Give fried chicken a flavor face-lift with a few simple ingredients. Like your bird hot? Fiery and spicy, Nashville-Style Hot Chicken is right up your alley. Prefer your chicken baked? Try Mexican Crispy Oven-Fried Chicken with a crunchy, panko-cornmeal crust. - McCormick Test Kitchens
Like every smart person, Julia Turshen, author of the forthcoming book Small Victories, knows that even if fried chicken can't get any better, it's still an ideal template for playing.
Regardless of whether you make her no-freakout fried chicken (that doesn’t use a whole vat of oil!) or any one of your favorite fried chicken recipes, Julia has very good ideas about how to give your chicken a whole new life. (Our thinking is: While you can eat fried chicken one night, and then cold leftovers the night after, if you make two batches and one with one of her variations, you get to eat a lot of fried chicken, all at once. But that's just us.)
1. Use lots of cracked black pepper in both the buttermilk and the seasoned flour. Dust the hot fried chicken with finely grated pecorino cheese. Cacio e Pepe Chicken!
2. Or add lots of black pepper and drizzle the finished chicken with maple syrup—black pepper and maple syrup are very good friends.
3. For a Mexican riff, use ground cumin and ground coriander instead of pimentón. Drizzle the hot fried chicken with some of the juice from a jar of pickled jalapeños and scatter with chopped cilantro.
4. For an Indian riff, marinate the chicken in yogurt (thinned with a bit of milk or water) instead of buttermilk and use curry powder instead of pimentón. Serve the chicken with raita and mango chutney.
This, and many other small-but-not-insignificant victories, can be found in Julia’s book.
This article was written by Ali Slagle from Food52 and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.
