Buttermilk Fried Chicken

I have made fried chicken a few times and the better recipes seem to all have a flour coating, followed by a buttermilk coating, followed lastly by another flour coating. Chef Keller’s recipe calls for exactly that. One aspect of this recipe that made a huge different was the overnight brine. While it has many ingredients, most of them I normally keep on hand, so it was super simple to throw together.

The most difficult part of this recipe is trying to maintain the recommended frying temperature for each kind of meat for the required time. Too hot and the skin will burn before the chicken is done, too low and the skin will never fry completely and won’t be nice and crispy. I would also recommend using more than the recommended 3 inches of oil because it was difficult to fry big chicken breast in only 3 inches of oil.

I do like that Chef Keller points out that different pieces of the chicken should be cooked at different temperatures. The only downside of this is you will need a lot of oil to fry if you choose to do it in multiple pans.

The end product was nice crispy skin and extremely moist, perfectly cooked, perfectly seasoned chicken. It was mouthwatering. I will always come back to this recipe to make fried chicken.