Marcus Nilsson for The New York Times. Food stylist: Mariana Velásquez.
Unless you're a routine visitor to KFC, fried chicken is probably not in your weekly diet. Which is fine: it is, after all, a treat. But even though you can get fried chicken that's way better than the fast-food variety all over the place, it remains a specialty of home cooking, and one that anyone can handle. To me, the best has a simple, flavored coating of flour or the like, rather than thick, ultracrusty preparations or spongy batters.
After trying a number of contemporary and often needlessly complicated fried-chicken recipes, I decided to refine my own standard, which was first published 14 years ago in "How to Cook Everything" and itself was an adaptation of a recipe that initially appeared as Paula Peck's Best-Ever Fried Chicken in her 1961 classic, "Paula Peck's Art of Good Cooking." That was among my favorites when I was learning how to cook, as varied and sensible a cookbook as existed at the time. (Her other book, "The Art of Fine Baking," is equally brilliant and provides perfect instructions for making croissants.)
While I never met Peck, and although her cookbooks are out of print (her granddaughter Megan is doing her part to reacquaint new cooks with Paula's work at meganpeckcooks.com), her cooking remains with me. Her treatment of chicken is a fine example; she was among the first cookbook authors to suggest that chicken breasts substitute for veal (hard to believe, now that it's the other way around), and she was also a fan of chicken legs.
Among her many memorable recipes for that still-underappreciated cut of meat was fried chicken. With no bells and whistles, she described a simple process for frying legs virtually undisturbed, locking in both moisture and taste. As I said, her technique is at the foundation of mine.
Leg-thigh pieces, of course, include both the drumstick and the dark, juicy thigh. They're sold separately, but it's a snap to cut through the joint if you can only find them whole. Just lay the pieces on a cutting board and wiggle any sharp knife where the drumstick and thigh meet until you find the ligaments that hold them together; it cuts easily.
Over the years, I've experimented with different coatings, eventually settling on cornmeal or, even better, masa harina. (Rice flour is also good; breadcrumbs do not work with this method.) It's worth saying that there is something ultrasatisfying about plain old flour-fried chicken.
To me, the biggest turnoff about frying chicken is spattering. (This is why you eat it in restaurants, right?) The way to avoid spattering is to forget about soaking the meat in buttermilk (which tenderizes the meat, as if chicken were not tender enough already) before coating; likewise, I avoid eggs and butter.
But even with the dry method, you are frying, so you have to expect some spattering. There's a very easy way to reduce this (a solution recognized, no doubt, by generations of home cooks): Covering the frying chicken in the early stages of cooking keeps spattering to a minimum while doing nothing to mitigate ultimate crispness.
So: You coat the chicken with salt, pepper and spices. (I've offered a few spice mixes here; you can use others, including things as simple as pimentón or cumin, and of course you can use store-bought chili or curry powder instead of making your own. I might say that among the best fried-chicken seasonings is a load of black pepper.) You use the right fat, and plenty of it. Lard is ideal, though there are others that are good, ranging from goose fat to clarified butter to high-quality cooking oil. Getting the fat to 350 degrees before starting to fry is also important; if you don't have a thermometer, a pinch of flour that sizzles energetically when added to the pan is a pretty reliable indicator that the oil is ready.
If you add the chicken slowly but steadily to the fat, the temperature won't fall much, and you'll be able to cover the pan for the first few minutes of frying, during which most of the spattering occurs. Carefully remove the cover (try to let none of the steam that has condensed on the inside of the lid fall into the pan), and look at the chicken; if any pieces are scorching, either move them accordingly or lower the heat a bit. From then on, you're golden. So to speak.
Drain fried chicken on paper towels or brown paper bags for at least a few minutes before serving. Unlike other fried foods, chicken, of course, is still pretty good even when cold. Maybe better.
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
Eat: Fear of Frying
Dengan url
http://koraninternetonline.blogspot.com/2012/11/eat-fear-of-frying.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
Eat: Fear of Frying
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar