Here’s my tale of fried chicken.
Now in my life, and I’m old, I don’t think I’ve ever made fried chicken. I might have once, 25 years ago, but I really don’t remember. I am not a huge fried food person. I do love Colonel Sanders with all my heart, but never eat it because I would classify that as a dinner of death. If you eat it and you listen really close, you can hear your arteries slamming shut. So, I don’t eat it, except on my birthday. I LOVE all those herbs and spices!
So, 4th of July was coming up and I decided I’m going to make fried chicken. I’m going to do a country picnic type dinner, fried chicken, a couple of salads. Potato salad, macaroni salad (with tuna, that came from Mick), beans, corn and biscuits that suddenly got turned into hush puppies.
First off I read all this stuff about making great fried chicken. I looked up Colonel Sanders eleven herbs and spices, (alleged), or 12 herbs and spices, whatever it is. Then I looked up a bunch of recipes and some of them called for things that weren’t on the Colonel Sanders list so I added them. And then it seemed to be an important thing to soak the chicken in buttermilk. So, I soaked the chicken in buttermilk. I soaked it for 24 hours.
Now it’s the big day and I get my chicken to room temperature and get my flour dredge ready. I think I ended up using 16 different herbs and spices. I made it and then I was worried that it’d be too salty because I put so many different kinds of things in there. It wasn’t.
And then I’m reading all these different recipes and combining them. I was reading that you can make the oil flavored, you can infuse the oil that you’re going to cook it in. So number one, peanut oil is the best oil so I bought a few bottles, (expensive). I added smashed garlic cloves. I put thyme, and sage, and rosemary in the oil and you put it in the oil when it’s room temperature. And then you bring it up to temperature and right before you fry the chicken, when it gets the 365 degrees or whatever it was, you’d take all that stuff out. Then I took my lovingly prepared fried chicken and then we put them in a few at a time.
I need to mention I had to cook it outside because we don’t have a good ventilation system in the kitchen. We were using the burner by the outside grill. At this point Mick scoots me out of the way and he starts frying the chicken. After all that is his grilling cooking spot.
All we’re going to do is fry them to make them brown and crispy and then finish them off in the oven. And that way it would be juicy, but not over fried. We did all that as you can see from the pictures.
We sat down, I took a chicken breast because that’s my piece, and I bit into it and it had beautiful texture. And I tasted it and I said, “Hmm, Well, Meh.” My family said, “Oh, it’s good.” And I said, “Nah, it doesn’t taste like Colonel Sanders.” It had really good coating, it was juicy, all that turned out perfect. But I was looking for a really fun flavor on that. And it just tasted like average fried chicken you can get anywhere.
The moral of the story is just go to Colonel Sanders. Buy it for the 4th of July, live happily ever after. No mess, no work, no deep disappointment.
Lastly, I ended up with all that oil that I had to throw away because I couldn’t save it. It looked all creepy because of the infusion I did with all the herbs. And frankly, I couldn’t taste it anyway. So it was a waste of time. I would change some things up next time BUT there is never going to be a next time. Some things I’m just never going to cook again or care about. So now let’s chalk that up to experience.
And that’s the end of my story.
