Poultry Power: The Fried Chicken Chronicles

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I think fried chicken chicken nuggets are an abomination.

I think they're a food product, not a food.

I think to call something fried chicken, in my book, there needs to be a bone, and a human hand should have been involved in the preparation of said bird.

And nuggets don't qualify by either of those measures.

Those are fighting words.

You might have thought that fried chicken is just chicken that's been fried, but it's way more complicated than that.

In fact, fried chicken can be a surprisingly contentious dish.

And not just on the topic of whether nuggets are an abomination or not.

So grab a drumstick and join us on this crispy, crunchy, deep-fried adventure.

I'm Nicola Twilley.

And I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And in this episode of Gastropod, we're going to take a look at fried chicken controversies through the lens of science and history.

Is fried chicken really a southern dish?

How do you get a truly crispy crust on it?

And what is going on with racist stereotypes about African Americans and fried chicken?

What put it it onto my radar as something to watch was actually fried chicken sandwiches?

That's Hilary Dixler.

She's a senior editor at Eater, and she recently called 2016 the year of the fried chicken.

Fried chicken is super hot right now.

Hot and delicious, yes.

But like we said, it's also really complicated.

The first question is where the tradition of breading and frying birds in hot oil actually comes from.

John T.

Edge directs the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi, and he looked into that question for his book, Fried Chicken, an American Story.

I think that

so many people want to find like the Ur fried chicken cook.

And I think that's an exercise in folly.

I think that there are a number of things we can surmise about the roots of fried chicken.

And there are that it is a rural dish.

It is a dish of farm cooks who had ready, easy access to birds clucking around in the backyard.

It is a working class dish.

And as

the institution of slavery spread across the United States, it became a dish of black expertise.

But how?

Did enslaved Africans bring this chicken frying technique with them?

Or did the dish come from Europe originally?

Or did different traditions come together to create something new, southern-style fried chicken?

There are some who say it was of European origin.

There are others who say it's of African origin.

And you know, it's always tricky because in the Americas in particular, where you had the admixture of European colonists, African enslaved peoples, native peoples to this country, how this particular food came to be is somewhat a vexed question, quite frankly.

And so I tend to stay away from origins because none of us were actually there.

What we do know is that enslaved people, enslaved Africans in particular, did cook foods prior to coming to the Americas in ways of frying in one pot using some sort of palm oil or oil-based substance.

Psyche Williams Forson is chair of the American Studies Department at the University of Maryland, and she's the author of Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs, Black Women, Food, and Power.

Psyche says that whatever the dish's origins, it was enslaved African women who became the experts at frying it.

And if you're picturing a KFC-style bucket of wings right right now, Psyche and John have news for you.

This early fried chicken cooked by African-American slaves throughout the South, it wasn't like that.

Although, like Psyche says, none of us were there, so it's hard to know for sure.

And there certainly isn't much in the way of recipes to guide us.

Fried chicken was, in many cases, like cornbread, like other kind of elemental dishes.

It was

not as thoroughly documented as something that would have been perceived as more complex, something that would have required a recipe.

Fried chicken was something that a cook knew how to prepare when they stepped in the kitchen.

That said,

you know, the early recipes reveal a very simple bird, lightly flavored and fried in lard and oftentimes served with gravy.

This kind of super crunchy 14 herbs and spices KFC-inspired bird is something relatively new.

And we're not talking chicken as we know it, but more yard birds sort of roaming around, a wild kind of hen and bird that folks may have

had access to.

So, that early American fried chicken, the bird might have been a little darker and tougher, a little more free-range, and those drumsticks wouldn't have been quite as crunchy and crispy as we're used to seeing today.

Still sounds mighty tasty to me.

But you know, most often the women who had become experts at preparing fried chicken, they weren't the ones eating it.

Because, of course, in this truly hideous system, African slaves didn't get to enjoy the choice foods they spent hours preparing.

That fried chicken was pretty much for their white owners.

But there is one way that some of the last generation of enslaved African women who spent years cooking fried chicken for other people again and again and again ended up being able to make use of their very hard-won expertise.

because after emancipation, some used their chicken frying skills to start their own businesses.

The group of women that I found in particular, I hone in on Orange County, Virginia, or Gordonsville, the town of Gordonsville.

But you might find these women at various whistle stops and junctions trying to peddle their wares.

So this is just after the Civil War, just after emancipation in the 1860s and 70s.

Rail travel is pretty new, it's booming, and African Americans are trying to scrape a living amidst a lot of ongoing prejudice and discrimination.

They didn't have a lot of other opportunities.

And so Psyche helped us imagine what it would have been like as the train pulled in to Gordonsville.

It would have been,

I think, a very interesting scene because it, first of all, would have been hot, perhaps dusty, very chaotic.

And out of nowhere, perhaps,

because by all accounts you didn't quite really see them coming, these women emerge, you know, all trying to, if you can just think in terms of cacophony of voices, all at one time, you know, hawking their foods in hot pie, hot coffee, you know, fried chicken, maybe eggs, other kinds of goodies, berries, things of that nature.

And so all of this is going on at one time, you know, and they're vending

almost similar to what we would see at a modern-day ball game, except it's a lot more hurried and rushed and it's certainly more chaotic.

And the transactions are made right there.

I believe that fried chicken breasts were sold for 25 cents.

Other parts of the chicken may have been sold for a nickel or a dime.

These women called themselves waiter carriers.

In one of the only photos we have documenting their work, you can see them holding their baskets above their heads right there on the tracks next to the train.

They were selling fried chicken to passengers directly through the windows.

These newly emancipated waiter carriers were free to work for themselves, and so they were able to use their chicken frying skills to get ahead.

So in this instance, these women, in Gordonsville in particular, were able to use the proceeds of that money to build houses, to put their children through school, to help fund churches.

This didn't just happen in Gordonsville, Virginia.

Psyche says that scenes like this one were likely happening all over the South as formerly enslaved women became fried chicken entrepreneurs.

But Gordonsville might have been special.

There are some, again, folklore stories about Gordonsville that said some folks just deliberately planned their trip so that they would stop through Gordonsville.

And at least one author named or dubbed the area the fried chicken capital of the world.

Of course, that was before a certain Kentucky colonel got his hands on the crispy bird.

It took a few decades, but white folks eventually ended up appropriating some of fried chicken's entrepreneurial possibilities for themselves.

Yes, so Harlan Sanders, who opened his first store in Corbin, Kentucky, which was, you know, if you think about the deep racial history of this, Corbin, Kentucky at one point was a sundown town.

In other words, a town where blacks were welcomed during the day but not at night.

Colonel Harlan Sanders, who earned that title, it's an honorific from the governor of Kentucky, who wore a white plantation suit with a bolo tie, who affected the kind of neo-Confederate colonel in his mien,

who bleached his goatee so it too would be white.

He was a creation of the modern era.

He created a very modern dish, pressure-fried chicken, and created a very modern icon himself and used the old South to sell the new.

Evoking a sort of plantation history and playing off the racism of the day, Colonel Sanders opens the very first KFC in 1930.

Then he starts franchising the stores in 1952.

But the most important year is 1969.

That's when he took the company public.

And in the first year alone, John T.

says he made $12 million for his investors.

And you don't make $12 million off of fried chicken in a single year without people taking notice.

The kind of late 1960s boom of Kentucky Fried Chicken inspired entrepreneurs across the country.

In that moment, some Nashville businessmen concocted some analogs to Colonel Sanders, and one of whom was Minnie Pearl.

And Minnie Pearl,

her actual name was Sarah Cannon.

She was a child of privilege and wealth from Nashville who played the part of Minnie Pearl, the woman whom you always see in the grand old Opry pictures who had the hat with flowers on it and the $1.95 price tag hanging off, and who would say howdy?

That was Minnie Pearl.

She was herself, another persona.

And that persona of Minnie Pearl is the folksy everywhere used to sell Mini Pearl fried chicken franchises, which began to spread across the South out from Nashville not long after the Colonel, after KFC went public.

At the same time, those Nashville businessmen who developed Minnie Pearls also began to invest in Mahalia Jackson's fried chicken, a black analog to Minnie Pearls.

And instead of keying off Minnie Pearl's hat, they keyed off of Mahalia Jackson, who was at the time the most popular gospel singer in America.

They keyed off her life and her career.

So the buckets showed kind of a stylized church window on it, church stained glass window on it.

They started a bunch of corporations.

Everybody got into speculation.

Chicken stock was so

There's even more, and I absolutely love this.

Aretha Franklin opened a fried chicken restaurant named after herself, and Mickey Mantle opened one too.

His slogan was, 100% serious here, quote, to get a better piece of bird, you'd have to be a rooster.

Even James Brown got into the act.

James Brown proposed a golden platter chain of restaurants.

It was about black wealth creation.

It was about black job training.

It was based in Macon, which is not far from where Brown grew up, and

like the Mahalia Jackson effort, it was an attempt to say, this is a black dish, and I, the black entrepreneur, in this case James Brown, believe that blacks should profit from this dish.

So it was a political statement as well as a cultural gambit.

So on the one hand, you have Harlan Sanders profiting off the racist history of southern-style fried chicken.

And on the other hand, African Americans have managed to transform fried chicken from its beginnings in slavery into something that was really a tool for black empowerment.

But, like everything to do with fried chicken, things are a little bit more complicated even than that.

The waiter carriers and Mahalia Jackson and James Brown, they were all selling freshly cooked piping hot fried chicken.

But the other part of this story is about cold fried chicken, and that's where things get uglier.

In between the waiter carriers of the 1860s and 70s and the fried chicken boom of the 1960s comes the Jim Crow period in American history.

This is a time when racist laws, particularly in the South, basically enforced segregation.

African-American families who, during Jim Crow, did not have easy access to good food on the road or any food on the road or any accommodations or welcoming accommodations would pack their own lunch.

And the reality that that's the way they travel led many people to refer to trains, especially the trains that took African-American Southerners north from Arkansas and Mississippi and Alabama and Louisiana, took them north to cities like Chicago and Detroit, those trains populated by African American people who were moving out of the South for opportunity in the North and fleeing segregation, fleeing Jim Crow, were often referred to as Chicken Bone Express.

And the way you provisioned yourself as you fled north was by way of fried chicken in a shoebox.

And so when you think about that part of the story, you have to think about, hmm, how was this food able to sustain during hot temperatures and hot climates?

And so chicken is one of those foods that will sort of preserve itself for a while.

And so those who are traveling would be packed a shoebox lunch, quite frankly, whether it's an actual shoebox or a paper bag or what have you,

with chicken, some type of a sweet, that is cake or cookies or what have you.

Also, maybe a piece of fruit and some kind of a drink.

So, this would be the Chicken Bone Express, and the story goes that

you could tell the paths that African-American people were taking because you would follow the trail of chicken bones, whether that was on Greyhound or on the train or by car.

If you just followed the chicken bones, that's when you would know what direction that these African-American travelers had gone.

Cold-fried chicken wasn't just travel food for African Americans, though.

It was church food too.

My mom would get up really early and start frying chicken before we went to church, you know, because I'm a preacher's kid, so we were always in church on Sunday.

And, you know, my dad had to preach, and so we would get up, she would get up early and start frying chicken or cooking the Sunday meal, making biscuits or what have you.

Psyche said church was an all-day affair for a lot of folks in the South.

Services started early in the morning and lasted well into the evening.

Not having time to travel all the way back home and then come back again for evening service, a lot of folks just brought their food with them early in the morning and would make a picnic basket or eat in the church sanctuary or eat in the church basement or on the church grounds or in their car or what have you.

And more often than not, that food would have been fried chicken.

But if you didn't have the money for that, Psyche said that tomato sandwiches were pretty common too, because as the 1900s wore on and America became a fully industrialized nation after the Second World War, people tended not to have a bird running around in the yard anymore.

Chicken became something you had to buy at the store, and so it became a bit of a treat.

There was a time not too long ago when chicken was

an expensive animal until the commercial broiler industry begins along the Delmarva Peninsula up around Delaware, Virginia, in the top right-hand corner of the South.

And so, you know, if you were a, you know, a farm family and you wanted to invite the preacher over for dinner, the kind of most illustrious food you could serve the preacher was not a country ham, it was fried chicken.

That was the ultimate show of respect.

And in that way, that show of respect came to be called the gospel bird.

Okay, so now I understand a little bit of this complicated story of fried chicken in America.

It played a crucial role in African American history, in part because of the tragedy at the heart of the the story.

And now I also understand why it became associated with church.

But so today, why do we see fried chicken joints all over the country run by all sorts of people?

So while I wrote a book, Fried Chicken, and I'm a Southerner, and all those things would...

probably lead you to believe that I wrote a book about southern fried chicken, I didn't.

And that was kind of what I attempted to do, was to look at fried chicken and it's American food.

And that's what I found traveling around.

It's an American food, not a southern food.

Because that same entrepreneurial drive that inspired the waiter carriers of Gordonsville and Minnie Pearl, that's a very American characteristic.

And so today, fried chicken has come to symbolize opportunity, and not just for African Americans.

You know, one of the ones that fascinated me the most was in Barberton, Ohio.

The thing that was interesting to me about Barberton, Ohio is the degree to which a group of families, Serb families, immigrants to America,

kind of grasped hold of this dish-fried chicken and saw it as their path to belonging in this new country, saw it as their path to assimilation, and also saw it as their path to economic independence.

And their tales are not singular.

You know, all across the country, I met, you know, I met a cook of Indian extraction in Chicago who saw his kind of lemon-inflected Italian-style chicken as his ticket to the American Dream.

I met Korean fried chicken cooks in Atlanta and in Seattle who saw their style of fried chicken as their kind of purchase of the American Dream.

It's a common tale and was told all across the country, not just in the South.

These different communities all put their own spin on it.

Korean fried chicken has a thinner, crispier crust.

The Latin American version is often a little more garlicky with citrus notes.

And the 2016 version of the entrepreneurial fried chicken American dream is a fast casual sandwich.

Last year, Shake Shack, which is the pioneering fast casual chain run by Union Square Hospitality Group's Danny Meyer, they launched something called a Chicken Shack, which is a fried chicken sandwich.

And right around the same time, David Chang of the Momofuku Restaurant Group in New York City announced and opened his very first quick service restaurant, which was dedicated to fried chicken sandwiches.

So that's what sort of led me down the the path of investigating what is going on.

And I would say today I would still point to fucku and to shake shack as important pieces in the puzzle of why fried chicken now.

Hillary Dixler wrote an article called Why It's Finally Time for a Fast Casual Chicken Explosion.

Explosion in the business boom sense, not in the wings flying through the air sense, sadly.

Hillary's point was that until recently, you had cheaper fast food joints, KFC, Popeyes, and then you had chefs at more expensive expensive restaurants frying up chicken.

There wasn't really anything in the middle price-wise.

And then chicken got cheap, or at least cheaper than beef.

Over the past decade, chicken has come down from its pricey perch as the gospel bird, at least relative to beef.

So chicken pricing has remained really stable, and beef has gotten more expensive.

So if you're a numbers-driven operator and you know that restaurants run on incredibly slim margins, that's, you know, that's meaningful data.

So a lot of chefs are opening kind of mid-range fried chicken sandwich joints.

It's a pretty big trend right now, and Hillary doesn't think it's going to slow down anytime soon.

I cannot lie, I love the Shake Shack fried chicken sandwich.

I have some bad news for you, Nikki.

John T agrees that it's tasty, but he doesn't think it's fried chicken.

I love Shake Shack, I love Momofuku, I love what David Chang's doing, I love what Danny Myers is doing.

That's not fried chicken, that's chicken that has been fried.

It's different.

How so?

There's no bone.

To me, you know, for a dish to be called fried chicken, culturally, historically,

and for me, in terms of sheer pleasure, it requires a bone.

Fried chicken sandwiches are chicken that has been fried, placed between two pieces of bread, and I love them too, but they're not the same thing.

I can roll with that.

As long as no one is taking my fried chicken sandwich away, you can call it what you like.

I would not even dare come between you and your fried chicken sandwich.

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So, we told you there's a boom in mid-range, fast casual fried chicken.

A little more chefy than the fast food franchises started by Harlan Saunders.

But really, those chains, KFCs, Popeyes, they're still the ones selling most of America's fried chicken.

And for a lot of people, it's kind of a guilty pleasure.

We love Popeyes.

And yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.

Like, the birds aren't from good sources, and you can make a whole bunch of different arguments against Popeyes.

The chicken's damn good.

If the sourcing of those birds matters to you, we are going to give you some tips about how to cook up the perfect fried chicken at home.

But before we get to that, the way the birds are farmed, that's not the only problem.

Right, like in London, there are more fried chicken shops than basically anything else, and they're clustered in the poorest boroughs.

Boroughs where one in six kids is obese by the time they leave primary school.

PFC to me means perfect fried chicken.

I don't know if you can call it franchise but there's quite a few of them in the area.

They're part of the scenery, they're part of the culture.

I think PFCs are really popular because they're cheap, they're quick, everybody loves chicken, chicken's like the new craze, it's just easy, simple, tasty.

It's a new generation, parents work 24-7 and that's their only meal through the day.

Perfect Fried Chicken or PFCs is a mini chain of chicken shops in London.

They're so ubiquitous that they've become slang for any fried chicken shop.

And that clip is from a movie that a youth group in Mile End in London made for a community project exploring what fried chicken means to their mostly immigrant and minority, mostly poor neighborhood.

It's more than just a chicken shop because it's like some people's second home.

Yeah, well, brought up with it.

Yeah, and it's like a social gathering.

Yeah, the venue will be the Englishman's pub.

PFC is a very warm place where you can hang out with your mates, it's safe, especially in the winter time when it gets dark very early and it starts to rain and it's very cold.

Everyone knows that you know it's bad for you, you know, it impacts you, but you know, just for the whole social sake

for your peers, you know, you just end up going.

And I've been an example of that as well.

You know, we said fried chicken was controversial and this is one of the ways.

Everyone knows that a two-piece box as an after-school snack is not helping Britain's obesity crisis.

But fried chicken plays this incredibly important role in the community, too.

It's a point of pride for these kids to have all these chicken shops in their hood.

Fried chicken shops are popular in poorer neighborhoods in the U.S.

as well, but there's an even darker side of the story here in America.

I was in Mississippi doing a show, and I go to a restaurant to order some food, and I say to the guy, I say, I would like to have, and before I even finish my sentence, he says, the chicken.

I could not believe it.

This man was absolutely right.

I said, how did he know that I was going to get some chicken?

I asked him, I said, how do you know that?

How did you know I was going to get some chicken?

He looked at me like I was crazy.

Come on, buddy.

Come on, buddy.

Now everybody knew as soon as you walk through the goddamn door, you're going to get some chicken.

It is no secret down here that blacks and chickens are quite fond of one another

if you don't immediately recognize that voice that's dave chappelle in one of his comedy routines but really that's not a joke here are the two hosts of the popular podcast another round tracy clayton and heaven nagatu fried chicken for black people is a battleground okay

fried chicken is a battlefield because i mean it's not just like a super super delicious food fried chicken is so so good but it's a very racialized food unfortunately because you know white folks for some reason we're like oh let's taunt black people with a really delicious food even though everyone likes fried chicken nobody dislikes fried chicken nobody does and so it's so tied into respectability politics because like i feel like we all have that moment or maybe not all of us i had a moment or two

being the only black person in any sort of room where fried chicken is like on the lunch menu or like you're out ordering lunch with your white co-workers and you're like, yo, if I get this fried chicken, I'm like, oh,

am I going to seem like a stereotype?

Yo, it sounds silly, but I've definitely thought about that chicken.

Exactly, exactly.

Dave Chappelle and even Heaven and Tracy, they're laughing.

But this is a real racist stereotype with real historical roots.

Psyche actually dug into the origins of how fried chicken became negatively associated with black people in America.

African-American people very early on, I'd say sometime in the 17th, 18th century, began to be heavily associated with chicken.

And then there was this 1915 crazy racist, but at the same time wildly popular movie about the founding of the KKK called The Birth of a Nation.

In it, there's a bunch of African-American legislators, and they're depicted as lazy and crude.

They have their feet on the desk, and they're drinking, and one is tearing into a piece of fried chicken.

So, this kind of image became ingrained in American culture, and it recurs again and again.

Psyche's built up a horrifying collection of racist cartoons and captioned photographs on the subject.

And then one of my actual favorite images that is extremely problematic is the picture of the African-American man in an idyllic setting where he has a watermelon under each arm and then there's a bird waiting

on the ground there in front of him and the caption says, you know, something like just this nigga's dang fool luck.

Does he put down the watermelon and pick up the chicken or does he let the chicken go and keep the watermelon and so it's it's presented as the quintessential quandary right

and so yeah that's how these stereotypes emerge and and they continue right to this day I mean when

the President Obama entered the White House, you saw images circulating of watermelons on the south lawn.

That first photograph she mentioned was from the early 1900s, but Psyche's own research shows that this racist stereotype is still shaping behavior today.

I did some focus groups with students, many of whom said absolutely not, I would not eat chicken in public.

There was an African-American woman who worked for the government and she said, I just think eating chicken at your desk is ghetto when you're working in a professional setting.

That kind of internalized stereotype, depriving a government worker of a delicious lunch just because of the color of her skin, that's exactly what Heaven and Tracy are fighting against not eating fried chicken in public is not gonna make me respect you anymore you just denying yourself fried chicken that's not being kind to yourself that's not good self-care and i know so many people who refuse who actively refuse to eat fried chicken in public

it's just so ridiculous that we would limit ourselves the pleasure and enjoyment of biting into a hot piece of juicy crispy fried chicken speak on it Tracy.

Speak on it.

Because the white people don't let that happen.

Psyche's on board.

She'll happily eat fried chicken in mixed company.

I have a friend who one time said, no, I'm going to the cookout and I'm going to absolutely buy into every stereotype.

I'm going to eat the watermelon and the chicken.

So I'm with them, actually,

and with many other people who, quite frankly, aren't really concerned.

Although that said, Psyche's not about to eat any old fried chicken.

I was at a cookout not long ago and they had fried chicken wignettes.

And I said to my mom, I said, who cooked this?

And she told me who made it.

I was like, oh, okay.

I don't like the looks of it.

Because to me, it wasn't cooked hard enough because it wasn't dark enough.

It was just way too still a little bit too fleshy.

And I don't like fleshy, jiggly moving chicken.

Like many people who grew up in the South, Psyche learned to make fried chicken standing by her mom at the stove.

There was no recipe to share.

I think fried chicken is less about the recipe than it is is about the muscle memory of the cook.

And so, you know, there's a lot of focus on, you know, what's this person's secret recipe?

And I think what we ought to really focus on is

the accumulated knowledge of the cook who,

you know, for a generation or two generations stands facing the stove, stands facing a skillet, burbling with oil, knows when to turn the chicken, knows when to change the oil, knows how to salt the chicken, knows all these different steps.

And that accumulated knowledge is what's important, not so much the recipe.

But do not despair.

Even if generations of chicken frying have not imprinted themselves on your muscle memory, science can help.

Because there's science to good fried chicken, as well as all of this controversial history.

So we called up one of our science and cooking experts.

You might remember Kenji Lopez-Alt from our episode last summer where we interviewed him about his great book, The Food Lab.

Or you might already know his work from Sirius Eats.

He devotes an entire chapter to frying, and in particular, how to create the absolutely most wonderful fried chicken.

But first, Nikki and I had one major question.

Why bother frying chicken at home?

I mean, this seems like a job for the experts.

It involves a lot of hot oil for starters.

It's always felt like a combination of too dangerous and too much of a hassle for me.

You know, but there are good reasons to fry at home.

I mean, I guess the main one is that it's delicious.

Actually, to be honest, I can't really think of many other reasons, but for food, I think that should be reason enough.

Now, Kenji does admit that frying chicken at home is not a walk in a park.

There are all sorts of places where things can go horribly wrong.

So getting the chicken to cook through while the coating crisps up properly is one tricky point.

You know, making sure that the coating doesn't burn before while the chicken is still raw in the center.

And so that has to do with oil temperature.

It also has to do with the size of the chicken pieces.

And it also has to do with the exact makeup of the coating because, you know, there's certain things you can add like sugar or paprika or other ingredients that will make the coating brown much faster.

It's sort of a balancing act between all those things to make sure that the coating is golden brown by the time the chicken is cooked through.

Then there's making sure that the coating sticks to the skin.

The last thing you want is for the coating to just kind of slough off as you're eating it and have sort of pale skin underneath.

And you have to get the crunch right.

Just really maximizing the surface area and getting this sort of nice balance between crispy and crunchy.

To me, crispy and crunchy are two different things.

Like crispy is like a potato chip, whereas crunchy is sort of like a much hardier thing, like a bread crust.

And you don't want fried chicken to be too crunchy.

You don't want it to be tough.

That seems like a pretty long list of ways that frying chicken at home can go wrong.

This is another reason I'm still inclined to leave it to the experts.

But let's give Kenji a chance.

He's come up with the science of how to make it work.

Of course, it took an insane amount of tasting and testing.

It started like with any recipe by doing research, which meant just going out and eating a lot of fried chicken.

But then once you get down to the actual recipe testing portion, well, a lot of it, you know, it's examining existing recipes and seeing what similarities they have, what differences they have, and trying to pinpoint exactly why recipes are different from each other.

You know, why does this one recommend you rest the chicken and why does this one not?

You know, why does this one say to shallow fry in a cast iron pan while this one says it's better to deep fry?

So it did involve frying lots and lots and lots of chicken.

And you know, fried chicken is actually my wife's favorite food.

It's what we get for her birthday every year.

And so,

like a good husband, I waited until she was gone before I did all this testing because

otherwise she wouldn't have been able to help herself, I think.

And amazingly, Kenji and his wife are, as of right now, still married.

Whereas if my husband was deliberately making my favorite food only when I was out of town, well, I would have some things to say about that.

Good thing Jeff doesn't know how to fry a chicken.

After listening to this episode, he will.

Jeff, consider yourself warned.

But let's let Kenji talk us through a few of his best tips for scientifically proven fried chicken.

For this episode, we're going to focus on the oil.

Honestly, that's the part of it that scares me the most.

The number one rule, I think, is to not be afraid of the oil, because I think hot fat can sense fear.

And if you're very timid about it and you say you're holding your hand a few inches above the oil and you don't want to lower your hand down and you're kind of dropping food in, that's when you're going to splash yourself.

A much better way to deep fry is to pick up the food and then lower it into the oil and release it just before your hands reach the level of the oil.

And that way it'll sort of slide in, you know, like an Olympic diver.

You want to really slide in without making any splash at all.

If it helps calm your nerves, Kenji pointed out that the oil is not really boiling.

Well, deep frying is dehydration, really.

So I'm sure you've heard this term boiling oil.

People will say, oh, I dropped it into boiling oil.

But the fact is that oil itself does not actually boil.

It never does because it'll catch on fire way before it comes to its actual boiling point.

So when you're putting fried foods into oil, it's not the oil that's boiling, it's actually the water content of the food that is boiling and bubbling out of that oil in the form of water vapor.

So that's what leads to dehydration.

At the same time, you're doing a few other things.

One of the things you're doing is leavening.

So much in the same way that when you put a loaf of bread or a piece of dough in the oven, when you're baking bread, a lot of those internal gas pockets will start to expand.

So you'll get pockets of water vapor, you'll get pockets of carbon dioxide that are all expanding, and that's what causes bread to puff up or like the, you know, the crust of a pizza to puff up.

And this is what makes the chicken crust get light and crispy.

So, that's the science of what's happening while your chicken is bubbling away.

But that leads us to some more practical questions, like what oil should you use, and what type of pot?

Typically, you want to use a relatively large volume of oil because if you don't use enough oil when you add food to it, it'll cool down to the point where you're not really deep-frying anymore, and you're kind of sort of poaching in fat, which you don't really want to do.

You want there to be a relatively vigorous bubbling the entire time.

So, you want to use a large enough volume of oil that it doesn't really drop significantly in temperature when you add in your food.

For home cooks, usually a couple of quarts is enough, like two quarts of peanut oil, something like that, or canola oil will work.

Kenji actually recommends using a wok because the sloped sides give you plenty of room to move the chicken around while it's cooking.

And the fat question?

That's an interesting one.

Kenji tried a bunch of different oils.

The general rule with frying foods is that the higher percentage of saturated fat in the oil you're using, the crisper the food's going to come out.

So something with very low saturated fat, say like a light olive oil, is going to come out, you're going to get food that has a very thin crispness and will turn soggy relatively quickly.

Whereas highly saturated fat, say like, you know, if you go to want to go to the extreme, like something like beef tallow, you'll get something that's very, very crunchy and crispy.

There is a downside to using highly saturated, overly saturated fats, though, which is that as they cool, they solidify.

So eating, and I've tried this, eating fried chicken that's fried 100% in beef tallow, it tastes great for like the first five seconds out of the fryer um and then as it starts to cool down you get this sort of candle wax texture to it where the the fat just kind of coats your tongue because it's so so thick and so it really does taste like you're eating a crunchy candle crunchy beef and chicken flavored candle which you don't want a crunchy beef and chicken flavored candle does not sound at all appetizing Kenji ends up recommending peanut oil because for a vegetable oil it's pretty highly saturated and it's got a neutral flavor.

Kenji also recommends paper towels for draining off excess oil instead of a wire rack because the paper towel will wick away excess oil.

And Kenji says there's a popular myth that the hotter your cooking oil, the less fat your chicken will absorb.

In fact, the opposite is true.

It actually absorbs more oil, but it's crispier, so it doesn't feel as greasy on your tongue.

Fried chicken is just not a health food.

There's no way to work that particular miracle.

But it's still delicious.

There's a lot more science to the perfect fried chicken.

There's brining, there's the batter, there's whether it should rest before you fry it.

There's even when to salt it, not to mention what to do with all that oil after you've fried your chicken.

But if you're a stronger woman than me and you're determined to make fried chicken at home, let Kenji be your guide.

We let Kenji guide us somewhere else.

He said that in general, he's not a fan of what he calls cheffy fried chicken, but there is one.

Okay, yes,

I take back my no chef.

There's no cheffy fried chicken I like.

I do like the fried chicken at Kirkland.

And as it happens, Kirkland Tap and Trotter is right down the street from me in Somerville.

They serve fried chicken every Sunday night.

Nikki was in town recently, and we headed over there to try it out.

They pretty much use the same method as Kenji does on their birds.

We break them down in-house.

They

are marinated overnight.

Well, first, they're brined and salt, and then some chicken spice that we use on the chicken.

And then we marinate them overnight in a buttermilk and egg mixture with more chicken spice involved.

We fry them the night before at a low temp to slowly crisp the skin and cook the chicken through.

And then we throw them in the oven for five or ten minutes and we finish them in a hot oil to crisp them up.

How hot is the oil?

350.

A bit of fine sea salt.

Okay, one thing you have to understand is that I was really, really hungry because my train was delayed and I hadn't eaten lunch.

So I was already even more excited about eating that fried chicken than usual.

It's so good.

It smells, it doesn't smell greasy, it smells just entirely crispy.

It's like

if crispiness could have a smell, this is it.

It smells like perfect fried chicken.

That's what it smells like.

But now the real test.

Which part, which piece are you going to start with?

I mean, I feel like maybe we should start with a drumstick because it's kind of the perfect thing to bite into.

Okay.

Mmm.

Mmm.

Oh my gosh.

The chicken is moist and delicious and that breading doesn't come off separately, which I like, but it's so crispy.

It's like unreal.

It's unnatural.

It's super crispy.

Exactly.

It's super, super crispy.

And the chicken is super, super moist still.

It's amazing.

I think, wait, I need if I could have audio of your face right now.

If you couldn't tell by the sound of our voices, we were pretty much in heaven.

And Nikki polished off the entire half of a chicken.

And kind of to my amazement, you actually didn't, Cynthia, which meant that we got to try the wonders of cold-fried chicken the next day.

And if you want to know more about cold fried chicken as an American phenomenon, well, I will direct you to our special supporters-only Outtakes email.

Full details on how to get yourself on that list at the end of the show.

But for now, back to fried chicken.

At the beginning of the show, John T., remember, he wrote a book called Fried Chicken, an American Story.

He said that fried chicken is an iconic American dish.

It's not just because we've been eating it here for hundreds of years.

It's not even just because it's delicious, though, of course, it is.

This isn't about pleasure.

This is about a narrative embedded in food.

And fried chicken, I would argue, is one of those foods that is embedded with multiple narratives, multiple meaningful narratives.

They're not narratives about pleasure.

They're narratives about sacrifice.

They're narratives about entrepreneurial zeal.

They're narratives about ethnicity and assimilation.

They're narratives about racism and its impacts

on America.

That's why fried chicken resonates.

That's why fried chicken is iconic.

It's a narrative embedded in the food.

It's not the savory,

tender, tasty qualities of fried chicken.

That's the bonus.

The reason we're all attracted to fried chicken, whether we know it or not, is because we are attracted to and it's sometimes repulsed by the narratives embedded in it.

Thanks this episode to John T.

Edge, the author of Fried Chicken, an American Story, and to Psyche Williams Forson, the author of Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs.

Thanks also to Hillary Dixler of Eater and Kenji Lopez-Alt, author of The Food Lab.

A special thanks to Toni Moz, chef owner of Kirkland Tap and Trotter, and Brendan West, a chef there, for letting us in the kitchen and feeding us delicious fried chicken.

And thanks to Ari Leibowitz for her help.

As always, we have links to everybody's books and websites and restaurants, as well as photos and more on our website, gastropod.com.

We'll be back in two weeks, so stay tuned.

Fried chicken in a country tune.

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