Fried Chicken

Season Everything. The Chicken. The Flour. the egg if you roll like that.

Food For Lovers Post #1

Love Starts with Grief:

What is something you miss cooking…

It’s been years since I cooked with my mother. This was a time we could talk. Share ideas. It’s where I learned to feed many people at once. Or 5. That weird octagonal shaped table in my parent’s cramped kitchen was the only place I experienced intimacy in my home on a regular basis.

My memories of boiling potatoes to remove the skins and peel after/are coming back strongly. That table was the first place I found a voice. Or maybe it was the strip of brick colored carpet just adjacent to it. The kitchen was where I started debating, doubling down. My first topics of choice were overcooked vegetables and well-done steak. It would be at least a decade or so before I came at them about aioli vs. Hellmann’s mayo.

My dad was the first person to teach me how to peel ginger with a spoon. He looked up at me while spraying ginger juice and skins all over and said “This is How You Do it”. My dad hated the way the kitchen smelled after frying chicken. He’d open all the windows and complain all night long. He would also stand at the counter in his work pants and pull apart all the wings at the joint with engine oil stained fingers, tear the skin off the breasts and thighs, and eat all the best parts of the fried chicken.

For me good fried chicken must pass a cold chicken test. I’ve listened quite contentedly while people go on and on about the best fried chicken coming from this place or that, made by these people or those. Listen, if your fried chicken isn’t just as good (or better) after a several hour road trip in a greasy Ziploc bag I don’t want to hear it. When America decided black folks weren’t allowed to eat in public we packed foods that traveled well. Fried chicken must be able to travel. I do love me a piece of hot and sweet, damn near candy coated Korean fried chicken like the next man, but while the CRONCH keeps us comin’ back— rice flour will never pass a cold chicken test.

Fried Chicken

My mother taught me to fry chicken.

Of course, now we do it very differently.

Her not at all

Me

Only when I’m in the mood to have the whole house smell like grease

And it’s worth it

I’ve been trying to Per-Fect my fried chicken for a decade

Perfection is a lie

But mine is pretty close

She would take the wing tip and tuck it behind the drum

I find this technique makes the inner drum soggy

Everything takes longer and the crisp will never be even

But maybe next time I’ll try it in earnest

I remember how it felt to “pop” the tip behind the thickest part of the drum

It takes a while

And you want to do it post seasoning

I

Coat the chicken in high quality fresh spices and cheap American mustard

Toss it in a mix of rice bean and wheat flours

Heavily seasoned of course

Heat the expensive blend of avocado and coconut oils to 350 and get going

Frying chicken appropriately takes patience

There’s so much flipping

Rotating

Balancing – ensuring I dip the wing tips that stick above the oil downward before

I temp the thickest part of the drum till 165

Pull

Drain on racks

Golden Brown is never more beautiful than in this moment

She

Pulled the Lawry’s from the dusty cabinet before

knocking the garlic and onion powder against the counter

seasoning the tucked wings

dunking them in hot as hell vegetable oil

“I only mess with Crisco”

rotating. Flipping.

The dark spots reminders that the cast iron pan is uneven and maybe the flame is too high

Until they were done

She just knows when this is the case

Plopping them on paper towel lined aluminum pans

My mother’s fried chicken was so much better than mine