Saw some show about a black soul food place in N.O. that basically combines the egg wash and flour/seasonings in a bowl and dredges the bird in that slush. The hosts raved about the finished result.
Now, that’s heresy from everything I’ve heard, but then again, keeping the flour stock from turning to sticky mud after a few pieces of washed chicken are dredged is a capital challenge.
Can I skip a step and achieve good results by dredging in a flour-egg-seasoning slurry? I suspect the “crisp” would suffer, which would grieve me. But man would I like to expedite things with the prep here. Would it work better with a cornflake-egg or rice-flour-egg slurry?
I have seen a lot of recipes for that batter - and have used this method often - beer batter recipes call for this often. If I am not mistaken, that is the preferred method of choice in Joy Of Cooking.
Usually I use a deep fryer, and it comes out great!
However, the mess is enough to make you re-think doing it again soon - not only the mess on the counter, but the deep fryer oil is pretty much history after you are finished, what with all the splatter and bits and pieces of batter floating around and getting more and more burnt as the process continues.
I’m a little confused by the OP. There’s breaded chicken (dredge in flour, dredge in egg, dredge in breadcrumbs) and there’s battered chicken (dip in something that resembles a pancake batter.) Both are perfectly acceptable ways to fry a chicken, and you can get plenty crisp chicken both ways. If you pan-fry your chicken, you can’t batter it (at least not very well), as your batter will tend to run off. You need to deep-fry battered chicken. Deep-fried battered chicken is plenty crispy.
You’re making me feel dumb. I’ve never heard of battered chicken before now. And, I’ve rarely heard of breadcrumbs for fried (as opposed to baked) chicken – we breaded with egg, then cake flour or cornflakes (also, the opposite order to yours). Was my grandmother <that> uninformed? Maybe.
I don’t think it is that uninformed…just more than one way to do it.
That said, for fried chicken (which I rarely make) I’ve done both (but never used breadcrumbs or cornflakes) and both turn out crispy and tasty. They are the same, only different.
As mentioned above, battered chicken needs deep frying, while breaded chicken can be pan fried. And just for the record I do seasoned flour, then buttermilk, egg, then seasoned flour again. Sometimes I skip the egg, sometimes I skip the buttermilk, sometimes I mix it all up into a batter…it is all good.
Sorry. Traditional Southern pan-fried chicken is flour-eggs-flour. We come from an Eastern European family, so we do, flour-eggs-breadcrumbs, as we do for our fried pork chops (schnitzels) and fried fish.
