We adapted Sean Brock’s fried chicken recipe and streamlined everything but the flavor
Occasionally I come across a recipe so over-the-top, I blurt out, “They have lost their damn minds.” And then, a beat later, I wonder if maybe there’s a reason the recipe is so convoluted. Perhaps the end dish is absolutely worth the myriad steps and arcane ingredients? Should I try it just to be sure?
Take the fried chicken and gravy recipe in Sean Brock’s 2014 cookbook, Heritage. The famed Nashville chef is a self-professed obsessive when it comes to fried chicken, demoing it on CBS News’s The Dish, eating it on PBS’s The Mind of a Chef, and proselytizing about it at the drop of a hat. I know we agree on what makes great fried chicken great, as Brock has cited the dive bar Reel M Inn in Portland, Oregon, as a gold standard. I wrote about the crackling glory of Reel M Inn’s chicken way back in 2007. So, when I opened Heritage and saw Brock’s own recipe — entitled Fried Chicken and Gravy (Or the Way I Make Fried Chicken at Home) — I was all in. It was his home recipe, not the one from his lauded restaurants, so (I assumed) it couldn’t be that difficult!
The recipe starts with a brine, but not just any brine. This one calls for making a gallon of tea with 38 tea bags (preferably from Charleston Tea Garden), 1 cup of kosher salt, and 1 cup of sugar. To this, you add one cut up chicken... to serve two people. The tannins in the tea are said to help tenderize the bird, while the salt and sugar plump the meat and make the chicken juicier. After its 12-hour tea bath, you soak the chicken in ice water, and then marinate the meat in another bath made from 2 quarts of buttermilk and 3 tablespoons of Brock’s homemade hot sauce for an hour and rinse it again. (That’s a lot of to-and-fro with wet chicken, which is a great way to pick up stray bacteria, says the USDA.)
Meanwhile, you’ll be gathering five types of fat for pan-frying the chicken — but not just any fats. You’ll start by cooking 1½ pounds of chicken skins to get 1 cup of liquid chicken fat. Go to any meat counter and ask for 1½ pounds of chicken skins and I promise you’ll get a very odd look; in fact, you might just wind up on an FBI watch list. It’s such a weird ask that even Brock has acknowledged that “chicken fat is hard to come by.” I fudged the schmaltz with some jarred duck fat ($13 for 11 ounces). To that Brock adds lard, which you’ll have to render yourself using the sub-recipe provided at the back of the book. I opted for Morell snow cap lard because I had no idea where to get 1 quart of pork fat and, also, I have a life.
You’ll add canola oil, Benton’s slab bacon, and Benton’s smoked ham trimmings to the lard and chicken fat. Benton’s products are only available in the Southeast and through mail order, and you can’t buy trimmings, so you will have to find someone with a whole Benton’s ham who’s willing to share. I have a friend from Tennessee who just happened to receive some Benton’s slices in a care package from home, so I begged some off of her, though I didn’t have the heart to tell her what I was doing with it. As for the bacon, I used locally made stuff. The butter is to “lend sheen.” In later tests my chicken was pretty shiny already, so file that one under “X-treme Bro Cooking Excess.”
While the fat fest is warming up, you make the flour dredge. The recipe must have been scaled down from a giant restaurant-sized batch, and not very mindfully at that, because it requires 6 cups of flour to dredge one chicken. I threw out at least 5½ cups of leftover seasoned flour at the end. For a chef who aligns himself with heritage foodways and respecting food makers and farmers, this kind of waste seemed rather hypocritical.
Brock recommends heating the five fats to 300 degrees, which is quite low for fried chicken. Every other recipe I consulted starts with oil heated to at least 350 degrees. Once the chicken is added to the skillet, the oil temperature drops about 50 degrees before slowly coming back up to temp. Thus, in subsequent trials, I started with oil at 350 so that the temperature arrives at the target 300 degrees without having to adjust the heat as often. Covering the chicken for half the time is great advice, as it does speed cooking, but Brock doesn’t remind you to lift the lid carefully so that the condensation doesn’t drip into the hot oil and spatter you (ouch!).
He also doesn’t give you any idea how to know if the chicken is done. “Until crispy and golden brown” is not enough detail. It can be tricky to get the timing right with browned and crispy chicken that is also cooked through and not raw at the bone, so in my adapted recipe I’ve given some crucial details. Spoiler alert: You need an instant-read thermometer. Also of note, Brock assumes you either have a massive skillet that fits all the chicken at once, or that you’ll use a second skillet (and even more fats) to cook all the chicken all at once. It’s much easier and less wasteful to fry the chicken in two batches in the same skillet, holding the cooked chicken in a warm oven while you finish the rest.
Was Brock’s original fried chicken amazing? Oh, heck yes! Crispy crusted with juicy, slightly sweet meat, it’s very good fried chicken. But there’s a lot of room for streamlining. The tea brine is a waste of perfectly good tea. I couldn’t taste it and since I was starting with a tender fryer, the purported tenderization wasn’t really needed. Instead, I opted for a simple 3-cup buttermilk brine that delivers juicy meat in three to four hours instead of 12.
As for the five fats, well, just like five-cheese pizza, after about the third cheese, it’s all negligible. The pricey ham trimmings are undetectable in the chicken’s flavor, and I’ll save the poultry fat for roasted potatoes, where it’s better appreciated. The bacon does lend a subtle smokiness, and lard does make for very crispy fried chicken, so I am using those fats, supplemented with canola, from now on.
As for the breading, I found the seasonings a bit weak. So in my subsequent batches, I added more garlic, onion powder, and also the Colonel’s “secret” ingredient MSG to boost the flavor. I also added a bit of baking powder, because it makes the breading lighter and crispier.
With those tweaks in mind, I’m confident that I’ve arrived at a doable fried chicken recipe that’s almost as good as Brock’s. My streamlining means a savings of about nine hours, 36 tea bags, about 1 cup each of salt and sugar, 5 cups of buttermilk, 1½ pounds of chicken fat, and $9 plus shipping for the ham. And with the price of groceries these days, that sort of streamlining is definitely worth it.
Fried Chicken With Gravy Recipe
Adapted from Heritage
Serves 4
Ingredients:
For the chicken and brine:
3 cups buttermilk
3 tablespoons sea salt
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons hot sauce
8 to 10 pieces bone-in skin-on chicken (about 3 to 3½ pounds)
For the dredging:
1½ cups all-purpose flour
¼ cup fine cornmeal
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon each garlic powder, onion powder, salt, and freshly ground black pepper
½ teaspoon MSG (optional)
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
For the frying:
1 to 2 cups canola oil
1 to 2 cups pure (non-hydrogenated) lard
1 strip thick-cut smoked bacon
For the gravy:
3 tablespoons of the fat from skillet
1 cup whole milk
1 cup chicken broth (or 1 teaspoon chicken bouillon base plus 1 cup water)
Soy sauce, to taste
¾ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
Instructions:
Step 1: In a glass baking dish or gallon zip-top bag, combine the buttermilk, salt, sugar, and hot sauce and stir (or seal and shake if using a bag) to dissolve the sugar and salt. Cut the chicken breasts crosswise into 2 pieces and if the legs are whole, cut the drumsticks from the thighs. Add the chicken to the buttermilk mixture and refrigerate for 3 to 4 hours.
Step 2: In a large bowl or baking pan, combine the flour, cornmeal, cornstarch, baking powder, garlic powder, onion powder, salt, pepper, MSG (if using), and cayenne pepper and stir thoroughly to combine. Measure out 3 tablespoons of the mixture and set aside for the gravy.
Step 3: Preheat the oven to 250 degrees and set a cooling rack on a rimmed baking sheet. Set aside.
Step 4: Take the chicken out of the refrigerator. Using one hand to handle wet ingredients and one to handle the flouring, add the chicken to the flour mixture one piece at a time, letting the excess buttermilk drip back into the bowl of brine. Toss the chicken in the flour and press to coat all sides. Set each piece aside on a baking sheet and repeat with remaining chicken. If any of the pieces have wet spots, dredge them in flour again. Set aside at room temperature.
Step 5: Pour enough oil and lard into a large 2- to 3-inch-deep cast iron skillet with enough of the fats to measure ½-inch deep. Add the bacon. Attach a deep-fat thermometer to the pan and heat over medium-high heat until the oil has reached 350 degrees. Remove the bacon strip when it is crisped; discard or eat as a snack.
Step 6: Add the breast pieces and as many leg pieces to the oil as you can fit without crowding the pan. (If you don’t have a skillet that can fit all the chicken pieces comfortably, fry the chicken in batches and hold in the oven while finishing the rest.) The oil temperature will drop when you add the chicken to it, so adjust as necessary to maintain as close to 300 degrees as possible. Cook until the pieces are light golden brown on the bottom, 8 minutes. Turn the pieces over gently with tongs, cover, and cook until the chicken is deeply browned and cooked through (at 8 minutes, an instant-read thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the breast should register 160 degrees, and 165 degrees inserted into the thighs). Be careful lifting the lid; don’t let condensation drip back into the oil. (If you don’t have an instant-read thermometer, I highly suggest investing in one. But you can also nick and peek next to the bone to check that the chicken is cooked through.) Transfer the chicken to the cooling rack set up and put it in the oven. Fry the remaining chicken pieces in the same way.
Step 7: While the chicken is cooking, make the gravy. Spoon 3 tablespoons of the fry oil and some of the browned bits that have stuck to the sides of the skillet into a small saucepan and set over medium heat. Whisk in the reserved 3 tablespoons of dredging flour and cook for 1 minute. Add the milk and broth, whisking constantly. Bring to a simmer and cook until thick and bubbly, 5 minutes. Add the soy sauce to taste and season with additional pepper if desired. Keep warm over low heat until ready to serve.
Step 8: Serve the fried chicken with the gravy on the side. Leftover chicken and gravy can be stored in the refrigerator, loosely covered, for up to 3 days. To reheat, microwave or reheat the chicken in a toaster oven at 300 degrees until it’s hot throughout. Microwave or reheat the gravy over low heat until it’s piping hot, thinning with a little water if necessary to adjust the consistency.
Ivy Manning is a Portland, Oregon-based award-winning food writer and author of 10 cookbooks, including Tacos A to Z: A Delicious Guide to Nontraditional Tacos. She is a regular recipe tester and editor for Eater as well as for restaurants and appliance brands.
Dina Ávila is a photographer living in Portland, Oregon.
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