridge it will definitely thicken up a little bit which is where I'm gonna put it right now until we finish our sandwiches. So at this point our chicken breasts have been marinating for 12 hours. And finally the time has come to fry these chicken sandwiches and put them together. Super excited about this. But before I do the amount of dredge I have listed in the recipe in the description is enough for probably like 50 pieces of chicken. So what I do is I just make a bunch of dredge at a time and then I'll just scoop some out and save it in a quart container, label it up. And next time you wanna fry some chicken you already have this done. It's all dried ingredients. Chicken dredge ready to go. The next thing I'm gonna do here is rinse off the buttermilk. And people freak out when you rinse chicken in your sink because of the bacteria splashing everywhere. So here's how we solve that. We do a quick dip and we splash the bacteria all over our board instead. But if I just dip it here, should probably be doing this in the sink. Honestly I don't believe all that. I think you can rinse chicken in your sink and not die personally. But hey, to each their own. You can do it either way. But I don't want all this excess buttermilk on here right now for this first stage. So a quick dip and then we're drying off on paper towel over here. And paper towel on top. They can be a tiny bit moist but you don't want like excessive moisture at this stage. And now with our chicken here, I'm gonna give it a light seasoning because we didn't do any curing or brining. Just a little bit of salt on the chicken. Obviously there's a lot in the dredge as well but it still does need just a little bit more salt in this stage. So each bite can be absolutely glorious. Now chicken goes into the dry dredge. Dry dredge, say that fast three times over. Dry dredge, dry dredge, dry dredge, dry dredge, dry dredge, dry dredge. And the process has begun. So one quick coating. A little shake off and then we're gonna set it on a sheet pan lined with a wire rack. And we are gonna let this sit for about 20 minutes. And what we're doing here is really letting the little bit of moisture that's still on the chicken start vibing out with the dredge. And what we're looking for is just like a little bit of tackiness on this chicken before we move on to the next step. And after 20 minutes, as you touch this chicken, you just feel it's tacky. Tacky is the perfect word to describe it because it's just a little bit sticky. And this first step is important because it really helps the coating adhere to the chicken. Now for the next step, we go back into the flour, re-dredge, and then holding the chicken by the tails here, we give them a good shake. We're gonna dip them into our wet batter. And then I'm just gonna hold them up and let them drip for a good like 20 seconds. You can even, if you feel comfortable, give them a little shake. And here we go back into the dredge. And at this point, coat them up, push the dredge into the chicken just like this. Really compact it down. It's gonna help you get more of those little craggly spots. And then I'm gonna toss a little bit like this. And you can see already before even frying, just look, if your chicken looks like that pre-fry, you know it's gonna be good. That is sort of what you're after here. Crispy, craggly, crunchy bits. Okay, let's fry these. And now shake off the excess dredge. And we're dropping it into peanut oil that's sitting at 330 degrees Fahrenheit. And I'm just gonna let it swim a little and then send it on its way. And these will take roughly six and a half, seven minutes to cook. If your breasts are thicker than mine, do it a little longer. And if for some reason they're thinner, go on the short side. I fried mine for exactly seven minutes and then immediately hit them with a little salt and pepper just for that coating, which can only do it a lot of good. And if you're looking for texture, I mean, just take a look at this chicken, right? Look at all the little crunchy, craggly bits that are sticking out. Like this thing is absolutely glorious. Let's go ahead and dunk it up now. And as my glaze cooled back down to room temp, you can see it's nice and thick and syrupy now, perfect for coating a piece of fried chicken. And upon submerging in the glaze, you really now have the fried chicken in all of its glory. Like, if that doesn't look good to you, I don't know what to say. All we gotta do now is build these on a butter toasted challah bun, complete with our mayonnaise, thick dill pickles, and just some crunchy butter lettuce to lighten things up a little bit. And there you have it, my friends. The only thing left to do is give this a taste with Marcus. All right, you know, I got Marcus here to try this with me. So should we go for regular? Reg? We got a nice piece of even chicken that goes through the whole middle. Looks good. Let's hit it. Big crunch on the chicken. Nice, thick, crunchy pickle. Brings a lot of acidity. That mayo, absolutely great. Multiple elements of crunch, too, in this. Chicken, very nice and moist. Not snappy at all. Okay, should we go for the dip? Really excited for this. The creme de la creme. The dip, same idea. Nice cross-section. Dude, the dip is so good. The mayo and the pickle and the vinegar really helped to cut through it being one note too sweet. The mayo has so much flavor and it brings a lot of salt. It's almost on the salty side, but that cuts through that really sweet glaze. And so the mayo with the glaze, with the crunchy, fatty chicken and the big, thick, crunchy pickles that are really acidic, like each bite, nicely balanced. Also the texture on our chicken is significantly better. Not to like toot our own horn, it's just that we've A-B tested each kind of method for tenderizing chicken in buttermilk, 12 hours. Gives the chicken a tang, doesn't firm up the chicken. It's just beautifully juicy and is a much better experience. And just the flavors of this sandwich, the balance of sweet, salty, sour, and spicy. It's all here and it's all in one bite. And it's not like too much of one thing. I can't judge it myself. I would have to take this to the streets, but if I'm being honest, this is better than the chicken sandwich we had. Yeah, it just is. I'm sorry. The nuggets were excellent. Sauces were good. This corrects the few tweaks that we had with it, but really excellent. Make it. Now look guys, when Joshua Weissman opened a restaurant in the city I live in, the temptation to butt better, the butt better guy, was just too much. So I had to make this video. Having said that, I just want to congratulate Joshua Weissman on opening a restaurant. It is not an easy task. And to be quite honest, there is so much I loved about his food. So if you are ever in Austin, definitely check out Ben and Lynn's and see for yourself. Otherwise, thank you for watching. And again, subscribe to the channel. Check out our members community, eBooks linked in the description, and I will see you next time. You know I love you in my mouth.