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

Discussion in 'The Green Room' started by gturner, Aug 20, 2016.

  1. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    Yeah, pretty much. I have to to get the recipe and technique down.

    But I have to take breaks from it, so earlier I ate chicken biryani on long grain rice.

    But while I was at the store getting more fucking chicken wings (and leg quarters at .69 cents a pound), I picked up a bottle of Korean Bibigo go-chu-jang hot & sweet sauce in a squeeze bottle.

    It's used in Korean baked gochujang chicken wings, LaCrema version of gochujang baked wings, Food & Wine gochujang baked wings, , another Korean fried chicken wing recipe with gochujang, and the Domestic Goddess spicy Korean fried chicken wings.

    All use sesame seeds, most use soy sauce, and some will use cashews or peanuts.
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  2. El Chup

    El Chup Fuck Trump Deceased Member Git

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    You took a break from chicken....by eating chicken? :lol:

    I'm sure it will be satisfying to perfect, but it just amuses me the amount of buckets of KFC you could've bought by now!
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  3. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    Well I considered trying to make KFC battered fish. :bailey:

    Would it work, or would it be freakin' nasty? One way to find out.

    Oh, and some other tips I've seen are to do the first dry dredge in corn starch, which sticks to the skin better. Some of the Korean wings recipes use potato starch for the first dredge. I've got some wheat starch I could use for that. I also saw a comment about browning that said gluten causes problems in forming the proper crust, so I bought gluten free flour in case that tip pans out.

    I could make two seasoned breading mixes, one for the first dry dredge using the wheat starch and the second using gluten free flour. There could also be a third dip in a KFC seasoned panko mix but that's just getting crazy. :garamet: I wouldn't try that for some weeks yet.

    It's a lot of fun to push recipes and techniques to the limit, especially when there's bound to be room for improvement on what a 65-year old train guy came up with in Corbin Kentucky back in the 1950's from what he could buy at the local A&P.
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  4. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    Something else I'm thinking of doing, to speed up the development and refinement process, is to use the KFC breading as a bread mix, making little tiny muffins or something so I can try different spices.

    The Maker's Mark whiskey recipe was developed that way, by baking various grain bills as breads until one tasted really good. Then they brewed the whiskey from that grain bill. If they had to wait seven years to see what a recipe tasted like it would have taken then centuries. I could do something similar, saving the lives of test chickens.

    And keep in mind, there weren't all that many spices available in a grocery store in Eastern Kentucky in the 1950's. It's surprising they even had white pepper. Heck, he may have special ordered that.

    Now if you got yourself a pressure cooker, what could you come up with using all those obscure British herbs? A bit of mugwort, coltsfoot, and feverfew, with perhaps some more obscure Indian spices thrown in as well?

    We've now got KFC as a base to start. I almost doubled the recipe's dried herbs with a teaspoon each of savory, tarragon, and rosemary, and it was even more delicious. What would happen if I add fenugreek or drizzle the breading with Worcestershire sauce instead of water?

    How good can fried chicken taste?
  5. Shirogayne

    Shirogayne Gay™ Formerly Important

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  6. Order2Chaos

    Order2Chaos Ultimate... Immortal Administrator

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    So recently I was gifted a pressure cooker. Can I use it as a pressure fryer, or is that a good way to set my apartment on fire?
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  7. Will Power

    Will Power If you only knew the irony of my name.

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  8. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    It is also a pressure fryer. :)

    Just add oil.

    Back in the 70's my dad used a pressure cooker to fry our chicken. A lot of people swore by it. The one I'm using was about $20 a Walmart. When the Colonel attended a seminar on pressure cookers they were just aimed at steaming vegetables and such. He asked about frying and they said it could be used for that, too. The rest is history.

    I've got a metal basket with a handle from one of those FryDaddy deep fryers, and I bent the handle over a little farther so I could use it inside the pressure cooker so I don't have to lift the chicken out with tongs, but tongs would work find too as long as you're careful with the crust. I'm using an $8.00 candy thermometer to measure the oil temperature.

    And according to the training videos I've watched, they put the chicken in for about 1:30 before closing the lid, to brown the crust, and then they pressure cook the chicken for 8 minutes.
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  9. Order2Chaos

    Order2Chaos Ultimate... Immortal Administrator

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    I think I just had either the most brilliant or most terrible idea in history: pressure fry popcorn (KFC seasoning optional). Get it nice and hot and as soon as you decompress, ALL the popcorn will explode at once!
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  10. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    That might be very interesting, though you might have to add some water to the oil to make sufficient steam to build up pressure in a reasonable amount of time, although the early popping kernels might do that for you.
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  11. Order2Chaos

    Order2Chaos Ultimate... Immortal Administrator

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    The hot air won't pressurize on its own?
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  12. Order2Chaos

    Order2Chaos Ultimate... Immortal Administrator

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    Mythbusters did it first :( (and with Alton Brown no less, how did I miss this?)
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  13. Tuckerfan

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    It's called "broasting" and was invented back in the '50s.
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  14. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    The air would pressurize if you heated cold air in a sealed vessel. Unfortunately you've got to have the lid up when you put in the chicken or popcorn, so the air is already about as hot as it's going to get when you close the lid.
  15. Order2Chaos

    Order2Chaos Ultimate... Immortal Administrator

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    Why not just put it in cold?
  16. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    If you start popcorn in cold oil I think the kernels lose a bit more internal moisture during the long slow fizzing they do as the oil comes up to temperature, so when they do pop they're not quite as fluffy. You can kind of see that in the kernels from the Mythbuster's experiment.

    The Chinese device was brought up to 145 PSI (1 megapascal) through slow heating. A better method would be

    1) heat the oil up to about 450 F with the popcorn held above it in a remotely operated container.
    2) add 150 PSI of pressure by opening a valve from an air compressor.
    3) drop the popcorn in the oil and let it heat for some period of time, probably 2 to 3 minutes (the oil temp would initially drop a bit).
    4) release the pressure in a controlled manner to let all the kernels pop.
    5) open the lid.
  17. Order2Chaos

    Order2Chaos Ultimate... Immortal Administrator

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    Got it... Interesting.
  18. Tuckerfan

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    So, I tried this tonight. Not so much because I wanted to taste the chicken, but because I want to see what the original gravy was like. (I'll be making that tomorrow.) I pan-fried some chicken tenderloins in about 1/4 of an inch of oil in a cast iron skillet. I didn't have any issues with the breading like Gturner did.

    Some of my spices were a bit old, so they weren't as flavorful as they could be, and I also didn't get the seasonings blended into the flour as well as I should have. Still, I say it's the recipe. Even with a less than ideal mixing of the seasonings, when I hit a patch that was right, I could tell it. (The paprika also explains why the chicken always had a slightly reddish tint to it.) If I make this again, I'm going to delete the two teaspoons of salt. I'm not a huge fan of salty food, and that was a bit much. I will also probably switch to rice flour instead of wheat flour. After having chicken that had been coated with rice flour, I find that I much prefer the lighter nature of it to wheat flour.
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  19. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    I'm thinking that this recipe might do quite a lot to bring back "home-fried chicken". When I was growing up a lot of people made Southern fried chicken at home, even though the Colonel's was always of course better. As KFC went from being an occasional Sunday after-church indulgence to a staple, followed by the profusion of other fast food and frozen food options like Bojangles, Chick-Fil-A, and a ton of different chicken sandwiches, I think many people stopped trying to make Southern fried chicken at home.

    And why should they? It's quite a task so nobody is going to do it for just a snack, and yet no matter how good you are at it, it was never nearly as good as KFC. At best you might get it as good as supermarket deli chicken. And with kids growing up eating top-notch fried chicken, the general reaction to anything you might make would be "Not as good as KFC." So I think a lot of people pretty much gave up making it themselves.

    But this recipe changes the game. If you can make it as good as KFC, then you can also make it better than KFC. (Thus my batch with savory, rosemary, and tarragon). It becomes a winnable game where you can invite friends and family members over and potentially blow them away. A girl could once again get a husband, or a man a wife, with his Southern fried chicken skills. It could perhaps reshape and reorder our society.

    ****
    Reducing the salt - substituting garlic powder for garlic salt.

    As an aside (unless that was the aside), the other day I quickly made up some breading for an ex-housemate. I cut it from about 9 teaspoons of salt (the 3 tablespoons of celery salt and garlic salt are probably about 7 teaspoons of just salt) by dropping the 2 teaspoons of table salt and substituting 1-1/2 teaspoons garlic powder for garlic salt. (Garlic salt is 3 parts salt to 1 part garlic powder.) And then I mixed the herbs and spices with 2 cups of gluten free flour because I ran across some sciency recipe site that mentioned something about how gluten makes browning and crisping more difficult (or perhaps the opposite - I can't recall).

    So she has the low-sodium gluten-free version. I have plenty of Low-salt and No-salt that I could have added, which use potassium chloride, but I wasn't sure what she thought about potassium chloride so I told her to add salt to taste.

    I'd made another batch of wings (I think experiment #13) where I dry dredged them in wheat starch, dunked them in water, and then dredged them in the usual KFC batter, as the Korean wing recipes often use starch instead of flour because it sticks better. But I think I got the temperature wrong and they came out with a less than crisp crust.

    So I used them in a further experiment in double frying (which did make them crispier), and then coating them with a Korean double-fried go-chu-jang wing mix. But I screwed up the wing mix by substituting molasses for honey. They were pretty bitter wings. :brood:
  20. shootER

    shootER Insubordinate...and churlish Administrator

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    The chili recipe I use came from a sergeant who works for the sheriff's department in a neighboring county and calls for both paprika and salt.

    After the second time I made it, I quit adding any salt at all because the paprika makes it salty enough on its own.
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  21. Soma

    Soma OMG WTF LOL STFU ROTFL!!!

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    Oh good God, you are retarded.
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  22. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    Paprika only has 5 mg of sodium per tablespoon, which can't be much salt, unless perhaps some brands add a bit of extra salt to it.

    Maybe the peppers were grown on a salt-flat?

    Speaking of that, this week my old housemate will be putting on Tyvek to do site analysis on a place not far from here where some homes were built on soil that has 10,000 ppm of arsenic. I said "Don't you mean 10,000 ppb?" "No. 10,000 PPM!". "That's 1% arsenic! The maximum allowed level in food is just 35 ppb!" So it's 250,000 times the safe level.

    And the homeowners had gardens in it - for years. Perhaps even organic ones. The state took hair and fingernail samples from them to see how bad their exposure is. There is so much copper, chromium, and arsenic that their soil is actually green. On the bright side, they probably had no fungus or insect problems with their tomatoes.

    That state apparently knew about the toxic waste site 20 years ago but the information got mishandled when it was shuffled from department to department. The homeowners are getting per diem while the heavy equipment goes in to remove the dirt. Their houses are sitting on the site of an old CCA (copper chromium arsenic) wood treatment plant.
  23. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    When was the last time you went to someone's house and they served you their Southern fried chicken? Forty or fifty years ago, you could almost guarantee that you would be served their Southern fried chicken.

    Also, this is the green room.
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  24. Tuckerfan

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    Report on tonight's experiment: In the picture, you can see mashed potatoes with the Colonel's recipe, reheated homemade KFC tenderloins, canned baked beans, slaw made using the KFC recipe. The slaw was nothing special, if you've got a favorite recipe/brand, use that, you'll be happier. The baked beans were Bush's Bourbon and Brown Sugar. Fine, but one of my next projects is going to be making my own from scratch, I think. The reheated chicken tasted exactly like reheated KFC. The gravy? Fuck the Colonel and his chicken, that was some good goddamned gravy! I honestly didn't want to eat anything else, it was that good. The only change I would make to the recipe would be to use 2 Tablespoons of butter instead of just 1. 1 isn't enough to do more than make the flour damp, and a roux is typically a bit moister than that. I still have some leftover gravy in the fridge that I plan on reheating tomorrow, to see if it, like a lot of gravies is even better the next day.

    kfc.jpg
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  25. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    Oh that looks good!

    I noticed the same thing about the gravy. The initial roux paste is more like wood putty or mortar than it should be.

    For a typical roux you'd use a flour/butter volume ratio of 1.75 to 2.00, or equal weights of each. Perhaps the gravy recipe on Reddit made a simple error of saying 1 tbspn butter instead of 2, which would be perfect for 1/4 cup of flour. But as KFC breading is only 2/3rds flour, the recommended ratio would indicate you should use 1 tbspn and 1 tspn butter (1-1/3 tbspn) for 1/4 cup breading, or 1 tbspn butter to 3 tbspn breading. Of course it's also usual to use clarified butter.

    It's also recommended to always had hot fluid to a cold roux paste or cold fluid to a hot roux paste, which would explain why he adds cold milk to the hot roux, then very hot or boiling water, then cold cream.

    Knorr.co.uk - secrets to a roux sauce

    I wonder if those KFC "butter" packets would work? My bet is that the Colonel would have thrown them in the trash with lots of use of the "F" word. :garamet:
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  26. Will Power

    Will Power If you only knew the irony of my name.

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    All this KFC eats talk brings up a good question, even if ~2 & a half months early:

    Has anyone HERE ever deep fried an entire TURKEY?

    I know it's something you really HAVE TO KNOW what you're doing, or you could quite probably kiss your home goodbye, & perhaps your neighbour's, if not the entire neighbourhood as a whole.

    Terribly tragic how every year throughout the U.S., there are folks who unintentionally & unwittingly turn their homes into infernos thinking they knew HOW to deep fry turkeys!

    But, back to the specific question, assuming you know HOW to safely, efficiently, & properly deep fry a turkey, think of how superbly moistly tenderly delicious a deep fried whole turkey would come out done KFC Style, with those 11 herbs & spices.
  27. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    Considering how long the turkey has to remain in the oil to cook, would it hurt the breading?

    I can't find any recipe for a whole breaded turkey, only breaded turkey cutlets. :shrug:

    But we haven't been deep frying turkeys for very long, we always baked them.
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  28. El Chup

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  29. shootER

    shootER Insubordinate...and churlish Administrator

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    The breading would be burned black by the time the meat was done, assuming you could keep it from falling off in the peanut oil).

    You'd be better off making the spice mixture into a liquid and then using a meat injector (BTW, I call dibs on that name for a punk/metal band) to squirt it into the bird.
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  30. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    I could see trying the breaded whole-bird approach on a deep-fried Cornish game hen, though. :)
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