How to Make Super Crunchy Fried Chicken - Techniquely with Lan Lam

If I could only have one style of fried chicken, then this is what I want. It's crispy, craggy, juicy, and there's just one thing you need to know if you want to make it at home. Usually, you have to build up that crust by either battering or dredging the chicken before frying. Let's see what happens when you do both. Before we can get to that crunchy crust, we need to prep the chicken, and that starts with trimming and seasoning. I've got four pounds of mixed parts here, but you know, if you wanted to just do all white meat or all dark meat, it's totally fine, it's absolutely up to you. Either way, you're going to need to make sure that you're trimming the meat well. The extra fat that is on the chicken, it's not going to really render out, so you want to make sure you're cutting it off. I find that if there's extra bits of skin, it just ends up kind of flopping around and getting in the way, so I trim that as well. But this is looking pretty good. Let's make a pile right here. Drums are nice, there's usually not a ton to trim. So when we get to the breast, this is a little bit trickier. A breast kind of tapers, and this bottom bit right here, where it's significantly thinner, that part tends to overcook and dry out while you're waiting for this to cook through. And so I like to make sure I just cut them in half, that cuts the cook time, and it keeps this bit from drying out. So we'll start by trimming off all the extra stuff that we don't want. If you flip a chicken breast over, there's the rib cage. There isn't really any meat on here, and I like to just get rid of it. It just gets in the way, it means less food fits in the pot. And so what I'm going to do is, there's usually kind of a dividing line right here. You can kind of see where that bone is, and I just cut straight down and push to pull that off. There's a couple of ways to approach cutting this in half. If you were to just cut straight down, this bit is significantly larger than this bit, right? And the cook time would not be ideal. I want to have even pieces in an even amount of meat. And so rather than just cutting straight down, I'm actually going to cut at a diagonal, and I'm going to scoot up pretty substantially, so that if I were to put these pieces on a scale, they'd weigh about the same. I want to saw through and get through all of the skin and meat, and then place my knife down and push. And that's kind of the neatest, easiest way to do it. You end up with two pieces that are about the same size. Brining is pretty typical for fried chicken. The salt in the brine helps season the meat, it helps it stay juicy. Usually you see buttermilk instead of water, but it's a good amount of liquid, and I feel like when you use a buttermilk brine, most of that buttermilk gets tossed, so we're going to save the buttermilk for a little bit later. I've got a quart of water here. First up, I've got some salt. Now, a typical brine that we use here at ATK uses a lot more salt, and we do that because we want to make sure that that brining process goes fast. If you kind of use a generous amount of salt in there, then you can get the chicken in and out in 30 minutes. I'm actually going to use a little bit less salt than normal, and the reason for that is I want the chicken to sit in the brine for a little bit longer so that it has time to pick up other flavors. Those other flavors are a little bit of sugar, garlic powder, and cayenne pepper. You can get this full recipe on the ATK app, or you can use the link below. I am going to get this chicken in. It has to sit in the brine for at least two hours, but it could go up to 24 hours though, and I really like the flexibility that this recipe gives me. I can fry when I want to, not when the chicken is ready to be fried. I'm going to wash my hands, pop a lid on this, and get it in the fridge. Typically, fried chicken is either battered or dredged. Both coating methods are great, but they're pretty different. So if you take your seasoned flour and whisk in buttermilk or water or some other liquid, you end up with a batter, and batters can be great because they coat the chicken really nicely. They're really easy to work with. Just because both exist doesn't mean you have to choose between them. We're actually going to use both. Combining them is going to get us a much more substantial, crispier, crunchier crust. First up, I have some flour. Flour is going to be the base for this dredge. It holds onto everything nicely, and unlike starches, it doesn't kind of settle to the bottom as it sits, which is really nice. Next up, I want to cut my flour with a pretty substantial amount of cornstarch. I'm using cornstarch because it doesn't have any protein. It's a pure starch. Proteins are great for giving our batter some structure to help it remain easy to work with, but when we go to fry this, those proteins hold onto oil and water in a way that starch doesn't, and so by cutting the amount of protein in the overall mixture, we're going to get a crust that is crispier and crunchier and less greasy. Next up, I have some baking powder. This is going to activate when we go to fry the chicken, and it's going to leaven that crust. It's going to make it a little bit less dense and just a little bit crispier. So these are the functional ingredients. I also have some flavorings. I want to echo the flavors that went into the brine, and so you're going to see a lot of those same ingredients again. I've got pepper, dried thyme, cayenne, garlic powder, and a little onion powder. I want to make sure this is well blended because I'm going to use a portion of this for the dredge, and the rest of it is going to be for the batter. So I need one and a quarter cups for the batter, and I'm just going to scoop that out. So that's one cup, and that's our quarter cup. The flour that's left here, this is going to be for our dredge. I'm actually going to transfer it to a 13 by 9. There's just so much more surface area here than there is here, and it just makes for a nicer space to work with. I find that I make less of a mess when I use a pan. So this is ready to go, and now we can make our batter. I'm going to reuse this bowl for our batter. The dry ingredients go back in. I'm going to season this up with a little sugar and some salt. This is the point where I want to bring the buttermilk back. I want that kind of classic tangy flavor that buttermilk brings to fried chicken, so we're going to add that and give this a good whisk. This is kind of the part where people sometimes get tripped up with this recipe. During testing, what I learned is that I don't want a really thick layer of batter because when there's a really thick coating, you end up with a doughy undercoating, and that wasn't nice to eat. I want it to be fully fried through and fully crispy, but I also need that batter to be really viscous, like really clingy. When you make a generous amount of this stuff and you put the chicken in, you then have to spend a lot of time wiping off the excess, and it's really annoying. It's hard to get the ratio right. I found it was a lot easier to make just the right amount and trust that with the right amount of mixing, you're going to get a really thin coating of a really thick batter. It looks almost like really thick pancake batter dressing. Just trust the process. Okay, so that's our batter. That's our dredge. Now we just have to grab the chicken, coat it, and give it a fry. So this chicken's been brining for four hours. I'm going to pull it out, and I want to wipe off the extra brine. It's going to thin out the batter too much, so you don't have to have to get the chicken perfectly dry. You just need to make sure that it's not sopping wet. So now I want to toss, and I'm just looking for all of the chicken pieces to be evenly coated. Remember, really thick batter, and we want a really thin coating of it. I'm going to wash my hands and make sure my oil is at the right temperature, and then we'll start frying. So I'm looking for a 340 degree oil, and so now that my chicken is all battered, I want to get about half of it into the oil, and I want to make sure that one of my hands is for picking up the battered chicken, but the other hand stays fairly clean. You don't have to be especially delicate about this. As you're kind of pressing the dredge into that batter, you kind of start developing the crispy, craggy bits. You can kind of see them starting to form already, and you just drop these pieces one at a time into the oil. All of the pieces will take however long they take to fry, so there's really no benefit in making sure that they all go in at the same time, because they will not come out at the same time. So one thing to keep in mind when you're adding food to hot oil, all of this stuff that it's on my hands, it's actually forming kind of a nice protective layer. If any oil happens to splatter up, it's going to hit the dredge and the batter rather than my skin. You never want to drop the pieces from up high, because it's going to splash more, and so you want to make sure you're down pretty low. It's a much safer way to add food to oil. So before I started battering and dredging my chicken, I got my little fry set up in order. I have a little landing zone here, and it's just a rack set on top of a rimmed baking sheet so that the oil can drip off. And I brought my oil up to 140 degrees. You always want to overshoot the frying temperature, because when you add the food, it's going to drop the temperature of the oil. A lot of recipes will have you crank that up pretty high so that it recovers faster. I actually like having the chicken kind of take its time. I'm not going to adjust the heat. This kind of low and slow approach is going to ensure that the chicken is super juicy, because we're not bombarding the outside with heat, and it'll help the chicken fry up more evenly and more tender as well. One of the things you hear is that if you fry at a temperature that's too low, your food is going to get greasy. That's absolutely true, but there isn't like a hard temperature where greasiness starts. It's going to depend on the recipe. The visual cue you should be looking for is kind of the sizzling. If you're seeing these bubbles forming as you're frying, it means water is getting driven out, and so long as water is pushing its way out of the crust, oil can't seep in. I'm looking at this, and I'm sure that this will not be greasy. So when it comes to temping your fried chicken, you're going to need to check each one individually, because they're all different sizes, they're all different shapes, they went in at different times, they will finish cooking at different times. Beyond that, we've got two different types of chicken here, dark meat and white meat, and we cook them to different temperatures. I'm going to find the smallest piece that's the one that's going to cook through the fastest, and when I go to temp it, I'm going to pick it up and move it away from the oil. When you pierce the chicken with your thermometer, juices are going to leak out, and if those juices fall into the hot oil, it's going to splatter right back up at you. So it's much safer to pick up your chicken, move it to the side, and then temp it. I want to take the drums and thighs to 160 degrees, and the breasts to 140 degrees. That's right, 140 degrees. It sounds low, but I promise it's not. Okay, so that's the first batch. I want to let this oil come back up to 340, and then I'll drop the second batch. The other nice thing about having a really thick batter is it saves you on one of, I think, the most annoying steps about fried chicken. You'll see a lot of recipes out there say that you should dredge all of your chicken and then let it hang out for about an hour. The reason these recipes have you do that is it takes maybe an hour for that crust to really glue itself to the chicken so that it won't fall off when you go to fry. Having a really nice, thick, substantial batter means that this crust is going to stick, and I can just go straight from that pan of dredge into the oil. No waiting required. So when I drop the chicken into the oil, I like to give it a couple of swirls back and forth. It just kind of sets that crust a little bit, and I find that the chicken won't stick to the bottom of the pot when I do that, whereas if I just drop it straight in, you end up having to loosen the chicken from the pot after a couple of minutes. Pretty much every fried chicken recipe out there tells you to cook the chicken until it's at 160 degrees or even above that, and that number is not arbitrary. That's the temp that the chicken needs to get to to be food safe, but we also know that food continues to cook after you remove it from the heat, and that's the same case here. So for the juiciest chicken, we actually need to account for that carryover cooking. Now, the other complication is the crust. It kind of increases carryover. You can think of it as like a blanket that fully surrounds the chicken, and so that's why we can get away with pulling the meat at 140 degrees and letting it coast up to 160. This sounds crispy. I think I want this one. You can hear how crispy that is, right? Can I eat now? I'm not gonna mess. It's so good. It's juicy. It's really well seasoned. You get kind of those herbs and spices. There's something about biting through that crust, and all of those crispy, craggy bits means that some bits are crunchy, some bits are crispy. It's fantastic. To get the recipe, head to the ATK app and look up Super Crunchy Buttermilk Fried Chicken. In the app, you can actually use cook mode to look for detailed step-by-step instructions. After you've made this fried chicken, come on back and let me know what you thought. You guys, we should do more fried chicken recipes.