–I mean, really fresh fried chicken, coated with whole wheat flour, salt, paprika, black pepper, and fried in olive oil–is a very, very good thing.
Lately I have not been liking our chickens much. Tonight all that changed.
fat and happy–
Tom
Fried chicken, done correctly, is indeed a wonderful thing!
You forgot the iron skillet, though. A well-seasoned iron skillet, the kind whose surface is so black and shiny that you can almost use it for a mirror, is an absolute necessity to create the finest fried chicken.
–James
And the gravy to go with it! 
This was what my mother always cooked in. When we moved overseas we realized we needed one, and we went to the store there in Mindanao. We were baffled that they didn’t have any regular skillets. All they had were these funny round bottomed skillets, so we got one. It was a few years before we figured out it was a wok.
Finger lickin’ good.
I have to admit that fried chicken does taste good. People love it because we all share a fried fat gene. However, in the current age, when we are not bordering on starvation most of the time, this fat-craving gene is not helping us that much. As it is, most of us are getting too much fat in our diets. I know that the fried chicken purists would not approve of this, but removing most of the skin and the fat layers under the skin prior to frying the chicken will make for a healthier meal. Better yet, drop the skinned bird in a crockpot and cook without oil or other liquid until the meat falls off the bone. Now that is what I call good-tasting and healthy chicken.
As some comedian has observed, the whole POINT of fried chicken is the unhealthy fried chicken skin. He said he wished KFC would sell a bucket of fried chicken skin.
When a recipe calls for skinless chicken, I remove the skin, lay it on a cookie sheet, season it, and bake it to a nice crispness. When this come out of the oven, the room is quickly divided into folks who know good eats and people who try to improve themselves too much.
Sorry, I don’t see anything comedic about it. The skin is my favourite part, though I much prefer it roasted to a crisp dark brown than fried. I don’t care much for fired chicken, but crispy chicken (or turkey) skin, well, that’s just good eatin’.
djm
Check on the iron skillet, James. Why cook on anything else? (well, there is that whole dishwasher safe thing, I guess)
Doug, you’re probably right, but crockpot chicken, great as it is, just isn’t the same. I guess when you’re as ripped as me and Fly, it really doesn’t hurt anything.
We do skin our chickens (because, basically, we’re too lazy to pluck them). I was suprised at how little the overall product suffered–still crisp and tender.
mmmmmmm. Only trouble is it’s all gone now.
Here, chicky chicky chicky…
T
I live in a university neighborhood, and a group of five college boys recently moved into the rental property next to our house. In talking to the the landlord of the rental property, he described some of the boys as “nerds”, in that at least one of them seemed so preoccupied with cleanlines and orderliness of the yard. I understand that two of them are pharmacy students.
A few days ago I watched from my kitchen window as one of them was cooking something on the grill (grilled chicken?). The young man would do something at the grill and then would return to the house. However, what I found odd was that he returned to the grill one minute later. He kept going into the house and returning to the grill like this until I started laughing and had to stop watching. You’ve heard it said that a “watched pot never boils”. I was about ready to yell out the window my advice, which I’m sure would not have been appreciated. Well, I expect that the grilled meat was perfect, but I would have been too anxious to enjoy the meal after all of that. Better to call out for Chinese, pizza, or a bucket of KFC fried chicken.
I know that the fried chicken purists would not approve of this, but removing most of the skin and the fat layers under the skin prior to frying the chicken will make for a healthier meal.
Actually, my mom always removed the skin from chicken before frying, and to this day I prefer fried chicken to have been fried with the skin removed.
She learned this from her mom; her sisters cooked the same way.
If the skin is present on fried chicken, I’ll eat the chicken, but not the skin, though I may pick some of the breading off of the skin.
They did this for a very practical reason: chickens have mites that live on their skin. They didn’t wanted to eat fried mites.
–James
I, too, remove the skin and never eat it.
I also only like white meat (except wings, but those don’t really count because there’s so little meat on them).
I’ll eat both white and dark meat; what I absolutely will not ever eat (or even want to touch or look at) is chicken liver, fried or cooked any other way.
I don’t eat organ meats; such entrails as liver, pancreas, brains, etc, are not things that I consider to be food.
–James
…but crispy chicken (or turkey) skin, well, that’s just good eatin’.
djm
Crispy turkey skin is the best flavor on the planet. More, even, than bacon. Yes, I said this.
DAMN! You’re right! What was I thinking???
Edited: Signature dutifully updated.
My grandfather was a rural mail delivery person, and during the summer months I sometimes rode with him on his delivery route. His delivery customers would often give him presents, usually something from the farm, such as eggs, produce, and whenever hogs were slaughtered, cracklins. I remember the greasy pork skins in an invariably greasy paper bag. They were a big favorite with my family in the early 50’s, but how they would compare with crispy fried turkey skins, I would hesitate to guess.
http://www.deltablues.net/cracklin.html
Well, that’s … that’s just … indisputable! 
djm
Later, I’ll be posting my recipe for crispy turkey skin-wrapped, bacon-wrapped, chicken-fried, bacon-wrapped, crispy turkey skins. With bacon sauce.
Hey, you guys. Listen. Do you think if you fed turkeys a steady diet of bacon that it would improve the flavor of turkey skins even more? Of course, it would probably be easier to feed pigs turkey skins and then go for that turkey-skin flavored bacon. And don’t be going all Turkey Bacon on me because that stuff is not bacon and I’m not even sure it’s turkey. It’s Tacon. It’s Burkey. And it’s about as appetizing as those names.