Fried Chicken

This is Joshua Weissman's "American Fried Chicken" recipe with a few minor tweaks.

1. Fryer chicken; 1 whole, approximately 4 lbs.
2. Corn oil; 128 fl. oz.

• Two mixing bowls
• A wide but shallow pot
• Thermometer
• A spider or fryer basket helps, but you can get by with just tongs
• Wire rack

1. Cut the chicken into 10 pieces.
   1. I tend to start by removing the wings, then the leg quarters, then separating the breast bone (sternum) from the rest of the carcass. I cut the wing tips off of the wings and separate the thighs from the drumsticks. If you're inexperienced, you can bend the leg to get an idea of where the joint is. You want to be cutting the cartilage, not the bone. Then I slice directly down the sternum to separate the breasts, and then cut each breast into two. If you don't want to cut through bone, you can definitely remove the breast from the bone cut each de-boned breast into two, but my preference is to fry the white meat with the bone-in.
2. Prepare the marinade by placing the chicken into a mixing bowl, adding enough buttermilk to cover, and then adding the dry spices listed under the "Marinade" section of the ingredients list. Let marinade in the refrigerator overnight.
3. Fill the pot with the oil and heat to 350°F.
4. Prepare the dredge by mixing all the remaining ingredients in a mixing bowl.
   1. Weissman recommends dripping some of the marinade into the seasoned flour mixture and mixing it in with your hands. This produces a coating for the chicken with a more heterogeneous texture.
5. Take each piece of chicken and coat it in the seasoned flour. Mix it around, and squeeze the chicken pieces as you do this. You want to ensure that the chicken is completely coated in flour.
   1. It helps to treat one hand as the "dry hand" that touches the flour and chicken that's been coated in the flour, and one hand as the "wet hand" that touches the uncoated chicken.
6. Fry the chicken in batches, ensuring the oil returns to a temperature of 350°F before starting the next batch.
   1. If you throw all the chicken in the oil at once, the temperature of the oil is going to drop extremely quickly and prevent the browning you're going for.
   2. The chicken should be a deep golden brown after about 7-8 minutes. I would definitely recommend probing the white meat as it comes out to ensure it's cooked to 165°F internal. If your temperature control is off, you end up with whit meat that looks done on the outside but is still undercooked on the inside.
   3. Cool the chicken on a wire rack to ensure that the coating is still crisp by mealtime.

This can be made without MSG. But if you're omitting it because you don't expect to be able to find it: you can almost certainly find it locally, assuming you live in the United States. The brand you'll find in ordinary American supermarkets is Ac'cent Flavor Enhancer. It's going to be in the aisle that seasonings are in, probably not far from the salt. If you have an Asian grocery store nearby like an H-Mart, I would recommend stopping there and buying a giant bag of Ajinomoto because it's much more economical.

I hate wasting the buttermilk, so I usually re-purpose it for whatever side dish I'm serving alongside the fried chicken. I've successfully used it as the liquid for a baked mac and cheese, for grits, and for cornbread. That's what I do, because of my aversion to wasting dairy or meat. My younger brother apparently freezes his buttermilk marinade and re-uses it for later batches of fried chicken to great success, so that's also an option. You can also just dump it.

This reheats perfectly in an air fryer.

You can save the oil and re-use it for another batch or two of fried chicken, or some other fried dish. Discard when it starts to smell off. If you're re-using oil, be mindful of what's been cooked in it beforehand. I keep a separate jugs of recycled oil for fish, and things besides fish. Chicken fried in oil that was previously used for fish is nasty.