How to Fry Chicken

Tom Papoutsis: Hi, I am Tom Papoutsis. Today we are doing chicken basics. Right now, we are going to fry chicken. We are going to make the regular, standard, fried chicken. It's very simple, very easy. Earlier today, we took our chicken, a whole chicken, we cut it up into pieces, we showed you how to do that. We took those pieces, we actually put them in buttermilk and we have let that chicken sit in the buttermilk for a couple of hours now.

What we are going to do is we are going to mix our flour mixture here which is we are going to dredge our chicken through. Also it is, is regular all purpose flour. We are going to take some ground black pepper and some Kosher salt, mix that together, take the chicken out of here, dredge it, put it in the oil and we are going to fry for about 10-12 minutes. So let's get started with that.

Essentially, I have got one cup of flour in here. I am going to measure out in my hand here probably about a good tablespoon of salt, put that in. We are going to do probably about a couple of teaspoons of black pepper and we are about two right there, about two teaspoons. We are going to put that in. I am going to take a fork and I am going to mix that around. You see how I just mix it around and you are going to get that pepper incorporated with the flour and the salts in there, mix it around real good, that's our coating and this is going to be very simple, very easy, very quick.

Now as far as soaking your chicken in the buttermilk, the buttermilk actually has a high acidity content which helps soften that chicken, make it nice and tender and it's also going to act in the replacement of egg which is typically used for breading. It's going to -- you can see how it gets stick. Oh, it's sticking gooey and man, that's good stuff right there.

So we are going to take this out, dredge it through here, just turn it a couple of times and get it coated all the way around. You have to pack it on there, that's good stuff right there. Now we are going to take this very carefully.

Now our hot oil. We got to about 300 degrees. What you got to remember is don't go over two-thirds on your pan or when you drop this in, it's going to boil over. So when we are going to drop this in very carefully, there it goes. Same holds true for this. Now you can see how that's bubbling up. If I would have been more full with that oil, it would go over, we don't want that.

So essentially what we are going to do is come up two-thirds on the side of the pan, that's all the full you want to be and don't -- like at this point, I would probably not add any more chicken. I would let these two pieces cook and we would move on to the next, to the next, to the next. So right now, we are going to let this cook for a couple of minutes, keep an eye on them and then in about ten minutes we will be back and these will be done. It has been about ten minutes. Our chicken is nice and very golden brown. You see it finished off really nice. We will set it here. Look at that nice looking chicken. Now you want your chicken to be -- I will go ahead and turn the heat off here. You want your chicken to end up being about a 180 degrees. It's what you want the inside temperature of the chicken to be. Well that's it. That's basic fried chicken right there and that should do it. Chicken basics, everything that we have told here today, give it a try, it's very simple, very easy and enjoy.