KFC's 11 herbs and spices found in the Colonel's wife's scrapbook

So I mixed up another batch, substituting 1 tablespoon of cayenne pepper for 3 tablespoons of paprika, but still using one tablespoon of the paprika (cutting the total pepper component in half). Some of the color issue might be because the paprika I have is really deep, bright red, much redder than the cayenne.

And then I mixed it into 1-1/2 cups plain flour, 1/4 cup oat flour, 1/4 cup corn flour (for tamales), and 1/4 cup breadcrumbs, because regular frying and pressure frying affects the mechanics of the crust differently.

Then I found out my last chicken breast had gone bad, and I don't think a KFC breaded hot dog would be all that good.

This is a great threaf, because fried chicken

KFC recipe + actually being able to cook the skin like I want = winning.

Rosemary, tarragon, and marjoram might be good additions to the recipe. Those are very common herbs for chicken dishes, along with sage, savory, and bay leaves. Bay leaf might have to go in the wash, though.

Here's the original Chicago Tribune interview with the Colonel's nephew

The recipe wasn't just in a scrapbook, it was written on the back of the Colonel's wife's will. The nephew also confirms that those are the spices he used to mix together for the restaurant and other franchises when he was a boy, and that the real secret one was the white pepper, which nobody knew much about back then.

I retract my suggestion that they might use less white pepper and more black pepper. I made a mix with 2 tablespoons of black and 2 tablespoons of white, instead of 1 and 3, and can definitely taste the black pepper, and quite strongly. So that's wrong.

I haven't found a good reference to how many chickens KFC uses, except for one site that said they use a billion chickens a year without saying whether that was world or domestic. I also don't know how much breading they use per chicken, so I'm guessing the 2 cups of flour is for one chicken, since most all chicken recipes use two cups of flour and a whole chicken.

If that's the case, then KFC would be using 20,000 metric tons of white pepper per year, against the world production of white pepper of 43,500 metric tons.

This may explain why not much white pepper makes it onto the store shelves.

The Colonel said he used a milk and egg wash. That's not what I recently saw on a video of a tour of their Louisville facilities. There they were just using a brine wash.

Marion-Kay has offered it for sale for years under the brand 99X (IIRC). Good spice mix, definitely better than KFC now, which is just salt, pepper, MSG, and flour.

My issue with KFC isnt the favor but the texture of the skin for original, Extra Crispy is barely passable.

That's an American thing, because I've had KFC in Canada ( years ago) and Japan. Neither had EC, but the skin was acrually tight on the meat.

Also, when did they get rid of the parfait? I went there a couple of months ago, and the lady told me they no longer served those that was the only thing I liked there.

Chicken pot pie is there greatest meal.

Ack! They got rid of the parfait?!

*searches*

Re-creating Chocolate Cream Little Bucket Parfaits
These are put together with a few simple layers.

Graham cracker crust crumbs: the bottom layer. For the quick and easy version, you can just buy an inexpensive pre-made graham cracker crust and crumble it. One full pie crust will make three to four parfaits. This layer is literally just the crumbs in a pile.

Chocolate pudding: the middle layer. Next put an equal amount of chocolate pudding. KFC’s version used a typical “regular” chocolate pudding (not dark chocolate).

Whipped cream: the top layer. This is pretty self-explanatory, but remember to top it off with chocolate sprinkles—you won’t have a true KFC chocolate cream parfait without them!​

I assume you'd make the strawberry parfait the same way, but using strawberries and strawberry glaze.

I'm taking a break from KFC today. I've been eating experimental KFC for days, so instead I made a nice Jamaican curry.

Chicken breast tenderloins, cut into roughly 1/2" to 1" pieces.
1 sweet Vadalia onion, cut into similar sized pieces.
1/2 tsp minced garlic
1 yellow bell pepper, cut up.
1 can of Hunt's fire roasted garlic tomatoes.
1/4 cup white rice
1 teaspoon ginger
1 tablespoon Jamaican curry powder.

Grill the chicken, onions, and garlic. Add the bell pepper, tomatoes, rice, and seasonings, with about a half cup of water. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 30 minutes.

I would like gturnip to try and make this at home....

https://www.kfc.com/extra-crispy-sunscreen

They're out.

Anyway, last night I had to get a new WiFi router (the old one was having lots of problems and finally kicked the bucket), so while I was at the all-night WiFi store I picked up a pressure cooker for $20. Unfortunately I could pick up some chicken because they were waxing the floor and had all the meat roped off.

Anyway, among the fried chicken advice to get the crust to stick to the skin is to dry the chicken, dredge it in flour (or cornstarch), then dunk it in a milk-egg wash (opinions vary), and then dredge it again in the breading. But KFC uses water or brine now (even though they used to use the milk egg wash), so first I went with water.

I calibrated my stove and pressure cooker, tossed in a single breaded breast tenderloin (which I already had), let it fry for 1.5 minutes to brown the crust, and then sealed the pressure cooker - which kept venting steam out of the safety lock so it never built up pressure.

Apparently a single breast tenderloin doesn't generate enough steam to raise the lock mechanism into place so it seals.

Anyway, that attempt produced a thin crust, like what you might get on a piece of catfish.

Some I made up another cup and a half of breading mix following the original recipe, but with 1/2 tsp of baking powder and 1/2 tsp of MSG. I fried three breast tenderloins and they came out pretty well (the pressure cooker worked this time). I'll have to repeat the process again with an actual piece of chicken with skin on it to see how it compares to KFC. The flavor is close. The texture needs refinement.

Also, my KFC breaded pressure fried milk dud experiment failed. They melted and ran out of a hole in the breading. They need something more like corn dog breading.

I marinate skinless chicken breasts overnight in buttermilk and do the double breading. It's always too much breading, but I keep trying anyway. :/

I thought about doing a soak in buttermilk, but I'm also trying to do exactly what KFC does, on the theory that it's the most likely way to get the same texture for the crust.

I do recommend getting a pressure cooker. The breast tenderloins that successfully pressure fried were much more juicy and tender than the previous breast tenderloin where the pressure didn't build up, even though they followed exactly the same time and oil temperature curve.

Okay, I'm up to attempt #9 with the original formula plus 1 tsp MSG (Accent) and 1 tsp baking powder.

Went with a dry dredge, a water dip, and a dredge, then fried at 360 F or so for 1.5 minutes before closing the lid and pressure frying for eight minutes. It came out looking great and tasting pretty darn close to KFC, such that if that's what was in the box, I'd eat it without much thought that it's any different than normal.

And of course I served it with KFC's coleslaw.

I bought one of those spices that has a grinder on top (for about $2.00 instead of the $17.00 Kroger wants for a spice grinder that doesn't come with spices )

I added a teaspoon of tarragon and a teaspoon of savory to the recipe and it came out tasting just fine.

But I'm still not getting quite the crispy, light crust I want.

Options from the Food Lab

1) I could brine the chicken so it looses less moisture, as the salt loosens the muscle proteins and allows them to retain more water. About two teaspoons of table salt per cup of water is recommended for a 6% salt solution. This might mean less moisture having to exit through the crust.

2) A couple tablespoons of vodka or whisky in a cup of brining solution will be more volatile than water, thus making more intense steam that helps dry the crust so that it browns and fluffs.

3) Drizzle 1/4 cup of water over the breading mix and whisk or stir it in. This will make wet clumps that will stick to the chicken, and is why pieces toward the end of the dredging come out with thicker, fluffier crusts than the first pieces, as the breading starts absorbing moisture from the earlier pieces.

4) Double fry the chicken, with a half hour rest in between. KFC can't do this because it would take too much time.

The other day, unable to face another KFC experiment, I used the KFC breading to make Korean double-fried chicken wings, which have the half-hour rest in between frying. After the second fry they're coated with a gooey coating and then sprinkled with sesame seeds and fried peanuts. The ones I made were delicious, even though I used a bottle of "Korean inspired" Thai wing sauce to save time.

That's what the Chicago Tribune wondered, so they mixed it both ways. The teaspoon version had very little flavor at all, but the tablespoon version nailed the KFC flavor.

And I think that's why nobody managed to emulate it. The Colonel was using almost a cup of herbs and spices for two cups of flour. Almost no other recipe even uses a quarter cup.

Picking the top 5 Google hits for Southern Fried Chicken Recipe:

All Recipes would use 2 teaspoons of spices (paprika - plus pepper to taste)
Paula Dean uses 2 teaspoons of black pepper.
Chef John uses maybe 5 or 6 teaspoons of seasoning.
Food and Wine uses about 3 teaspoons of seasoning.
Epicurious uses about 7 teaspoons.

The Colonel used 45 teaspoons of seasoning.

And sure enough, it tastes like KFC.

To that I'm adding 1 teaspoon of baking powder, 1 teaspoon of accent, 1 teaspoon of ground tarragon, and 1 teaspoon of ground savory.

I should probably add a teaspoon of rosemary, too.

I mean, if I really wanted KFC, other than to say I could make it, I'd just drive a mile down the road.

Some people, especially people from the South in my grandmother's generation, write capital T for tablespoon and lowercase t for teaspoon. I screwed up a few recipes of hers before realizing that.

I've always seen it written as tsp for teaspoon and Tbp or Tb for tablespoon.

This is why we need to get on the metric system.

Just an FYI, but those are both used in recipes written by folks in countries that use the metric system.

Fuck the metric system, ''Merika, fuck yeah!

I just fried up some more wings, and drizzling some water over the breading before dredging made a huge difference. Now it looks like KFC.

But it tastes saltier than KFC. I can't recall consciously tasting salt from the restaurant's version, but I definitely taste the salt in mine.

According to my spreadsheet and estimates of the salt content of celery salt and garlic salt, the recipe is using 8.75 teaspoons of salt, which would be 20,125 mg of sodium. But that makes 2.9375 cups of breading, and most Southern fried chicken recipes only make a bit over 2 cups of breading, so for an even 2 cups this recipe would have 13,700 mg of sodium.

According to KFC's nutrition information, the sodium content for original recipe is
1,100 mg - breast
770 mg - thigh
410 mg - drumstick
360 mg - whole wing.

Two of each would come to 5,280 mg of sodium. However they don't include the back, and I'd have to see how far 2 cups of the breading mix goes on just breasts, thighs, drumsticks, and whole wings for a real comparison, but my guess is they've cut the salt about in half.

That would make sense because people became more sensitive to the taste of it, and since most of the salt is in the celery salt and garlic salt, it would be pretty trivial to cut the salt content of those "spices" and still be sticking to the "recipe", which doesn't exactly lay down the exact composition of celery salt and garlic salt.

Power to the people!

To much breading? Try doing one coat of regular breading but for the second coat use Japanese panko. That should reduce the volume of breading while increasing the crunchiness.

I made a new batch of wings and nailed it. The last salty batch was due to re-used oil.

For this batch I added an extra teaspoon each of savory, tarragon, and rosemary, which I ground by hand with one of those little spice grinders. I drizzled water over the breading mix to pre-moisten it (creating more crumblies), then dredged the dry chicken, dunked it in water, and re-dredged it. In the 20 minutes it took to get the oil hot, the moisture had wetted a lot of the breading, so I dredged the chicken a third time (without re-dunking it in water).

The oil temp at the start was 350 F and dropped to about 300 F during the frying. I gave it 1:30 for browning before I closed the lid, and then 8:00 minutes under pressure. The color was very slightly darker than KFC, but the flavor I think was even better than KFC. So I ran a pair of wings down to the gas station and asked the clerk, who is a very experienced cook (and tank driver), and when he took a bite his eyes lit up and he said "That's it! That's KFC! I'll be damned!" I've already given him 3 cups of the breading mix which he'll try on Thursday.

Are you just eating KFC clones every day now?