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. ed629

    ed629 Morally Inept Banned

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    That's a headline for another "Florida Man" story.
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  2. Order2Chaos

    Order2Chaos Ultimate... Immortal Administrator

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    Use the 11 herbs and spices in the brine, but no breading would survive the turkey-fryer. Also go watch the Good Eats episode on turkey frying to learn how to do it relatively safely.
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  3. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    Since salt, white pepper, and paprika dominates the breading, perhaps they would make the brine, perhaps with mustard and ginger.

    Anyway, that got me thinking about different herb additions or substitution you could make to the recipe, and it struck me that we probably lack a very simple metric for herbs and spices - the threshold of detectability. The Scoville pepper scale is based on the number of dilutions before a human can't detect heat.

    Shouldn't we develop a similar scale for herbs and spices?

    For example, perhaps rosemary is three times more detectable than marjoram, and cinnamon fifteen times more detectable.

    Then you'd have some rough guide to balancing cinnamon with marjoram and rosemary. Or if you want ginger with a hint of cinnamon, you'd be able to hit about what you're going for just by the numbers.

    So in this theory I'm likening the flavor of a spice to a sound, each quite complex, but the intensity of the flavor to a sound's volume. As with audio mixing, you need to know what dB the source inputs are or a lot of what you do will get drowned out or be far too dominant.

    And of course if you took it further, digging into mass spectroscopy and such, you could divide each spice's flavor into the strength of individual components, verifying the strength of each of those based on dilution trials with a group of human subjects.

    I would think some food lab or test kitchen has perhaps done something like this, but sometimes we miss obvious things when it comes to cooking, such as having smart pans that display how hot their surface is, or a smart stove that has IR thermometers looking down upon each burner area and displaying pan surface temperatures on an overhead display.
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  4. shootER

    shootER Insubordinate...and churlish Administrator

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    Putting it in the brine is a good idea, but injecting it into the bird after a brine would make the flavors even more intense.
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  5. Order2Chaos

    Order2Chaos Ultimate... Immortal Administrator

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    My worry is that using a meat injector on a turkey destined for the fryer is a good way to create a literal turkey bomb.
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  6. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    My problem with such techniques is that they won't deliver the flavor evenly.

    A better method would be to take a live turkey, pluck an area near a major vein or artery so you can run a large heavily spiced IV into its circulatory system, delivering the flavor evenly throughout it's muscles and tissues, down to the capillary level, with the last beats of its heart.
    The pain from all those spices in its bloodstream should produce massive amounts of adrenaline, which might offset the turkey's natural levels of tryptophan so that you don't face plant after eating it.

    It makes a lot more sense than throwing them out of a helicopter.
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  7. Order2Chaos

    Order2Chaos Ultimate... Immortal Administrator

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    :backaway:
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  8. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    Nah. It's no different than the natural juices within the turkey.
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  9. El Chup

    El Chup Fuck Trump Deceased Member Git

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    Um, no. If there is water content in whatever is injected into it then there's a problem.
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  10. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    Speaking from experience, no, there's not. You drop the turkey into cold oil, and then you turn the burner on to heat the oil and cook the turkey. You're not dropping a turkey into hot oil, because if you did, there would be problems with oil splattering due to steam explosions, injected meat or not, because the turkey is going to have moisture on its skin.
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  11. shootER

    shootER Insubordinate...and churlish Administrator

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    Injecting turkeys for frying is one of the primary uses of those devices.

    Also, what @Tuckerfan said. And you don't even have to put the turkey cold oil to start because the injected liquid is inside the bird and isn't directly exposed to the oil.

    I haven't personally fried a turkey that way, but I've stood by and watched others do it without any problems at all.
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  12. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    For tonight's experiment, I made up a batch of the seasoning without the salt, and swapping out garlic powder for the garlic salt, then, instead of mixing it with flour and battering the chicken, I tried using it as a rub. This was a mistake. The seasoning was so powerful that it completely overwhelmed the chicken and made it impossible for me to eat. I scraped off as much of the rub as I could, and tried it that way. That worked, so I'd suggest anyone wishing to try this to put in something like a salt shaker and sprinkle it on the chicken before cooking it. A rub with this stuff is absolutely out of the question.
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  13. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    I'm sure I eventually would have tried that! Thanks for the warning. :D

    Sounds about like my Korean wings experiment using molasses instead of honey. I didn't even try to eat the last two of those wings.

    Could you tell which particular spices were causing the problem? I wouldn't think basil or oregano would be the issue, but the pepper, paprika, or mustard might.

    I might look up some rub recipes and do sort of a spreadsheet comparison to the KFC spices.
  14. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    Okay, I compared the KFC spices to six of the top google hits for "chicken rub recipe".

    upload_2016-9-14_0-17-7.png

    upload_2016-9-14_0-17-37.png

    Paprika is spot on. The salt is about average.
    It's got more dry mustard than the average, but way less than Ed's dry rub. The amount of garlic powder is likewise unremarkable.
    The ginger is slightly less than in the Moroccan rub, and the thyme and oregano are exceeded by the amounts in Hugh's dry rub. If those aren't causing an issue then the basil certainly isn't.

    Most of the rubs use more black pepper than KFC's herb & spice mix.
    But if you add the white pepper to the black pepper, KFC is using almost twice as much pepper as any rub, and almost three times as much pepper as the average rub.

    So it's either the total pepper being out of whack - or you just used too much of the rub.
  15. Order2Chaos

    Order2Chaos Ultimate... Immortal Administrator

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    Yeah that's why you pat dry a turkey you're about to fry with paper towels. In cold, won't that get the skin really oily?
  16. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    I think it was a combination of the pepper and the paprika. The combination of the two was just overwhelming. If you had less of one or the other, it might not have been so bad.
  17. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    Nope.
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  18. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    Tonight's experiment.

    IMG_20160914_194457408.jpg

    That's a slab of cow with the KFC seasoning sprinkled on to it before broiling, baked beans, and a half ear of corn. I'm out of fucking gravy, but still have mashed potatoes!!!! How can I eat the potatoes without gravy??? :ua:

    This worked, might have been a little stingy on the seasoning, but after last night's fiasco, I wasn't going to risk having too much. It definitely gave a nice flavor to the meat, without overpowering it. It doesn't replace my favorite way to season a steak, but it's a nice addition to my stable of ways to cook it. It probably would be a good way to season a burger as well. Might try that this weekend.
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  19. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    Tried it tonight on some pork chops, and it's almost perfect for them. I say "almost perfect," because there was something slightly missing from making it a completely blissful experience. Not entirely sure of what it was that they could have used, maybe a little olive oil (though the chops were plenty juicy), but something to give a little "float" to the flavors. I was more aggressive with the seasoning tonight than I was with the beef I had the other night, and I think I've found the right amount to put on food. You don't want to completely cover the meat like you do with a rub, but you want to do more than a light seasoning as well. A vigorous sprinkling from a salt shaker so that there's a light coating over most of the meat is what you want.
  20. ed629

    ed629 Morally Inept Banned

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    Maybe a little lemon pepper?
  21. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    Lemon, perhaps. It doesn't need any more pepper, I don't think.
  22. ed629

    ed629 Morally Inept Banned

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    I figured you could drop the pepper, and substitute the lemon pepper. Or as an alternative, keep the pepper and marinate the pork chops in some lemon juice.
  23. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    That would work if you were mixing up a batch especially for pork chops (assuming lemon pepper fills in the missing ingredient), but if you're planning on using it as a general-purpose seasoning, it might not work quite so well. (Though it would be worth experimenting with, I think.)
    That would probably be the best method.
  24. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    I made a mix with 21 herbs and spices, but with no real target other than a slightly different flavor. Aside from a teaspoon of savory and a teaspoon of tarragon, it's got 1/2 teaspoon of assorted things like cumin, corriander, sage, and whatnot. But I reduced the amount of white pepper (I ran out) and didn't use garlic salt, so I'm actually using less total volume of herbs and spices than KFC. No idea how it will taste.
  25. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    So a few weeks ago I'd given a Ziploc (3 cups) of the KFC breading mix to the clerk at my local Shell station, who is a very good cook (and whose brother bought a house by selling just a tiny percentage of his collectible action figurines that he's spent his life buying at yard sales).

    He was having difficulty coordinating a fried chicken night with his wife and kids, and instead used it on inch thick pork cutlets (or whatever you call a boneless pork chop). He breaded them up, fried them for a few minutes on each side, and then finished them in the oven for 20 or 30 minutes like Shake-n-Bake.

    He said they were the best pork chops he'd ever had. Incredible flavor and the breading kept them juicy inside.
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  26. Shirogayne

    Shirogayne Gay™ Formerly Important

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    I gotta say, @gturner that your dedication to this endeavor is remarkable. I'm gonna archive this thread once the convo dies off so that the recipe can be easily found. :techman:
  27. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    Tonight, I decided to whip up a batch, since I want more of that good ass gravy. I fried up a bunch of chicken that I had, looked at how much of the buttermilk mixture I had leftover and thought, "Hmm. I don't want to throw that out since there's so much of it. Not sure how it'll keep in the fridge, what to do?" I looked in the freezer, thinking that I might have some veggies like cauliflower or broccoli I could batter and fry with it, but I didn't have any. Then I saw the salmon. It wasn't particularly good salmon (that's almost impossible to find around here any more), so if it turned out to be a nightmare, nothing of value would be lost. I thawed a hunk of it out, battered it, and fried it. Tried a piece of it, and yup, it works! It gave a nice bit of flavor to it, without wiping out the few elements of actual salmon taste that it had. :techman:
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  28. shootER

    shootER Insubordinate...and churlish Administrator

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    :flow:






    :ramen:
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  29. Shirogayne

    Shirogayne Gay™ Formerly Important

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    Beat me to it :ramen:
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  30. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    So it works for chicken, pork, and fish. :)

    That just leaves country fried steak. :drool: