Austin Fried Chicken

We decided to fry our own chicken. We’ve tried before: It was a disaster. The batter wouldn’t stick, we used crappy boneless, skinless frozen chicken breasts and the oil burnt our chicken.

So we went all out this time and got mega-prepared. We went to Walmart and got all of the ingredients of Food Network whore Alton Brown’s fried chicken.

After coming home, we decided that his recipe was kind of freaky and West coast because you have to use Hungarian paprika and marinade your chicken in buttermilk the night before and pan-fry the chicken. So we went a little more southern and combined Paula Dean’s fried chicken recipe (excerpt: “Add enough hot sauce so the egg mixture is bright orange”) and another generic, Googled fried chicken recipe.

We got home all pumped and shortly after realized that our whole, cut-up Wal-mart chicken was green-splotched and smelled like a dead person. Oh, and it expired three weeks ago. MAKE SURE YOUR WALMART-BOUGHT CHICKEN IS NOT EXPIRED. So, after thorough hand-washes, Tyler sped to Fiesta mart and bought a spotless, fresh Tyson whole chicken.

We set a small bucket of vegetable shortening to medium heat, then assembled our dry mixture in a pan. It was:

1. 1 cup of flour
2. A shit ton of cayenne pepper
3. Little shit ton of salt, pepper and paprika.

In a separate bowl, we poured and stirred the wet mix:

1. 3 eggs
2. 1/3 cup buttermilk
3. Enough Tabasco to turn the mixture orange. We like spicy.

Vegetable shortening melted and slightly boiling, we took a drumstick, drenched it in the wet mix and patted it around in the flour. Then, we plopped it into the frying oil.

We noticed the batter wasn’t very thick, and we adore Willie Mae’s in New Orleans. The restaurant makes a wet-batter fried chicken, so we decided to combine the wet and dry mixes together.

Our sticky, wet batter conglomeration required countless additions of a “little more flour” and a “splash of water” and blah blah blah to make it actually stick to the chicken and not runnily glop all over fingers and the counter.

We kept the dark meat pieces in for about 14 minutes (they take longer to cook) and the white pieces in for about 11 minutes. We cut open each piece to make sure the meat wasn’t pink.

End the end, the dry-batter drumstick looked the most normal—Church’s-style, crispy and thin batter—while the wet-batter pieces ended up looking like Asian-fried chicken—thick, smooth and abundant batter. Both were good for different reasons.

For our last piece, we decided to drench the batter in Tabasco and cayenne pepper, and hat piece ended up tasting like a hot wing. Except more badass.

We feasted out that night and went into a fat coma.