Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Southern fried chicken

Video Jug has a recipe for Southern fried chicken. In essence: you poach chicken drumsticks; you coat them in flour flavoured with cayenne, thyme and parsley; you deep-fry them.

It works well. I have a few comments, based on what happened when I tried it at the weekend.

The poaching. I used one stock cube, rather than two. I thought that otherwise the Knorr flavour would be too assertive in the resulting stock.

The coating. I used egg rather than buttermilk as an adhesive. Each drumstick gets, I should guess, about one tbsp of coating; the modest quantity of seasoning in this recipe is not going to add much flavour to the finished dish. Be more lavish, is my advice. For a crunchier coating, you could follow Simon Hopkinson's method: he suggests repeating the egging/flouring process three times.

The frying. I used sunflower oil. Groundnut oil, which is more neutral, might have been better.

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