The Best Fried Chicken at Home

When I made this recipe, I thought, I want people to make the best fried chicken they have ever had in their life. This is a traditional buttermilk fried chicken, or is it? I slightly modified this a little bit. We've got a slightly different flour being used, but also it's just the overall technique of how you make this fried chicken that makes it great. Not only is it juicy, not only is it tender, not only is it flavorful and well-spiced, but the most important thing is the unbelievable earth-shattering crunch of a good crust, and that is what we're making today. Simply, beautifully, we're not talking about sides, we're just talking about chicken, so let's make this, shall we? So we're gonna start by breaking down our own whole chicken into individual pieces, then we'll make our secret blend of herbs and spices, both in marinade and breading, show a couple tricks for extra crispiness, and fry to perfection. You can obviously go and get a whole chicken cut up into six, eight pieces, et cetera, but my preference is to butcher it myself. You don't have to do it, but I'm taking the opportunity to show you how. Got a whole chicken right here, bada-bing, bada-boom. It's a little cheaper if you do it this way also, so you can save money by buying a whole chicken and cutting it up yourself. There are a few different ways people like to do this, my preference is I always start with the leg. This is just like a gap of skin, there's nothing here on both sides. So, take a sharp knife and you're gonna cut through that skin to kind of reveal that gap. You're gonna do the same on the other side. Again, just reveal that gap, you don't need to do much more here. All right, so that's revealed, done and done. You're gonna turn the chicken over, and this is my favorite part, okay? You take the leg and you're gonna bend it back until you hear a little pop. Again, on the other side, boom. What that just effectively did was it separated this right here, this is the thigh bone from the back of the chicken, okay? That's super important, because now you can basically just run your knife underneath that and remove the entire leg quarter, so we're gonna do that. See this fat line? You're gonna cut under skin right here, and remove this excess bit here so I can show you. This is where it disconnected and this is the bone itself. Honestly, you can just run your knife under this, but you will leave the oyster behind, which is a surprise for a lot of people. That's right here, you can see the little lump. So if you want, just run your knife under, it's fine, no big deal, you could boil the spine for stock. Or if you wanna get the oyster, you're gonna cut around this lump. So instead of going straight back, you're gonna go around the tip of your knife, go over that, see? Now I've revealed the oyster here. Just kinda scrape underneath. You can even use your finger to kinda scoop it out of there. So now the oyster's out. We can remove this leg. So tilt the leg back, find where the meat connects, and just gently follow along, follow through, and you've separated your leg quarter. Now repeat that on the other side. Now we're left with this guy right here. Now really all we need to worry about is the breast and the wings. To remove the wing, you're gonna kinda do the same thing. You're gonna start right here on this line, you're gonna cut straight down till you meet with bone, and you're gonna kinda cut around the wing. So the shoulder blade's gonna pop out like this, and you can see where the shoulder connects with the rest, that you can just cut straight through that. Now you've removed the wing piece. You're gonna do the same on the other side. Pop it out, reveal it, just cut around. See, boom, wing. Now for the breast. This part can get a little wobbly and weird if you want. If you have a heavier knife, like a cleaver or a really big chef's knife, you can kinda cut that part out and just remove that. Now from here, you're gonna set your breast down. Feel the center of the breast. You're gonna feel like almost like there's a wedged bone in between that. I want you to take your smaller knife, cut along the top of that chicken, all the way down in one nice stroke, and reveal that bone. Cut along one side of it. Keep your knife impinged against the bone. And then honestly, if you wanna keep the bone attached to this, at this point, you can literally just take a heavy knife, place it right there, right where you made your initial incision, and just... And you have two chicken breasts with the bone attached. This other piece here, you can just cut off with your cleaver or heavy knife. Then you essentially have two bone-in chicken breasts, two leg quarters, two wings. If you wanna go even further to separate the leg from the thigh, you'll notice a fat line that runs right here on the underside. If you follow that fat line, that'll essentially perfectly separate the thigh from the drumstick. So, follow along, cut along that, just kinda reveal that bone. You can do the same thing here. Just kinda snap it, reveal the knuckle, cut in between. You got a beautiful drumstick, and you got a beautiful thigh. Same thing on this guy. Cut in between, snap it, find the knuckle, cut in between that thigh, drumstick, drumstick. You can do the same thing with the wings, but I'm actually gonna leave the wings whole just because I like them like that. For the backbone of the chicken, the spine essentially, right? Here's the bottom piece with the tail, and then here's the upper spine here. These pieces, you should save, freeze them. Every time you do this, just keep saving them and freezing them until you got like three or four of these. You roast them, you make a beautiful stock. Now, we can marinate. There are many ways to flavor the chicken before you bread it. You could brine it, you could cure it. In this case, we're going with a classic buttermilk. We're in Texas, this is the South, brother. Two cups of the finest buttermilk you can get. Frankly, you could also do milk if you wanted to. Two tablespoons of kosher salt. The buttermilk does not have salt in it. In fact, buttermilk is tart, so you need a little extra salt to counteract the acidity. One teaspoon of sugar, one and a half teaspoons of MSG. Pause. If you're not familiar with this channel or me, MSG is, in my opinion, a non-negotiable. It's not expensive. You can go and get it at an Asian market. You can get it on Amazon. I'm telling you, it is one of the biggest unlocks for insane fried chicken with minimal effort. There's just no valuable science that's suggesting that it's not good for you, so I'm gonna put it in there. One tablespoon of garlic powder, two teaspoons of smoked paprika, and one teaspoon of cayenne powder for a little kick. You don't like it spicy? Leave it out or put less. Now, just whisk that together until thoroughly combined and homogenous. What you really don't want is a lump of spices just sitting in the corner of your marinade, and then the rest of the marinade just being unseasoned buttermilk. That will ruin your day. Now, we're gonna add our chicken pieces back in. Now, you're gonna carefully just kind of mix all that together just to make sure that the marinade is coating every single possible surface area on that chicken. Press it down in the marinade. Make sure it's submerged. You can actually bread and fry this right away if you want, but ideally, you'll marinate this in the fridge for at least an hour. Ideally, in the best case scenario, overnight or even two nights. It's gonna soak up that flavor. It's gonna tenderize the chicken. It's gonna do all sorts of beautiful things. But wait, you can do a whole chicken cut up or you can do all chicken thighs or you can do all drumsticks or you can do all breasts, although that would be kind of lame, right? If it were up to me, most of the time when I make fried chicken, I just do drumsticks and thighs, but I wanted to do a whole chicken because it felt the most economical. And I should mention that when you're marinating this though in general, regardless of the amount of time, cover it and do it in the fridge. Let's go marinate that thigh. I wanted to make a dredge that was so ridiculously crunchy. It made your teeth explode with joy. So you can start with two and a half cups of all-purpose flour, which typically in most recipes, you would just see that, but I'm adding also a half cup of potato starch. Not a necessity, you could do all all-purpose flour, just be aware that you'll have to add another half cup of all-purpose. But what the potato starch does is it just adds that extra snap, crackle, pop to the crust. It aerates it a little bit more. It adds a little bit of wispiness, a little bit of tenderness, so it's truly crispy. But secondarily, if you don't have potato, but you do have corn starch, you can sub that one-to-one also. One tablespoon of kosher salt, one teaspoon of MSG. Yes, we're doubling up on the MSG. One teaspoon of cayenne, one teaspoon of garlic, half teaspoon of onion powder. Please don't go above that. Onion powder is super strong and overwhelming. I always like to add just a little bit. Two teaspoons of black pepper, fresh ground ideally, and one teaspoon of dried oregano. Now you notice that I keep the spices light, you know, a teaspoon at a time, not a tablespoon, because this is what's gonna be the most impacted by the fryer. So when you're frying, you don't wanna put so many spices that they immediately burn to nothingness once they hit that hot oil. This is just gonna give us that flavor without burning. Oh, it just even smells good. Now my nostrils are probably caked with flour, but I'm happy about it. Now, let's bread and fry. We got a lot of tricks for you here. So we're gonna take our chicken out of the marinade, and just kinda let it drain over a wire rack. Now, in this remainder of marinade, you're gonna take a third cup measuring cup, and you're gonna add a third cup of your dredge to your marinade. Whisk that in till homogenous and smooth. Come back to your marinade, and then we're gonna take our hand and just flick a little bit of that thickened dredge into your flour mix. Got little dots going on, and then you're gonna whisk that in. You can do that a couple times, so now you got little tiny flecks of hydrated flour. You have your thickened batter, and now we actually get dredge. So remember, dry hand, wet hand. Pick a hand. One hand will be for wet, one hand will be for dry. I like to keep my dominant hand dry. Take a piece of chicken. That's gonna go in to your thickened marinade. Shake off the excess. Pop that into your flour, and then just toss. Really gently press to get that flour to adhere. Toss, press, toss. You're gonna coat every single crevice. Get it under the skin a little bit. Don't just leave that part wet. This is gonna do two things. It's gonna make sure that it adheres to the chicken, but it's also gonna spread out those thin balls of hydrated flour, which will then build up into those beautiful flakes. Once that's fully coated, shake off the excess. Pop on a sheet tray, and then repeat with all of your chicken pieces. All right, woo! Chicken time! So you got all your breaded chicken. Now we gotta fry it, dude. Okay, so we have a nice, deep Dutch oven full of vegetable oil. Any high heat oil. Avocado oil, lard, beef fat, duck fat. Just anything that can go around that 350 degree marker. We're using canola. It's cheap. Be cautious on how much you fill this. You wanna go around halfway up the pot. This is about a seven quart pot. You may need multiple of these. Beware of that. Now we're gonna do this in batches. We're gonna lower in some of our pieces. So I'm gonna drop in maybe a thigh, and a drumstick, and a wing. The holy trinity, if you will. Amen. While this is frying, please pay attention. So you want the oil to be around 325 to 350 Fahrenheit. I say this range because it depends on how big and how thick the pieces are. The bigger the pieces are, like these huge breasts in comparison to these tiny wings, the longer they're gonna have to cook. So if they're really big, start it at 325 so that they cook through before they burn. Monitor this, and then you're gonna let these fry, going, sort of adjusting the temperature as necessary, making sure that they don't get too brown till they reach an internal temperature of 165 Fahrenheit. Which will take about 10 to 15 minutes for the smaller pieces, and 15 to 20 minutes for the really big pieces. So you might wanna use multiple pots for this. Once your chicken is done in a thermometer and the thermometer is placed in the thickest part of the meat, reading around 165 degrees Fahrenheit, should also be golden brown and crispy, remove your chicken and drain over a wire rack, set over a baking sheet, or you can do plates with paper towels. And allow that to cool for about two to three minutes, and serve and enjoy immediately. If you don't know what to do with your leftover fry oil, then check out my Korean fried chicken video on this channel, where I show how to dispose of it properly. Look, we're gonna keep this simple. You can place this on a plate, you can do it on a tray. In my case, I have a parchment paper lined large plate, chicken stacked on. Optionally, you could add some herbs for color, but honestly, you could just serve this straight up. Wow, this looks like it could be the crispiest, greatest buttermilk fried chicken of all time. Cheers. That is a banger. Wow, the crispiness, the crunch, the fat on the skin is rendered, so the skin isn't chewy, it's tender, it melts in your mouth. The chicken's cooked perfectly, it's juicy, but it's also not too tough. You know, sometimes people fry chicken too quickly and the chicken kind of ends up a little too stringy and chewy. The chicken's nice and tender, but the seasoning is bar none, absolutely perfect. The balance of the spices all kind of work together to bring up the richness of the chicken without taking away from it. I'm not biting into this and just tasting a myriad of spices alone. I'm tasting rich, deep, chickeny flavor with a little bit of garlic, a little bit of onion, some spiciness, a little pops of heat on the tip of my tongue. But this isn't just a perfect fried chicken. It goes with so many other recipes that are already on this channel, like our mashed potatoes, our mac and cheese. You could take all these recipes together and make a whole meal. This is obviously just the centerpiece, the chicken itself, if you just wanted to focus on this. But don't forget to make some beautiful sides too. And don't forget to subscribe. Love you so much. The link's in the description. See ya, bye.