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Yeah, it's the classic american picnic food, but it's classic for a reason. And hell, I wanted to make fried chicken and potato salad anyway, so this was just a convenient excuse. I did put a lot more effort into this stuff than I normally would have, though, so let's just see how this all goes! The shopping haul, not counting some odds and ends like flour, eggs, salt, etc. There's one important notable absence, though. Dish 1: Twice Brined Fried Chicken 1 chicken 1/2 a yellow onion many garlic some ginger favorite spices oh poo poo I forgot the buttermilk flour cooking fat First off, disassemble the bird and huck it all into a bowl. This particular bird had a bunch of yellow gunk and gribbly bits to clean off, but that's just how it goes sometimes.   I ended up splitting the breasts in half because they were huge, and even then the thicker parts were too thick. I think next time I'll rip out the tenders to get the size down a bit. I can always save them to make a batch of chicken fingers later. My mediocre knife skills and lovely knife kind of made a hash of the skin, but that turned out not to matter at all. I could just as well have tossed the skin and no one would have noticed. And by 'tossed' I mean 'fry up in a pan as a treat for myself' of course.   I used a microplane grater to shred up the better part of a whole bulb of garlic and a little knob of ginger. Then I used a box grater to demolish half an onion. Then I cried until I stuck my face under a running faucet because oh god. Next time, just the food processor. When I could see again, I added a handful or so of kosher salt, and a heavy sprinkle of cayenne pepper, chili powder, and paprika. And, of course, a bunch of FRESHly ground black pepper.  Mush that stuff in good. Basically I was aiming for a combination marinade/brine like you would do for korean fried chicken. This got stashed in the fridge for about 6 hours. NOT PICTURED: Around this time, I dumped all the chicken scraps and the leftover onion and garlic into a pot and cooked for a billion hours to make stock.  After six hours, the lighting was really lovely. Also, I had to make another trip to the store to get buttermilk. I didn't rinse the brine off, I just drained the chicken in a colander to get rid of most of the expelled onion juice, put it all back in the bowl, and topped it off with buttermilk. This was maybe half a cup of buttermilk. Give it all a good rub and stash it back in the fridge overnight. THE NEXT DAY  My breading mixture was 1.5 cups of flour, about 1/3 cup of corn starch, 2 tablespoons of baking powder, and 2 tablespoons of salt. Sprinkle in a few drops of buttermilk at a time and stir until kind of pebbly. I want to get some texture from this breading. The chicken's going to go straight from its buttermilk bath into the flour.  The lighting hasn't improved any, by the way. Here's all the pieces dredged and ready to go. Don't stack them up on a plate like this. As the breading hydrates, the pieces glued together a bit. Didn't affect the end product much, but it made things annoying to work with.  Today's cooking fat will be the schmaltz skimmed off the chicken stock I made earlier, plus some lard to cover the rest of the pan. There was still some broth mixed in with the schmaltz. Bringing this up to temperature was... exciting. I'm glad I own a splatter guard.  Fat's at about 350F, and almost everything is crammed in there. I actually used too small of a pan, and things are a little too crowded. I couldn't even fit the wings in at all, but I just went back and fried them up separately. I let it cook on one side for about 10 minutes without touching it, and I probably could have gone up to 12 minutes to get the crust a little darker.  Looks pretty good, though! Christ, look how thick those breast pieces over on the left are, though. Cook on the other side for another 10-12 minutes, and then get this out on a rack to cool.  The giant breasts weren't quite cooked all the way through, so I just tossed them in the oven while I fried up the wings, just to get everything fully up to temp. ~~~MEANWHILE~~~ Dish 2: Potato Salad 4 russet potatoes 4 red potatoes 4 stalks celery 3 green onions 2 hard boiled eggs a little bit of chopped red bell pepper a couple chopped pickles 1/3 cup mayo big ol' squeeze of mustard I'm gonna level with you; I kind of hate most potato salad recipes. I don't want mashed potatoes, I don't want goopy dressing, I don't want the whole thing to taste sickly sweet. This potato salad isn't any of that poo poo. So, first off, I like my potatoes to stay more or less intact, but still be soft. If you just boil potatoes, the starches all pop and you get mashed potatoes at best, glue at worst. The solution: cook at a low simmer, and acidify the water.  I've got four russets, peeled, and 4 red potatoes, scrubbed. These get chopped up into little pieces. The shape doesn't matter at all, just try to get it all the same thickness so it cooks at the same time. Rinse, and add just enough water to cover.  To the water add a whole bunch of salt. Like, way more than you think. Potatoes are black holes of seasoning, especially when cold, and if you don't get them salted now you'll never get your potatoes to taste of anything. Also, a nice glug of vinegar. I think I went with a little less than a quarter cup. Bring to a boil, then drop the heat to barely simmer and cook until tender. Drain, and LET COOL COMPLETELY.  Once it's cooled to at least room temperature, you can start throwing poo poo in. I went with hard cooked egg, red bell pepper, pickle, green onions, and celery. I like the middle stalks of the bunch, nice and crisp without being too tiny to work with. Also, tear up the celery leaves and toss them in, too. They're delicious and really go a long way toward making the whole thing taste lighter. True story, I once had someone flip out at me over celery leaves. They were convinced that celery leaves are a deadly poison and I was an awful irresponsible person for including them in my recipe. It was great.  This might not look like enough mayo. It's plenty. Just stir the poo poo out the salad. The edges of the potato pieces will wear down and mix with the mayo, and eventually everything gets a nice smooth coating without just being wet gloop.  Sort of something like this. ... ... hey wait a minute  YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO BE HERE, CAT please stop helping  I might be pandering a little here. Anyway, put some cling wrap over this (THE SALAD, NOT THE CAT YOU MONSTER) and chill thoroughly before tasting it for seasoning. In my case, the salt and vinegar from the cooking was perfect, it didn't need any more. Usually it does. ~~MEANWHILE~~ Dish 3: Watermelon Iced Green Tea Watermelon Green Tea that's it actually, 1 lime too, I guess I admit it, this is just agua fresca with tea, but I don't usually drink fresh fruit drinks at all so this was a little out of my normal experience. The slow part, of course, is the tea. I always cold brew my iced tea. The traditional method of 'brew hot tea, then ice it down' just tastes like stale tea to me.  Just cram a bunch of teabags into a jar of water. This works best late at night when the lighting is poo poo again, of course. Stash that in the fridge for at least 8 hours to brew. You can go up to about 24 hours before you oversteep the tea, so there's a big margin of error to work in.   Take that cute personal watermelon and lop it in half. If you're making drinks for more than just yourself, by all means use a real watermelon, but I'm just making a small batch. Scoop out all the fleshy bits. Try not to get too many seeds, but it doesn't matter all that much because...  You're just going to blend it all up anyway. I tried putting the melon in the freezer for 15 minutes, just to firm up a little for the blender to catch more easily. It didn't make any difference at all.  Strain the juice, making sure to gently push all the good stuff through the strainer without getting the pulp and seeds.   Fill up the pitcher the rest of the way with tea, and test the flavor. The combination of watermelon and green tea had a very grassy flavor to it, almost hay-like, but it wasn't unpleasant. One I added some lime juice, a few tablespoons of sugar, and some salt, it was really nice. Now, in a perfect world, I would just everything chill, then stash it in a cooler and go enjoy it on a paper plate, sitting on a blanket out in the sun but IT HAS BEEN lovely AND RAINING HERE ALL WEEK. So gently caress it, I'm gonna angrily eat my delicious food on a real plate in front of my computer as I type up this entry post.   dish 4? corn??? Corn doesn't count. There's no recipe. Put corn in heat, wait a while, done. My self appraisal: The drink surprised me with how good it was! I don't usually like watermelon, or fruit in general for that matter, but this balanced with the tea nicely and was really refreshing. I'll probably make another pitcher of this when the sun comes back. The potato salad was perfect. I could seriously live off of this stuff. The vinegar in the cooking water just elevates the whole thing, makes it taste fresh and light instead of gooey and heavy. Hell, it actually tastes more like potatoes than mayonnaise. The chicken was... mostly there. The meat came out super moist and tender, and the heavily seasoned brine gave it all a nice flavor. The legs may actually have come out TOO tender; I ended up using a fork to eat the leg meat because it was so soft when I picked it up. (Yes, it was completely cooked, I have a thermapen) I might cook the leg meat a little higher than the rest, just to firm it up a bit. The breading, on the other hand, was kind of a wash. It tasted great, but it never really got crispy even when it was hot, didn't adhere super well to the chicken, and wasn't as thick as I'd like. I think I could improve the breading by wiping off the onion/garlic before giving it the buttermilk soak, and maybe adding an egg to the buttermilk to try and make a kind of batter. I had a lot of fun with this; at least with the cooking side, if not so much the crappy food photography side. Tendales fucked around with this message at 05:04 on Jun 13, 2017 |
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Jun 13, 2017 05:01
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| # ? May 5, 2024 05:47 |
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Fried chicken and potato salad? A goon after my own heart. One thing that I find really helpful as far as chicken flavor goes is to change the order of operations, and season after the buttermilk but right before breading. The marinade is good, but I think good fried chicken needs the stronger spicing right below the breading to really shine. Glad you had fun! This should be a pretty cool field of competitors.
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Jun 13, 2017 06:27
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There was a lot of seasoning in the buttermilk itself, since I didn't wipe away the onions and spices from the first step. But like a loving idiot I drained off the spiced up buttermilk before I thought to add any to the flour. At least I still had some left in the carton.
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Jun 13, 2017 07:24
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Here's a tip for your fried chicken. The reason you had a hard time getting them to all cook and still had some blackening of the breading is that you super crowded your pan. I'd suggest at least halving what you threw in per batch, what you put in was just way too much chicken. Even though it's counterintuitive, it actually takes longer to cook the way you did than to make two batches because you drop the temp of the oil and pan way down and end up burning the breading while you try to get everything up to temp again.
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Jun 13, 2017 15:16
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I love fried chicken. LOVE it. Yours looks awesome. But I'd crawl over a pile of broken glass for some of that potato salad. Holy poo poo, that looks amazing. Nice work on everything. I'd picnic with you any day.
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Jun 13, 2017 16:05
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| # ? May 5, 2024 05:47 |
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Croatoan posted:Here's a tip for your fried chicken. The reason you had a hard time getting them to all cook and still had some blackening of the breading is that you super crowded your pan. I'd suggest at least halving what you threw in per batch, what you put in was just way too much chicken. Even though it's counterintuitive, it actually takes longer to cook the way you did than to make two batches because you drop the temp of the oil and pan way down and end up burning the breading while you try to get everything up to temp again. Yeah, you're 100% right. Fortunately, I have a bigger pan I can use next time.
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Jun 13, 2017 18:45
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