Cooking challenge-lets replicate Chik-Fli-A

Cafe Society
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1

I love chicken sandwiches from Chick-Fil-A and Wendys. Popeyes is popular but too spicy.

How can we cook chicken like this at home? I’ve tried and end up with a tough, chewy hunk of meat. Nothing like Chick-Fli-A goodness.

I assume you start with breast fillets?
Do you butterfly them?

What next?

Remember they can’t be dripping grease.

I have bought frozen Tyson chicken patties for sandwiches.They’re ok, but Store bought chicken sandwiches are much better.

These aren’t fresh and I worry about additives.
Link Robot or human?

2

My best results with chicken for sandwiches has been using boneless skinless chicken thighs rather than breasts. Come up with the rub you like, toss in flour or bread crumbs and roast in the oven. They won’t be dripping grease and are very forgiving regarding being overcooked. I don’t have a specific recipe but if you look for oven baked chicken thighs I have faith you will be able to come up with something that works for you.

Never, never, never use chicken breasts. Way too dry. Thighs all the way.

Any Tyson product, as well as Perdue, is garbage. And probably immoral.

3

The famous Red Bag Chicken from Aldi tastes a lot like Chick-fil-A chicken only without the homophobia.

(No, honestly, it really does.)

4

Hmmm, I haven’t tried this item from Aldi but I like what I can find with a quick search. Although chicken breasts it looks like they might meet the criteria the OP is seeking but not what I would want.

And yes, lacking the homophobia so that’s a plus.

5

I’ll give this a try. Thighs are cheaper than breasts.

I’ve read chick-fli-a marinates in pickle juice for 20 to 30 mins. Use what ever flour and egg breading you like.

Getting enough pickle juice at home could be challenging. A jar of kosher pickles lasts me six months and thats only 2 or 3 cups of juice. They are cheap enough that a jar could be bought just for a supply of marinade.

6

Yeah, marinating or brining is probably going to be a factor; when you have restaurant chicken and it’s remarkably better than some other version of chicken somewhere else; 99 times out of 100, it’s because it was brined or marinated or soaked in buttermilk or something like that.

7

I’ve made a copycat Chick-Fil-A recipe before-- there’s plenty out there. It turned out ok, but I tried the real thing once just to try it, and I didn’t think the real thing was anything that special.

The secret I’ve heard is NOT pickle juice, as commonly believed, but lots of MSG in the dry coating you roll the nuggies in before cooking. Copycat recipe video below.

Actually, I like the copycat Chick-Fil-A sauce better than the copycat nugs. I often whip up a batch and use it for making sandwiches with a Costco rotisserie chicken or whatever. There’s recipes out there with spices and extra stuff added, but I make a simple version that’s just 1/3 yellow mustard, 1/3 mayo, and 1/3 BBQ sauce- any standard issue KC style will do. Mix up into an orange-colored sauce.

8

Back when Pickle Backs were a very popular drink, bars would have big jugs of pickle juice.

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Again, though I don’t know for sure, but I’ve heard that the widespread belief that Chick-Fil-A chicken is marinated in pickle juice is a myth.

What I do know is, I’ve tried marinating chicken in pickle juice not for CFA copycat experiments, but for grilling on a couple occasions, and the end result, while yummy, very much tastes like pickle-juice flavored chicken. It’s not like “what is that subtle flavor? How come the chicken is so moist and delicious? What’s the secret?” It’s more like “yum, pickle-flavored chicken!”

10

I used to make these when I first started boycotting Chik-Fil-A back in the 70s due to the lack of any of them near me. I used skinless chicken breasts pounded out just a little with the side of a plate. For the giant mambo chicken breasts they sell now I’d definitely butterfly them and pound them out further. Other than that I’d saute them in butter, quickly browning the sides just a little and then finishing over reduced heat. The style in those days was to serve them with a couple of pickle slices which may have led to the pickle juice idea. A little salt and pepper made them very similar to the store bought version. However, in the past 40 something years they may have changed how they were made, I have no idea because the boycott continues even though there is now one nearby.

11

It depends on if the goal is to replicate Chic-fil-a exactly, or just to make a good chicken sandwich. Because I’m pretty Chic-fil-a does use breasts. The thing is, the chicken breasts they (and other restaurants) use for sandwiches are smaller than the ones that you buy at the grocery store, so you’d have to compensate for that somehow if you’re going to bread and fry them yourself.

But I say forget about doing exactly what Chic-fil-a does, and just use thighs. All the best chicken sandwiches I’ve had have used thighs. They are more moist and flavorful (I honestly have no idea why most Americans prefer white meat).

12

When it comes to replicating large chain specialties, Jason Farmer is my go to source.

According to him, the brine is salt, sugar, MSG, mustard powder, paprika & black pepper. The breading is flour, milk powder, salt, sugar, MSG, mustard powder, white pepper, baking powder & cayenne. The egg wash is egg and non fat milk.

He goes into detail about all the steps in the video but it seems legit according to the comments.

13

Here you go:

You use breasts; you brine them for the correct texture. There’s no pickle juice involved. There’s a lot of arguing about this back and forth on the net, but I’ve personally come to the conclusion that pickle juice is not used in Chick Fil A’s product, but it does taste good if you’d like to use it.

Thighs do make a better sandwich, in my opinion. But if you’re replicating Chick Fil A, it’s breast.

14

The list @Shalmanese uses is similar to the ones I’ve found and tried, although mine also had some powdered sugar in the breading to add that slightly sweet taste (which the milk powder does as well) and to aid in browning.

To me, there are a few issues with replicating at home, although the biggest one I’ll leave for last.

First is the chicken itself. As @WildaBeast points out, most of the white meat chicken breasts you get at the store are oversized, pumped full of brine, woody/tough and often tasteless. You will do better with Redbird, or other smaller scale operations, but you’ll probably need to re-size and/or flatten them as well. Another advantage is a commercial deep fry option lets you cook fast and hot, without loosing moisture to a long cooking time or toughness from overcooking, something harder to do in home rigs.

But as @pulykamell points out, you can make a better sandwich, taking these options as a base and improving them, thighs, better brines, more seasonings, other options such as corn chip / corn flakes in the breading, panko, on and on and on.

Buuuuuut…

That brings me to the last point. Making fried chicken at home, while often amazing, is a metric ton of work and/or investment of specialty equipment. To make great dishes you’ll be doing a lot of prep, mechanical and brining, along with pre-fry work, and post fry cleaning. It’s exhausting. Not that it isn’t worth it, but the above made me go from frying say once a month, to 4 times a year, to “special occasions only”.

IMHO, you’re better off buying any of the higher end pre-made options and finishing at home, either in a home-fryer or an air fryer. Or, as pointed out in post # 2 by @Kolak_of_Twilo, learn the tricks above with good chicken, good breading options, and a fast brine, but do the cooking in an air fryer / convection oven / conventional oven and save a metric ton of cleanup work (in straining and cleaning oil) while getting 90% of the flavor profile.

15

The main issue for me is the smell and amount of oil (which gets saved, filtered, and reused), so I do it outside. It is a pain in the ass, but it’s really no more a pain in the ass than making breaded pork chops, which I do every week (flour, egg dredge, bread crumbs–this is really a clean as you go dish if you want to maintain order in your kitchen, and you can do all the dredging and let the chicken sit for a bit – it does better with a rest – while you clean up your bowls), since that’s one of my daughter’s favorite meals. The only real difference is the pork chops I’m not deep frying as I do the chicken. But you can still shallow fry up a decent chicken sandwich as you would a pork chop or schnitzel, especially with breasts and you can get those pretty evenly thick (as opposed to thigh, which is a little more “lumpy.”)

16

Years back, I read an article on why brining works. Something about the salt getting absorbed into the meat, and that causes it to suck in / retain moisture. Makes sense to me.

I haven’t tried to replicate Chick Fil A, but I do brine our turkey every year and it does lead to uniformly moist meat (as well as idiot-proofing it somewhat; the meat is still moist even if I accidentally overcook it a bit).

17

The main issue I had when making fried chicken at home was that the oil would always get splattered and sloshed all over the kitchen. I always attributed that to the fact that I was probably using too shallow of a pan. I’d like to get something like a Dutch oven before the next time I attempt deep frying at home. Until then, I can only dream of making my own homemade fried chicken sandwiches, and fish and chips…

18

Again, I’ll do shallow oil pan fry options (chicken piccata in a butter and olive oil mix for example) but even with a mesh splatter guard, there’s always the thin splatter of oil on everything 2-3 feet from the stove, and as you point out, the lingering odor.

It’s not a “never” thing, but it’s one of those things that I can and do find easier to outsource than do at home most of the time.

19

Their grilled chicken is my go to since Wendy’s discontinued thiers. I tried Feddy’s but the grilled chicken was hard and dry like it had been refried. I console my self that Chick-fil-a hires gay/trans/something else (I have seen people working there that do not seem to be cis-het), in my area and has a diversity program so maybe they are improving.

20

I’m considering a air fryer. I’ve read reviews and am watching cooking videos on youtube.

It seems to work well and keeps the splatter inside the machine.

Clean up is shown in the videos and looks reasonably easy.