How to Make KFC’s Vegan Fried Chicken at Home (Copycat Recipe)

Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm Chris, and I am one half of Sweet Simple Vegan. Jasmine's behind the camera today, and I'm going to be showing you guys how to make some vegan fried chicken with this block of tofu. So before you click away, I promise you should stay for this because it's going to be awesome. I know tofu sometimes gets a bad reputation, but let me just clear things up now. This isn't going to be mushy. This isn't going to be tasteless. This is going to be crispy, full of flavor, and honestly, it's going to size up right next to real fried chicken. And one other thing before we get started, I did want to clarify because we get the question all the time. A lot of people ask us why we want to recreate different meaty things if we're vegan. The answer is quite simple. We didn't go vegan because we don't like the taste of animal products. I enjoyed eating meat and everything under the sun for probably 23 years of my life just about. So if I can recreate the same flavors, textures, and tastes that I've always enjoyed without having to harm an animal, why wouldn't I? So to help people transition and to make things a whole lot easier, we like to turn plants into things that people are familiar with like meat and cheese and whatever else. So I'm going to stop ranting and we're going to start cooking. We are taking this medium firm block of tofu today and we're turning it into fried chicken. As I mentioned earlier, this process is a little bit involved, but with the right planning, it is going to be just perfect. So we're using medium firm tofu because it is the perfect consistency. It's not too firm, but it's also not too soft. And when prepared properly, it has the perfect chickeny consistency. So essentially what we're going to be doing is freezing this twice. So we're going to freeze it once. We're just going to pop the whole package into the freezer. Once it's fully frozen, we'll let it defrost. And then we're popping it back into the freezer. And then once it's fully frozen again, we're going to let it defrost one more time. So the process of freezing and defrosting and freezing and defrosting really helps give the tofu a really chickeny and I don't know, it's really, I don't know the full science behind it, but the texture that happens after you follow this process is pretty spot on to fried chicken or to chicken in general. So we actually got the method from Mary's Test Kitchen. She has an awesome YouTube channel if you wanted to check it out, we'll link it down below. That's how I learned this process and was inspired to create my own fried chicken recipe. So once our tofu is fully defrosted for the second time, we're going to be draining all the liquid out. So basically we'll just cut open the package, we'll empty the liquid and then using two cutting boards, we're just going to press all the liquid out of the tofu. This is a little bit of an involved process and the tofu gets really delicate at this point, so you want to be extra careful. But basically we're just going to slowly draw out all of the liquid and then once we think it's pretty dry, we'll just take a clean towel and we'll damp it dry even more. And then once the tofu is fully pressed and all the liquid has been drawn out, we're going to carefully piece apart the tofu. So basically it's going to be like a natural kind of feeling as you pick apart the tofu and it'll fall into some chunks that are about this size. They will be a little bit delicate, but they'll kind of naturally fall. You'll see once you do it, but it's kind of hard to explain. You can see in the video also. But now we're going to be marinating the tofu. So basically what we're going to do is carefully put these pieces into a deep dish and they can stack on top of each other if need be, but you just want to be as careful as possible because they are pretty fragile and there's going to be some little pieces too. So we're just going to add those in also and we'll be able to salvage what we can if it's large enough. Like popcorn chicken. Yeah, exactly. And basically what we have here is some vegan chicken broth. So we're using the no chicken bouillon cubes. We have two cups of water and basically we just heated that up and we mixed in the bouillon cubes. We're just going to pour this over so it absorbs the flavor. You just give it a quick little press down so it gets nice and full of flavor. And then we're just going to set this aside really quick. And while that's marinating, we're going to be making a buttermilk for our batter. So this is a very simple process. Basically we have some unsweetened oat milk, but you can use unsweetened almond milk, any unsweetened plant milk that you have available should work perfectly. And we're just going to take some apple cider vinegar and we're going to add that to our oat milk. And then we're just going to give this a quick mix through and we're going to let that curdle up. It should take maybe about five minutes and we'll set that aside with the chicken, with the tofu rather. So the next thing we're going to be doing is making our seasoned flour blend. So we're basically just using some all purpose flour and then we have a seasoning mixture here. I did some research and I tried to find like the KFC spice blend and I kind of riffed off that. It's not exactly the same, but I think it's like top secret or something, but I did find something that's similar and I've tested this maybe four or five times now and I've had to tweak things each time, but I think it's finally perfect. Essentially what we have here is some Italian seasoning. We have some paprika, some white pepper, some garlic salt, some celery salt, some mustard and some ginger. So it's mustard powder. If you've ever had that, you can just find it at any conventional grocery store. Oh, and then we also have some black pepper. So basically we're just going to add all of this into our flour and then I have this mini whisk and we're just going to carefully mix everything together. This bowl is a little bit smaller than ideal, but we're going to make it work. So after our flour and spices are all mixed through, we're just going to transfer this into a plate. I just figure it's easier to mix the seasonings together in a bowl, but it's easier to coat the tofu pieces in a plate. So transfer that over real quick. So what we're going to be doing now is battering our tofu before we fry it. So this is a three step system. We're actually going to be double battering, so it might be more steps, but basically we have the buttermilk we made, our seasoned flour blend that we put together and the tofu that we marinated. So we're going to be taking our tofu, we're going to be dipping it in our buttermilk and then we're going to plop it into our flour and I'm going to use forks here because it's going to stick to my hands otherwise. And we're just going to fully coat the tofu in flour and then we're going to carefully transfer the tofu over to our plate. And then we're just going to continue this process until all the tofu is fully coated. Tofu has been coated once, we are going to double coat it, but first we have our flour mixture and now we're just going to add some cornflakes to it. I'm using some organic Nature Valley cornflakes, not actual cornflakes. You can use cornflakes, but I've heard they're not vegan because of the D3 in them, but I don't really know. I think it's really hard to verify for what it is, but they are, there's plenty of organic and not Kellogg's versions of cornflakes, so you can choose to use whatever you'd like. But basically we're just going to be crumbling our cornflakes, not like fully, but just a bit. We're just going to be crumbling them in. So this will give the fried chicken slash fried tofu a good texture. You know with fried chicken, it has like that skin, I don't know how to explain it, but it has like that, yeah, the flakes, this helps kind of like emulate that. And now we're just going to mix this through with the flour, so you want to do your best to break it up as much as possible. One thing I forgot to mention earlier is that you can also use just egg for this recipe. We opted to do the buttermilk variety to do the first coating, but just egg works fine. I've tested it before, we've just, we just thought it would be a little more accessible to use just a plant-based milk and apple cider vinegar, as opposed to a pre-made product like that, that's not available everywhere and can be a little bit expensive. But if you have that, it'll work just as well in place of the buttermilk. So once the cornflakes are coated with the flour, we're going to be shifting our tofu back to the other side, rearranging things a bit. I'm going to get another plate for the final product. Now we're going to be double battering our tofu, so we're just going to be taking all the pieces that we just coated, we're going to dump them back into our buttermilk, and then after the buttermilk, we're just going to toss our tofu into the flour and cornflakes, and then we're just going to set it down. Again we'll repeat this whole process until all the tofu is fully coated, and then we'll fry. Everything is battered and ready to fry. We have our oil heated up here, sorry it's a little bit loud. This induction pan or cooktop is loud, so. I wasn't planning on being in the video, so I'm in my pajama sweater, but it's okay. We got to do a taste test. Wow, I'm so excited. Wow, how did he do the skin, wow. The skin is crazy, it's like chicken. Perfect. It's like perfectly moist on the inside, and then perfectly crunchy on the outside. Wow, look at these. I think this deserves a round of applause. Unbelievable. Wow, we can't eat them all, we have to take photos. We will have instructions to bake and air fry also, if deep frying is not your thing, totally get it. Sorry the dogs are playing, you might hear them running around. Of course deep frying is the preferred method, but whatever you'd like. We have all the options on the blog post, it should be linked down below. So that is all for today, we are going to eat some vegan fried chicken and chill for the rest of the night, but I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, please give it a thumbs up, comment down below, let us know if there's any other ingredients you want us to turn into recipes. Yeah, share your thoughts down below. These dudes are going nuts over here. We'll see you guys soon. Peace out. Bye.