Fried chicken

Poststructural Pub
1

I don’t care too much for this store-bought fried chicken that people eat nowadays.

When I was a child my mother fried it herself in a cast iron skillet. That was the good stuff. Lots of pieces for everybody. The store-bought chicken has only four kinds of pieces: legs, thighs, wings, and breasts. Mama cut it like Grandma did. Besides those, there was a back piece, and there was a pulley-bone piece. If I was lucky she’d fry the neck, liver, heart and gizzard too.

There was a greater crunchy to meat/bone ratio that way. You didn’t have to fry the flavor out in order to get it good and done, like they do with the store-bought white meat. That stuff gets cooked so dry and flavorless, and still not done in the middle. Disgusting.

2

The chicken neck has the most succulent meat of the whole chicken. I pick it apart and suck the meat, neck bone by neck bone. My wife is not impressed. And when you are done with the pickin, boil the bones and make soup.

3

Work away boy,
http://www.ehow.com/how_2713_bake-chicken.html
and bon appetite Walden!

4

Do people actually bake chickens?

5

Has anyone tried the chicken where you get a tin of beer, drink half, then wedge the chicken on top of the half filled beer tin and roast it in the oven.
I have the recipe but haven’t tried it yet.

6

We do that on on the grill with a spicy-herb rub and call it “Beer Butt Chicken”.
Maybe not an appetizing name, but the chicken ends up moist and tasty.

Walden- some folks in Maryland fry the necks and backs. Mostly on our eastern shore.

7

We always had KFC growing up, so I don’t know any better. Kroger’s makes good fried chicken. They sell rotisserie (I know that isn’t spelled right) chicken. My family bought those when I was a kid too. When I first got married, I bought those and my wife thought they were the strangest thing to buy, until she ate one. Now they’re sold everywhere. Back then, you had to know a place.

I bake whole chickens, especially in the winter when I want to heat the house extra warm. The first day, we eat the skin and the dark meat. The second day, we eat the breasts and I make chicken salad for sandwiches.

8

Love fried chicken, can’t eat fried chicken, life is the pits. But I roast chicken that has been salted and allowed to dry in the fridge for about twelve hours, good stuff.

9

I do love fried chicken and have the extra body mass as a result. My mother made the best, of course, and cast iron’s the only way to make it work.

That said, careful shopping will yield some pretty good store-prepared fried chicken. Many of the southern Winn-Dixies have good stuff and the Publix fried chicken is quite good.

I

10

My grandmother used to save bacon grease to fry chicken in. Battered and fried in a huge cast iron skillet. It was wonderful!

11

Ah, the old can of bacon grease on the back of the stove. You could fry a battered dirt clod in it, and it would be tasty.

Mother gonzo used to fix chcken just like Walden described – cut into 10 pieces with a back and a pulley bone. I much prefer it to 8-cut. I also like the fried heart, gizzard and liver.

But now, when I make fried chicken at home, I just get boneless breasts and pound them out so they’re about the size of a dessert plate, then bread thickly and fry.

It is best to leave the lid on when frying.

12

Funny story about the grease pit:
When I was first out on my own, I started my own grease pit in a coffee can. When I filled the coffee can to the top, I would gently warm the can until the grease would liquify. Then I would pour all the grease down the drain and start again. One time my wife saw me doing this and said, What the @#$% are you doing? So I explained. She further explained that the grease pit is thrown in the garbage can and a person starts a new one. When I tell people this story, they ask if we ever had plumbing problems. We moved around a lot when we were first married, six times in six years, so we never stayed around long enough to find out.

13

My MIL use to save goose fat for frying, it was exceptional. Growing up I saved all the fat from cooking for the winter birds. When I fry stuff nowadays I use either canola oil, avocado oil or grapeseed oil, all have a faitly high smoke point and in the case of the grapeseed oil it adds no flavor to the food. Avocado oil adds flavor but with the right food it can be quite tasty. If I fried chicken today I’d brown it well before reducing the heat and covering the pan.

14

Walden, if you’re even in Kansas City or Wichita, you need to go eat at Strouds. http://www.stroudsrestaurant.com/index.html

While they don’t cut the chicken the way you’d like, they still pan fry in cast iron skillets…best chicken this side of my grandmother’s I’ve ever found (she’d go out and get a, ahem, “fresh” chicken from the yard).

In KC, the north location has much, much better food. The original south location (in a 1920s or 30s roadhouse) was torn down for an overpass, and the new location just isn’t as good. We had our office lunch at the north location last week, and the food is still stellar there.

Eric

15

It’s been all downhill since Shake-n-Bake. My long-since-departed mother used an electric skillet but it came out as Walden describes. In terms of texture and taste, KFC is nothing like what she made. While on vacation last summer, we stopped in for an ice cream at a place in Weaverville (far north Calif) that has “Broasted” chicken. It took me back, because I remember when it was a big deal to go out and get this, it was a limited franchise using some kind of patented machine. I remember that I still thought my mother’s chicken was better.

I basically have a void in my life in terms of fried chicken. I don’t prepare it and I think KFC is over-priced and not that good anyway. I know I could cook some up but I know its not good for my increasing bodymass. The other thing is that I could make it, but I really have a problem pouring a ton of oil into a pan, then having to toss it (don’t have the bio-diesel still set up and I don’t own a diesel vehicle).

As for beer-can chicken: Williams-Sonoma makes a VERY nice round rack that holds an equivalent “can” to put liquid in while you’re cooking. I use it on my infrared outside grill. I have tried beer, pineapple, chicken broth in the can part and it comes out really good. The whole thing is stainless. The only rub is that you have to put another pan underneath to catch the grease. I bought a cheap aluminum disposable pan for that.

16

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Costco-Rotisserie-Chicken/166379400260

17

Interestingly, on my Amazon Kindle, which I dearly love, I just read Chapter 1 in What the Dog Saw, about Ron Popeil and his countertop rotisserie. I learned that the Popeil Pocket Fisherman was noted to be of dubious utility by someone, requiring Mr. Popeil to explain that the compact sporting good was for giving, not for using, thus explaining a great deal about the device and, unfortunately, eliminating one of my favorite conversation starters: “Remember the Popeil Pocket Fisherman?” If the reply was affirmative, we could discuss what kind of person would buy something like that. If negative, I would explain all about the device, moving right on into Ginsu knives and ending up with the Sledge-O-Matic.

With my new-found knowledge, I can begin straight out with the Popeil rotisserie. This exceptional device, which Mr. P was said to have developed in his own kitchen from an aquarium and a motor, rotissing countless chickens in the quest for the perfect bird, holds the chicken in a horizontal rather than vertical position to prevent the top end from drying out. It turns 6 times per minute, which is apparently the optimal rate for crisp, even browning. The door is glass and it is slanted to provide a full view of the delicious process taking place in order to enhance sales on TV–customers love to see how things work. Sales exceeded $1 million in the first hour Mr. P pitched the device on QVC, which was remarkable even for QVC.

I thought it interesting that this accomplishment occurred in the middle of the night. Far from being a gourmet device or even functional kitchen item like the crockpot, this item was not purchased by cooks and housewives. It is a sedative and hypnotic for insomniacs, the only people awake to have seen the pitch. I imagine thousands upon thousands of them soothing themselves through the night with slowly rotating chickens.

There was a grease can on the back of our stove. It was part of the canister set, and it had “GREASE” imprinted on its side. FLOUR, SUGAR, COFFEE, GREASE, and TEA. Tea was the smallest. Bacon grease went into a jar as a concession to my father, who used it to fry eggs. Mom did her Sunday deep-fat fried chicken in a large cast aluminum pot containing enough melted shortening to completely submerge all the chicken parts. The edible parts were tamped firmly in white flour, salt, and pepper, then dropped into the boiling oil until they turned crisply brown.

We did not eat at KFC. My mother seemed to find something slightly tawdry about the Colonel’s southern connection. This made me want to eat there very much, a desire I indulged immediately upon reaching the age of emancipation. I was cured of this by the discovery that KF chicken is one of the Unacceptably Wet Foods, as well as by the bizarre fact that they consider the chicken butt to be a piece and that their birds have two of them and four thighs.

I’m going to go read about the Dog Whisperer next, because I know someone who has an interest in him and his doggish abilities. It will give us something to discuss, which might be a good thing because I think I just wore out the topic of rotisseried chicken.

18

Well! There are some fans of rotisseried chicken there. I’ve heard that Costco chickens are pretty good.

The post I liked best was the one about the poor soul who does the chickens at Costco. When he gets off work, the chicken smell on him attracts dogs.

19

The probelm that I have found with Cosco chickens is that they are undercooked. Because they are so large, they require extra time in the ovens, time which management doesn’t allow. Consequently, the the inside of the chickens are not fully cooked. Unless you like to eat raw chicken or are prepared to further cook the chicken at home, I would advise looking elsewhere for rotissere chickens, which is what I do.