Umm, yeah, you’re being misinformed. Sugar is rampant in fast food, though. Texas is the southwest, but:
Preach it. I’ve been making my own chicken for decades (gonna do it on Sat, in fact). Never used sugar in my batter, nor did my mom, and the idea seems loony.
ETA: Also, every time I’ve made southern fried chicken or seen someone else make southern fried chicken, the dry and wet components are not mixed together. It’s not really what you think of as a “batter”, there are separate dry and wet pans you use to coat the chicken.
I have Church’s probably once every other week. I don’t recall them ever serving white bread. They currently serve drop biscuits, and as far as I can remember they always have. There are other chicken places in town that serve white bread, though (e.g. Gus’s).
To the OP: Popeyes is in the UK. I’d generally suggest them for fast food chicken, but they have a habit of doing truly weird shit. Avoid things like the cookie batter crust they did a few years ago. Get the standard chicken.
Lee’s Famous Recipe has roasted chicken parts. They’re a much smaller business than KFC or Popeye’s, but their non-battered fare is pretty good. Here’s where they’re located …
How the hell they survive as a franchise operation with so few outlets spread across so many states is a mystery to me. But they do.
Worth a try if you’re one of the lucky few near one.
Cultural thing, I guess. Up until now (maybe, with Slim Chickens expanding) this feels, at least to me, entirely alien. As an aside, the majority of fried chicken joints in the UK are small, low cost independents. It’s a lowest common denominator market (so in chicken terms, KFC is actually pretty high end, with Nando’s top of the tree). The Viz cartoon Hen Cabin satirizes this proliferation, with Hen Cabin wedged in between Roosters Zone, Chic-a-Max, Deep Fry Chix… (I’m making the names up because I can’t remember them). In that context, serving toast would come off as very weird.
But foodwise, I’ll try most anything I can. You’ve persuaded me - I’ll be looking out for Texas Toast.
They were great, sometimes. Again, the particular outlet made a difference. The place I would go to in downtown LA was fantastic. Another one out in the valley gave you chicken dripping with grease. And it’s not like it was fried either, the chicken was grilled over an open flame. Just like with KFC the quality of the chicken the use made a difference.
Specifically to soak up the slop? As I said, seems very strange to me.
Aside continued: for fun, I checked out the chicken shops in the Brighton area (on the coast, due south of London. I count 46 shops dedicated to chicken, of which 8 are KFC, 3 are Nando’s and one (!) is Slim Chickens (Who knew?).
So in broad terms, independents outnumber chain by three to one.
Canes … (I keep spelling wrong) … gives you a slightly toasted unsliced New England style hotdog bun for bread. For our friends across the puddle a New England style hotdog bun has a somewhat squarish cross section and is sliced on the top, as opposed to regular hotdog buns which have a more roundish profile and are sliced in one side. Probably seems like a pointless difference to the uninitiated but Americans always prefer one type and despise the other. Then they eat the hotdog and forget about it.
So, while Canes provides something resembling Texas Toast keep in mind that the Texan version of toast is just toast made with thicker bread.
I was confused by it as well seeing it the first time, and now I just accept it. Yeah, maybe to suck up the slop? With the ribs or rib tips, it’s nice to get some porky grease and sauce on the white bread, and that is somehow satisfying, but even better is the barbecue is often served on top of the fries, so they soak up that goodness, too, and make for some nice sloppy, if not a bit soggy, carb to go along with the fat and protein.
So I’m not entirely sure, but your guess is similar to mine.
Color me surprised about differing quality of chicken being used by a chain such as El Pollo Loco. I’d assume (that dangerous word) that all the chicken, in fact all the food and supplies, comes from a central warehouse managed by the main company. It’s (generally) not up to the franchisees to source their own ingredients from wherever they want.
There are a few other El Pollo Loco knockoffs around the US southwest. I don’t know of any that have expanded beyond the region.
Here locally in Miami we have the Caribbean equivalent: Pollo Tropical. Flame grilled chicken with Caribbean spicing and sides. Yummy and reasonably healthy if you choose your sides with an eye to carb-management.
They have ~150 company-owned restaurants in Florida and interestingly are doing franchising only into US malls, airports, etc., and overseas into the Caribbean & upper Latin America. They don’t seem interested in expanding across the US in the conventional free-standing fast food drive through format.
While the rest of the ingredients are usually delivered frozen it’s impractical to start with frozen uncooked chicken. And chicken is easy to source locally. It’s quite clear around here the chicken changes at outlets across state lines. Not sure otherwise but I also (dangerously) assume fast food chicken is not supplied in the same manner as hamburgers and pre-cooked chicken products.
I am crazy about Pollo Tropical! . I always order a Tropi-chop. For the unfamiliar- you choose pork, fried chicken bits, roasted chicken bits etc as the meat. Then you pcik white rice, brown rice, lettuce as the base. Then you pick things like corn, onions, tomatoes, peppers etc. They have wonderful sauces to choose from. My favorite is the curry mustard.
I was in the habit of ordering at least one of their Treis Leches to take home. One year, I found that they had switched to Quatro Leches. They added another leche!
Darn good point. It’s probably fresh / refrigerated, not frozen. And therefore probably not centrally provisioned. Although HQ could certainly exercise administrative control over where the local stores can get their birds and what grade / quality they need to be. Could.
At my local chicken chain you see them starting with whole featherless floppy chickens and hand-cleaving them into the several major subdisassemblies (is too a word!). It’s been awhile since I last had Pollo Loco but as I remember the scene behind the counter in the kitchen it’s the same.
As to El Pollo Loco …
They started in L.A., blanketed the southwest, and are now fanning out across the country. There’s a good map about halfway down this page: Explore El Pollo Loco franchising. I’d be surprised to see them locally where I am any time in the next decade. But they’re on the move.
Got interrupted before. The El Pollo Loco stores I went to were all in the LA area. This was back around 1990, so it is possible they were all supplied from a central source and the differences I found had to do with how well the local outlet did their job.
I did have more info about KFC in the 70s when Gino’s licensed the product in some markets but really can’t remember any details that would apply here. Maybe we’ll hear from someone with current info for any chain.
I’m all for avoiding food waste. But a lot of FF seems to be about using the cheapest possible starting materials. Which decision is often (not always) antithetical to quality.
As long as something eats the whole bird, and what’s uneaten is composted, I’m as happy as it’s sustainably eco-friendly possible to be.
Thank you; yes, I will eat at El Pollo Loco when on business trips near their restaurants. Usually, I get a two- or three-piece meal with corn and coleslaw, or macaroni and cheese instead of coleslaw, and perhaps a couple of churros if I need a sweet.
Yeah, when it comes to nuggets, I actually prefer the ground-up lefterover bits style (like McDonald’s) to the whole muscle chicken style. Sometimes I just crave that particular texture. When I make them at home, I do typically use thighs, since I can’t get chicken nugget thighs anywhere else, but I’ll also do them with ground chicken for that softer bite. And if they sold “chicken paste” that was cheaper, I sure as hell would try that. Give me all the unused bits ground up and emulsified. I don’t mind.