Beginning Your Fried Chicken
Today we are going to show you a basic preparation for made from scratch southern fried chicken. Now the difference being is that this chicken is going to have the skin on. I have taken a whole chicken and have actually broken it down and I've got a leg and a thigh here on some parchment paper that I already breaded. In my Tupperware though, I still got the chicken breast and I left the skin on. What the white liquid you see is buttermilk and I've had these chicken pieces soaking in the butter milk under refrigeration for approximately 3 hours. Some folks like to let theirs sit in the buttermilk overnight, whatever you choose but a minimum of about 2 to 3 hours, so I did 3 hours on this batch as far as that goes. I've got a mixing bowl with some all purpose flour in it and as you can see, I liberally seasoned it with some garlic salt, I've got some Cajun seasoning there in the middle and I've got some fresh cracked black pepper on the other side. The reason we want to season this so heavily is that we really can't season the meat simply because it is covered in buttermilk as far as that goes. It has been tenderizing in that sense. What we are going to do is just dredge the chicken pieces into this and knock off any residual flour and you end up with pieces that look like this. So again, I've got a chicken breast here. It's a pretty good size of chicken and I want to let that buttermilk drip off; that residual buttermilk that is left over and just drop that guy into here and the seasonings will get mixed in as you bread other pieces of chicken but for this demonstration we wanted to show you the ratios of seasonings we use in the flour. This is going to a different cooking technique simply because it is not going to be a deep fried chicken. It is actually going to be cooked on the stove top on a pan and we are going to cook it on both sides in a small amount of oil and finish it off baking it in the oven. That will help us get a good nice interior temperature in there and make sure all this is done. So, that's that and I'm shaking off the residual flour there; make sure you get a good nice breading on there, pull out this tender. That is pretty much what we are looking at folks. I am going to go over and pull that over to the parchment paper here. I am actually going to put these pieces in the refrigerator and let them sit for about 5 or 10 minutes. We'll come back and show you the next step of the cooking procedure for Southern Fried Chicken.