Fried Chicken

Okay, the first few casseroles I blogged, my bro asked me, 'Are you sure you're a cardiac patient?' And he was right, my first casseroles were made with every decision balanced to the rich. Cream instead of skim milk, regular cream of mushroom soup instead of the 98% fat free version, full fat cheeses, etc.

I've learned to make leaner casseroles, doing things like thickening skim milk with flour instead of leaning on fat for creaminess.

And when I cook chicken, it's usually on the grill. But as Jerry Gourd would say, I woke up yesterday with a real hankering for some fried chicken.


When I went to get the girls, I was told Mo was all about the fried chicken: they'd had it the night before and she eaten as if just released from a Turkish prison.*



So that decided it.

This is a dish I used to enjoy making not long after I took up housekeeping with the artist formerly known as Frau Lobster. It's time consuming, and it wrecks the kitchen in a big way, but you can make a pretty awesome fried chicken dinner at home and it doesn't cost a whole lot.

I got the boneless-skinless breasts, not because I wanted to ditch the skins, but because don't dig navigating the bones. I guess it's not really a big deal, and if I really wanted it to be a cheap meal I'd buy a whole chicken and carve it like my Mom did when I was growing up. Well, by the time I was in high school she was doing the boneless-skinless white meat because none of us really went for dark meat and it was easy, but I can remember plenty of meals built around a whole fried chicken. And as a wee lad, I'd even eat dark meat: the drum stick because it looked cool and the thigh because of that awesome skin.



I can remember my grandma, seeing me relish the skin off a thigh, 'That's the best part, isn't it?'

This would be probably 1974 or so. It was a different world. I don't know if it was less healthy, though: I saw a factoid the other day about daily caloric consumption between about then and about now, and it's gone through the freakin' roof. We ate fried chicken, but we ate at home and we knew what we were eating.

So anyway, I made this chicken two ways: one Mom's way, about half the batch. Mom just runs the chicken under water and dredges it in flour seasoned with salt and pepper. Quit a bit of salt and pepper, I remembered that lesson from my first attempts some fifteen years back. Skimp on the pepper and you get pitifully bland chicken. Use what I've always derided as 'stale pepper,' the stuff that's already ground when you buy it. It lacks the heat of fresh ground black pepper but it works better for fried chicken flour (maybe because of that lack of heat).

In retrospect, I had too much oil in the pan. You want the chicken covered about half way with hot oil. The consequence of too much oil is the breading doesn't get as crisp. This is less critical with Mom's one-shot flour dredge, those actually came out the crispiest of what I made.



The second half of the chicken I made using Joy of Cooking's technique for supposedly extra-crispy chicken. This is a flour dredge, then you go to beaten egg and milk, then back to the flour. This does make a thicker breading, but it didn't crisp up. Maybe because of too much oil or maybe I needed the oil to be hotter or something. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't what it was supposed to be.



I also made biscuits and gravy, sort of. My gravy didn't thicken up and I couldn't think how to get more flour in without getting lumps (though I realize now, after talking to my Mom, that all I needed to do was dissolve the flour in some milk first and then add it to the thin gravy). And the biscuits turned out a little weird. Same recipe I've been using, but they got a lot browner and the 'white' part had a yellowish hue to it. They tasted a little different, too, though I couldn't place it. Em said she thought it was a lack of flavor rather than a wrong flavor, though she was enthusiastic about the chicken.



Well, enthusiastic if you don't count the fact that she didn't eat the outside. She's done this with chicken nuggets, too, deciding that the outside, if even vaguely browned is 'too burned.'

Mo didn't devour as much chicken as I was prepared for: I cooked three pounds of chicken, and at least half of that was leftovers in the fridge. But then breakfast came around and Mo must have had a hankering for some (cold) fried chicken.

Oh, and a word to the wise: don't do this in black pants.



*I've never actually known anyone to be incarcerated in Turkey, their prisons may be hard to tell from Mediterranean resorts, but I doubt it.