Fried Chicken Revisited

Tonight I revisited my Fried Chicken post.  Since the initial post I've found some reasonable gluten free flour so now I toss the legs in a flour spice mix.  To date however I've been working primarily with rosemary and thyme.  Today I wanted to take a stab at the "11 herbs and spices" variation on fried chicken and thus used a little more than the two spices. 

I was actually going to count out 11, but around 6 I forgot to continue counting, because I was yelling about something ridiculous happening on The Bachelor in the other room.  Some of the spice highlights are:

• Cinnamon
• Cayenne
• Paprika
• Sage
• Basil
• Oregano
• Thyme

The chicken did not turn out tasting like KFC, but it did turn out quite nice.  

I've read that many chickens are rushed to market, a scant 20-some days after hatching, which evidently is too short a time for them to develop full flavor.  This being said I have no idea how to find more mature chickens, but if I do find out I would love to do a side-by-side comparison.

Chicken Scaloppine W/ White Wine Sauce

Chicken or Veal Scaloppine w/ a White Wine Sauce is what I would consider one of my staple recipes.  However since learning that my wife has celiac making it has become problematic. After searching for some time I was finally able to find a grocer who carried rice flour as a fungible commodity.  Said grocer also had a wide variety of rice pasta, though this I had previously acquired at other establishments.

The basic recipe is extremely simple and is essentially the same whether you are cooking chicken or veal (though for veal I shorten cooking times).  The first step is to get the water on to boil.  I've found that making this the first step is of particular import when cooking with an electric oven.  Back in the day when I had a gas stove to work with, heating up water still took time, but not nearly as much... man I miss that stove.  Next you have to get your chicken / veal into scaloppine form.  A scaloppine is actually a thin cut of meat.  For some reason, probably based on the Olive Garden menu, people have formed the notion that chicken or veal scaloppine refers to a particular recipe.  This is actually not the case, it only refers to the size and thickness of the cut of meat.  If you are working with veal you want to find veal that's already prepared as scaloppine.  If working with chicken you can either do the same or just buy (take out of the freezer) some chicken breasts (skinless & boneless).  Take these and pound the heck out of them until you're working with a 1/3 - 1/4 " thick piece.

Once you've pounded the chicken thin enough, slice it up into little scaloppine.  The actual size of the scaloppine doesn't matter as much as the thickness.  I like mine slightly larger than a silver dollar but heck, you can just cook up the whole breast thin if you want.

Dredge the scaloppine in flour (rice flour in this instance due to the gluten free requirement) salt and pepper.  Heat over high heat a tablespoon of butter and two tablespoons EVOO.  Once that's slightly brown and smelling fantastic throw some chicken in there (as all the cook books say, don't crowd the pan).  Normally I pre-heat the oven to something in the 200 range, because I normally have to cook at least two batches in the frying pan (now would be a good time to mention that you want to cook the chicken in a frying pan).  About a minute per side is what I do for chicken, a shorter time frame is used for veal.

With cooked chicken removed from the pan and sitting in the heated oven I dump some dry white wine (pinot grigio, sauvignon blanc) into the pan to deglaze it... scraping up all the "brown bits" as every cooking show will mention.  I add to that diced mushrooms and drained capers and let that simmer for 5 minutes (I threw in some thyme as well though I don't always do that).  To this I add salt, pepper, chopped fresh Italian parsley, and the chicken.

And that's it.  Stir that all together and throw it on some angle hair pasta with a lemon wedge and a glass of the same wine used for deglazing and you have yourself a meal fit for a hungry person.

Sorry, no pic this time.  I was too hungry to artistically present the dish.

Fried Chicken Sans Flour

It's not often that I get around to frying chicken... or really frying much of anything for that matter.  I thought about it and I can't come up with a particularly good reason why it's a rarity.  Perhaps it's, because the process is something of a mess... or perhaps it's, because I don't always have enough oil laying around.

Whatever the reason is, said reason did not hinder me from setting out to fry up some chicken legs a couple days ago.

I'm a big advocate of dark meat.  Not only does it have more natural flavor, it's a lot easier to cook, because you don't need to worry as much about it drying out.  You can cook the heck out of a chicken leg (or thigh) and it's still going to be juicy, where as, with a breast, you have a window of approximately 45 seconds between underdone and sawdust.  There's also the advantage of cost.  Since Americans demographically are not as fond of dark meat as they are of white meat, you can get a huge sack of chicken legs for half the price you would pay for a handful of breasts.

Your standard fried chicken recipe involves you dredging the chicken in some sort of flour and spice mixture (or shaking it up in a paper bag).  My wife however has recently learned that she is gluten sensitive so for her sake I decided to try a non-flour approach.  Another change I made from my standard frying technique is using shortening instead of peanut oil.  I've never done this before but a lot of websites claimed that it added a punch of flavor ... and I had shortening sitting around from when I made cookies or something a while back so I figured, what the heck.

I did shake up the chicken legs with some salt, pepper, thyme, and rosemary to give it a little punch of flavor.  May have used a little too much salt, but the wife enjoys her sodium so it was fine by her.  After a good shake I heated my shortening to 325 degrees in preparation for frying.  I only used somewhere between 1/8 and 1/4 inch of shortening in my trusty cast-iron pan.  I've seen some recipes calling for legitimate deep frying, actually dunking the whole think in a vat of peanut oil.  Where's the love?  If the literature is to be believed, proper fried chicken is done in shallow oil by turning the chicken every few minutes.

Timing for me worked out to about 20 minutes total.  I would turn in 5 minute increments, treating the chicken as though it had 4 sides, and then doing a quick minute or so on each side at the end just to give it a final crisp.  Unfortunately I ended up sitting by the pan the whole time carefully monitoring the temperature.  It fluctuated a lot as I turned the chicken and such and I had to keep finking with it to keep it right around 325.

Surprisingly (to me at least) it turned out great.  You'll find a picture of the finished product below (served with some wild rice) but that doesn't do it justice.  The dark meat allowed  for some pretty heavy cooking without drying out at all, and a little squeeze of lemon over the top at the end added some nice flavor.  I definitely noticed the absence of flour in the crust but it didn't really take anything away from the dish.  The skin provided enough flavor and texture to stand on it's own.