Tonight I am cooking fried chicken using the original 11 herbs and spices that Colonel Sanders used in his fried chicken when he started.
It is different from the recipe we all knew and loved as Kentucky Fried Chicken and if tonight is at all successful* I will spring the $30 for the real stuff as my next experiment. For you young’uns, the (now un-)official Colonel’s recipe as blended by Marion Kay is not the salt & MSG&more salt abomination of today. It had real flavor and ain’t nuthin’ today compares to it.
*technique-wise
Thanks for posting the recipe. I’ve been curious ever since I read William Poundstone’s book Big Secrets as to what the Original Recipe was. Poundstone got a sample of the coating mix and had it analyzed back in the 1980s. The lab results – which would have caught any trace of other spices – revealed that at the time the coating included only flour, salt, pepper, and MSG. No other spices were added afterwards to the mix. The preparation – as outlined in the Colonel’s patent, included dredging the chicken in buttermilk and egg and then the coating mix, then cooking it in a pressure cooker before finishing it with frying. No “11 herbs and spices”, which Poundstone presumed had by that time been eliminated as not needed by the Powers That Be at Heublein, the holders of the franchise.
I notice that the OP simply fries, without the pressure cooker stage. This might make a difference to the moisture and tenderness of the chicken – that was supposed to be part of the secret to fully cooking the chicken without overdoing or drying out the outside. So, if you decide to go whole hog (or whole cgicken) and completely duplicate his recipe, here’s the patent. The Colonel, according to Poundstone, traveled with his spices and a pressure cooker, so that he could demonstrate his method to prospective clients. That’s how he “sold” it to Pete Harmon in Salt Lake city, his first franchisee.
By the way, according to Poundstone, they changed the recipe to the gravy eons ago, and the colonel hated that. He claimed the gravy was “so good you could eat it and throw out the chicken.” I just had some of their gravy last night, and agree with his assessment of it as “wallpaper paste”.
Basically, the idea was this: bring the oil to 400F in a pressure fryer, drop your chicken in so it browns, then seal it and cook it under pressure for 8 minutes at 250F to finish cooking the interior.
This is not something to do at home with a regular pressure cooker.
It was very spicy and clearly not Kentucky Fried Chicken. I imagine it was the chicken you would have gotten at Sanders’ gas station when he started. Next I’ll buy the 99-x from Marion Kay and then ressurect the zombie to update when I make it.
Home pressure fryers are available, but not common or cheap. They’re not huge or absurdly cumbersome – Sanders, as I’ve said, used to keep his in his car for demos.
On eBay they hve vintage ones for under $100 and modern ones for over $500.
This cooking channel has just started a series on testing & recreating KFC.
I’ve watch many of their “trying recipe” videos and they’re always fun. My favorites are recipes from 1930’s depression era cookbooks often published by local community groups or churches.
Here’s KFC part1. They’ll probably be several more. They just posted part 2 and that’s a research trip to Kentucky. Glen is pretty methodical and I bet the final video will be very close to KFC.
In the mid-to-late 1990s, a former boss of mine had moved on from where we had worked together, to be a market researcher at KFC (which, at that point, was owned by PepsiCo, shortly before it’d been spun off to become Tricon, then Yum!). At that time, he told me that they were working on a project to get Original Recipe back to something more closely resembling Sanders’ actual original recipe.
I made a joke along the lines of, “so, the original recipe is written down on an old piece of paper, locked in a safe in the Colonel’s old office?” My old boss was silent for several seconds, then replied, “I cannot confirm or deny that.”
I agree wholeheartedly. I suspect that the price difference between “vintage” pressure fryers and modern ones (and difference in availability) has a lot to do with modern concerns for safety and the older ones (and the Colonel’s own old unit) being less concerned with mishaps.
One of the videos mentioned that Harland Sanders original chicken took 35 minutes to make, which was unacceptable for mass sales. As I don’t want to buy a pressure fryer, and I’m not selling to the public does anyone have his original original recipe, how long at what temperature and in what oil?
35 minutes seems like a crazy long time to me, but one of the videos does mention that chickens back then were slaughtered later, so needed more time in the fryer. If that was the case, I would assume the oil was at a lower temperature than what we fry it at today. Typically, deep frying most things takes place in the 325F-375F range. For chicken, I’m guessing it takes no more than 15 minutes or so when I make fried chicken.
