Chicken Fried Steak with Mashed Potatoes and White Gravy

Rob Carson: Hey guys! It's Rob Carson, I am a radio personality and I love to look. Today, we are making something very good and kind of bad for you, but you are going to love it. It's Chicken Fried Steak, two ways.

Okay, so Chicken Fried Steak is something that I had a lot when I was a kid. I am from the Midwest, from Iowa actually. It's traditionally a Southern dish, but somehow it became a staple of my diet. In fact, it was actually part of my school lunch menu, which would explain why I had weighed 250 pounds in 8th grade, but anyway, you can have it every once in a while, then it's perfectly fine. Our ingredients today are fairly simple. I am taking a really cheap kind of meat and I am making it into something extraordinary. This is a cube steak. Cube steaks are basically a really cheap cut of the cow that they pulverize until it almost falls apart. You can almost see through it actually. When you bread or when you pan-fry, this becomes really, really nice.

So we got about six cube steaks here that we are going to make into chicken fried steak. Over here about two-and-a-half cups of flour, we have about a tablespoon of fresh cracked pepper. We have about a tablespoon of chicken bullion, a tablespoon of chilly powder, three tablespoons of seasoned salt, about a tablespoon of celery salt. It's actually close to the three quarters, about two tablespoons.

We have got a tablespoon of onion powder, got a tablespoon of garlic powder and optional oregano. Add a tablespoon of that, if you want to use oregano, it's kind of nice. Finally, the last ingredient we are going to need is eggs, about 4-5 of them. There are a couple of ways that you can make chicken fried steak.

You can do it stove-top, get about a quarter to a half inch of oil, a Canola oil or maybe a peanut oil. I will tell you, unless you watch your temperature and you know what you are doing, you are going to smoke up your house. So I want to make it easy. I am going to use an indoor fryer. This is a turkey fryer actually, but it can be used for other things. I am using a temperature of 350 degrees which is optimum for deep fat frying.

There are tons of deep fat fryers available at department stores everywhere. I chose the bigger one just because I cook for bigger groups of people. So what I want to do is take all of these seasonings and I am going to add them to my flour. I have used just about every ramican that I have. Chilly powder, come all, black pepper. This is got to have a little kick to it.

I might also add, if you like it spicy guys, might be add some hot shot, it's black and red pepper blend. These are red pepper flakes and black pepper. Tweak in a little bit, add a little bit of spice. It's cool and we will stir this up. This is going to provide such a really awesome bread that you are going to love it.

Alright, I am going to crack my eggs here. A lot of people think fried food is taboo and for some people, maybe you have high cholesterol or high blood pressure, if you are overweight, it might be, but frying is really a wonderful way to cook food. If you use a non-trans fat, like Canola oil or peanut oil, it's not that bad. You only have it every once in a while.

I have fried food once every few weeks. I don't make it a mainstay of my diet. Let's go ahead and bread the chicken fried steak though. You will start-up by layering it in the flour. You are going to basically bread it twice. Twice the breading, twice the joy. You are going to dip in the egg, then back in the flour. This is going to make a really nice thick coating on it. It's going to cook up beautifully. It will look like cover of restaurant menu that serve chicken fried steak. Lay that over there, get another one here and do this to all of them. Make sure they get a good coating of it, lots of flavor. Let's make chicken fried steak. We have got hot oil, don't just drop it in there. You are going to be exploding all over and burning yourself. You are going to lay it in little bit of time, not all of them at the same time, got a little bit sound. I am going to go ahead and put two in for now.

It's really not popping or anything. I mean you can hear the sizzling but it's really not popping. This is only going to take a couple of minutes. Basically, when fried food is done, it floats, it's like hop, it floats. So when you see it nice and brown and you see it floating, you are done.

Now this is a thin steak and it has been aerated, like I said earlier. So it won't take too long to get this done. Fried chicken, you are going to be waiting a little bit longer because you are dealing with thicker meat. This is done pretty quick. I am just turning it a little bit, make sure it's getting even. Alright, I think we have done a piece of chicken fried steak. There it is, that's still sizzling.

I dab my excess oil off, I am not going to get all the oil out of it. It's still not a health food by any means. It's deep fried and everything is good deep fried. You can deep fry a shoe and it would be good. The thing is, you enjoy things like this in moderation and occasionally in excess.

Now I have made some garlic smashed potatoes. If you want to make them, they are really simple. Six or eight Yukon Gold potatoes, some cloves of garlic, three or four cloves of garlic, salt and pepper, whole cream and butter and that's it. It just mix into consistency, they are ridiculously good. Our steak has been fried, I have got some white gravy.

Now I just bought a store bought gravy, you can make your own gravy if you want to. I want to do this for convenience sake. Use a white gravy or chicken gravy or turkey gravy, you can use a steak gravy if you want. I want to take a big whole glob of mashed potatoes, put them on side here. Then I am going to take my chicken fried, I am going to lay it very nicely across here. So it looks kind of pretty. It's pretty, so it's going to look.

This is my white gravy. I am just going to drizzle it all over this. This is better than you can get at most restaurants. They have really got to specialize in chicken fried steak to make it this good. I am going to add some fresh cracked pepper because pepper is always good on chicken fried steak. There is your chicken fried steak, the first way.

Coming up next, we are going to utilize the deep fryer again because we are making it into a sandwich with homemade onion rings.