Jun 22 Buttermilk Fried Chicken

• 6 to 8 pieces chicken
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• black pepper to taste
• 1 teaspoon dried thyme
• paprika to taste
• salt to taste (a few teaspoons)
• oil for frying

Fried chicken is something that I first attempted fairly early on in my history of cooking. For a long while, I was very perplexed as to why my attempts at it bore absolutely no resemblance to the delicious-looking photographs next to the recipe or the kind of thing you might find in a restaurant. Over time, I would say I have improved considerably, and I have found that when frying chicken, there are not a lot of hard and fast rules, but there are really three to follow if you want to produce something resembling the picture on the left:

1. Leave the skin on the chicken. You can certainly take the skin off your chicken and fry it, but that’s not the same dish. That is something else entirely.
2. Use enough oil in your pan.
3. Get the oil hot enough before adding the chicken.

Beyond that, there’s a tremendous amount of room to experiment. Mostly, I try to keep it simple. There are, of course, many different variations on fried chicken, but this is the procedure I most often follow. I begin by lightly salting the chicken, then coating it thoroughly in the buttermilk and letting it rest a good while in the fridge, maybe an hour or so.

Then, I mix together the flour, pepper, thyme, paprika, and salt. Obviously you don’t want to overdo the amount of salt in the flour, but you should be fairly liberal with it if you want the coating to have good flavor. I’ll mix all that together in a bag and then add the chicken pieces, shaking them to coat. I’ll then let that sit in the fridge for at least another hour or so until I’m ready to fry the chicken. You can fry it as soon as it has been tossed in the flour, but the longer it sits, the thicker the coating on the chicken will be.

I typically fry my chicken in canola oil. I used to go to the trouble of deep-frying it, which is good, but lately I’ve found I can still get good results from shallow-frying it, which is much less hassle. I fill my pan with about 1/4 inch or maybe just a little less of oil and heat it up over a medium to medium-high flame. It’s really not enough oil to use a thermometer with, so I wait until the end of wooden spoon placed in the oil bubbles nicely, and then add in the chicken. I cook it until it’s golden brown on one side, turn it once, finish cooking the other side to a nice golden brown, then remove the chicken and let it drain on paper towels. I used to always leave the pan uncovered while frying, but fried chicken actually works quite well if you cover it while cooking.