shallow-fried chicken
We woke up to ten inches of snow on the ground and a power outage at the office today, so we had a little impromptu lunch party for the unexpected snow day. We made the summeriest food we could think of.
Chicken shallow-fried at home is a different beast entirely from restaurant fried chicken, which is usually pressure-fried or deep-fried. It has a shattering-crisp crust, dark and crunchy (but not hard or greasy) where it rested against the pan. It is good even the next day, cold. The meat is succulent and moist, but not at all greasy. It makes a mess of your clothes and stovetop and kitchen, and it takes fussing and poking and prodding. But it is good stuff.
Frying chicken well is easiest to do on a responsive, high-powered gas stove; if you have an electric stove, you may need to do a few batches before you get a feel for how agile your stove is with temperature adjustments. Not that that’s a bad thing.
Shallow-Fried Chicken
Frying is really a kind of dry cooking—the food is encapsulated in heat that does not add moisture. It cooks in its own steam.
Frying big chunks of food is always a balancing act—the fat needs to be hot enough to cook the outer crust quickly and seal it off from the fat, but you don’t wan the crust to burn before the interior of the food is cooked. When you’re frying chickens, you need to work with small chickens (2.5-3lbs) to get the balance right. These are usually marketed as fryers, and are hard to find sometimes—if you can’t, you can use chickens up to 3.5 lbs, but cut the breasts in half crosswise.
Cut your chicken into serving parts, discarding lumps of fat. Hint: The backbone is awesome battered and fried and consumed by the cook late at night; don’t discard it.
Marinate it in buttermilk to cover for at least a couple of hours. Add up to a tablespoon of Tabasco and some salt and pepper.
Pull it out of the fridge an hour before you want to cook to shake off some of the chill. Mix up your breading: you want a couple cups of flour per chicken, a tablespoon of baking powder (this helps the crust crisp up), a teaspoon of salt, and a LOT of black pepper—there should be visible pepper all through the flour.
Pour the flour mixture into a large brown paper bag. Drop in two or three chicken pieces, fold the bag closed, and shake it vigorously over a sink. Pull the pieces out and put them on a rack, skin side up. Repeat until all your chicken is breaded with a heavy layer of flour.
Bring 3/4” or so of shortening or lard to 375F in a shallow cast-iron skillet. Add a big spoonful of bacon fat if you use shortening and if you have some lying around.
Lay chicken pieces in skin-side down, making sure they don’t touch each other. Keep the heat high and your eye on the thermometer—if it drops below 325F, stop adding chicken. Maintain a temperature between 340F and 360F for six to ten minutes, depending on the size of your pieces (use the lower temperature and the longer time for larger chickens; higher and shorter for smaller ones). Turn them over when the bottoms are deep golden brown, and cook the same amount of time on the other side. Move pieces as needed to keep them off hot spots and raise or lower your temperature to keep the oil hot but not too hot.
Test the temperature; thighs should read 160F. Hold in a warm oven on a rack while you cook the rest of the chicken.
Serve with biscuits, coleslaw, mashed potatoes, and good company. Add milk gravy made with the chicken drippings if you are a maniac.
TIPS:
- Cook dark and white meat separately; the dark pieces will take a minute or two longer than the white ones.
- STAND BACK and use long-handled tongs to handle the chicken. It will foam up like a mofo in the hot shortening; make sure you don’t have so much shortening in the pan that adding chicken will make it overflow. It should be about halfway up the sides of the pieces. A splatter screen and a strong exhaust fan will make your life a lot easier here.
- The usual safety tips apply: Wear long sleeves (but not dangly ones), tie back your hair, keep water away from the pan, and turn handles away from the edge of the stove.
- When you’re done, let the shortening cool and then pour into a yogurt container or the like and discard.
