Battle with the hot chicken project was joined again this weekend, and ours was not the only unit at the head of the charge. (Military metaphor will be dropped forthwith.) A Chinatown friend of mine had been inspired by Esquire to brine his meat in a mixture of Coca-Cola, Worcestershire and Tabasco, a bizarre experiment that would sound repulsive if it weren’t also tantalizing. I, meanwhile, pressed on where I left off last time, attempting to prove my mother’s theory that if I just put enough fucking pepper in the flour, my mouth would be beset by wonderful and terrible sensation.
Continued frustration was my result. My third test-fry, I have yet to replicate the crispy perfection of my first haphazard trial. I’ve visited a different butcher each time, and the second two sold me much larger pieces of chicken than I used that first Wednesday. That may have some bearing, but it is also possible that fried food suffers when overly intellectualized, that the scientific façade of my endeavor is the trouble. (It’s well known that the second time Ben Franklin tried trapping lightning in a bottle, his kite came back greasy and undercooked.)
But crunch and moistness are matters of technique. They will improve in time. The real question is, was it hot?
No, and damn it, it wasn’t for lack of trying. My breading was about 1/2 flour, 1/2 cayenne (with a little salt, pepper and dried mustard for flavor), a finger dipped in the mixture came back burning. Simply put, this should have been spicy—if not Agent Orange spicy, then at least hotter than it was with a tenth that much cayenne. It made no difference at all, and I think the red cloud that formed at the bottom of my oil points to the cause. Like a buttermilk brine—so promising when breaded, so disappointing when dropped in the pan—the cayenne came off in the oil. The chicken’s flavor was commendable, but damn it people, this stuff is supposed to hurt your face. Thankfully, I was able to prepare a few teaspoons of cayenne paste, which acted as a brutally spicy failsafe.
The failure of highly seasoned breading leaves me with two paths to follow. The first is to refine the paste I’m using, to help it stick better and coat more evenly. (A recent New York Times travel article claims a similar rub is actually how they do it at Prince’s.) The second is to work on brining my meat—not in buttermilk, but in a salt brine steeped in peppers.
Despite the crushing disappointment, I’m enjoying the work because, at least based on the research I’ve done, this is a largely unexplored field. Nashville loves hot chicken, but from the recipes available online, nobody knows anything about it. (And the ones that do know aren’t willing to share.) It’s nice to be on the cutting edge, even if it’s just of cholesterol.
How did the Coca-Cola fried chicken turn out? I only tasted it the next day, but it was nothing to scoff at. The color was nice, and the meat was very moist. My friends who cooked it assured me that, when fresh, it had been “good.” But the soda had made it sweet, and that is not my goal. My quest is for cayenne catharsis. I’ll let you know when I find it.
3 Comments
November 15, 2009 at 11:56 pm
Your grandmother insists that one secret to fried chicken is small chickens. She feels that it’s hard to find smallish chickens these days… that they’re growing them bigger… and they don’t fry up right.
That would be my mother. The other grandmother is at Mt. Olivet and not sharing her cooking secrets, other than through your Mom.
November 29, 2009 at 2:31 pm
[...] and my mouth was as stripped as the jungles of North Vietnam. (I believe that’s my second Agent Orange allusion in the month—record!) I worked through as much of the meat as I could, but a foolish touch of [...]
December 11, 2009 at 3:15 pm
[...] III: The Sauce is Strong With This One Jump to Comments I theorized last time that what’s been damning my chicken-work was not a lack of rigor, but too much of it. And so [...]