I LOVEEEEE fried chicken! And its SO MUCH BETTER AT HOME you guys!
Ingredients are below but are super similar to the buttermilk chicken fried steak recipe!
- Chicken- You can use a whole chicken cut up, wings, thighs, breasts, whateverrrr it is your heart desires! I love dark meat fried 🙂
- Buttermilk or a salt water brine
- Hot sauce
- Flour, corn starch, salt, pepper, cayenne, garlic powder, and a vat of oil!
Steps:
- Create a quick seasoning mixture with salt, pepper, cayenne, and garlic powder. You just want a light season more for flavor than saltiness. Generously sprinkle this all over your chicken. Save your excess seasoning mixture.
- Submerge your chicken in some buttermilk. Buttermilk is great for tenderizing chicken and giving your fried chicken the Southern salute it deserves. Marinate in this buttermilk overnight, a few hours, or 30 mins. Obv if you marinate it overnight it would be amazing, but I understand you spontaneous fried chicken cravers may not have all night!
- Remove chicken from buttermilk and shake off excess. I like to splash hot sauce over my chicken at this point for an extra kick.
- Create your flour mixture of flour, cornstarch, and the excess seasoning mixture from part 1. If you don’t have excess seasonings, that’s cool. Just season your flour directly. I do 3 parts flour 1 part cornstarch, and I season my mixture so its extra spicy and a little salty. You can’t go back on your salt, but you can always dip your chicken later in a sauce if it’s not salty enough!
- Coat every nook and cranny of your chicken with this flour mixture, and I mean EVERY nook and cranny!
- Heat up your oil so that when you stick your chopsticks in you see fizzing or when you sprinkle a little bit of flour that sizzles away.
- Cook your chicken until it reaches 165 degrees F internally. If your chicken is already brown but not cooked through, you can remove your chicken and put it on a rack in the oven/air fryer to bake at ~325 until it reaches that 165. Remember to let your chicken cook and brown before moving/flipping it. We don’t want to move the chicken around too much because we want to keep as much of the coating on there as possible! Dutch oven or cast iron distributes heat the best for frying things like this. A deep fryer would be super amazing..but you literally can also fry in anything else.
I opted to fry in 1 inch standing oil in a cast iron, it was delicious! But I’ve also deep fried and although that takes considerably a lot more oil, the cooking’s much quicker and more even since the chicken’s fully submerged in oil. If you do this method, make sure your pot of oil is shallow enough to handle the oil, the chicken in the oil, and then has a little bit more height real estate to safe guard your stove top with the splattering.
If you’re afraid of splashing oil when you put your chicken in, use a slotted spoon or a pair of tongs to gently lower your chicken in your oil. Oil used for fried chicken can be strained and used for other things as well.