Hi! I’m Tom Papoutsis. Today we’re doing chicken basics. Right now we’re going to fry a chicken. We’re going to make a regular standard fried chicken, okay? It’s very simple, very easy.

Earlier today, we took our whole chicken. We cut it up into pieces. We showed you how to do that. We took those pieces. We actually put them in buttermilk and we’ve let that chicken sit in the buttermilk for a couple of hours now.

What we’re going to do is we’re going to mix our flour mixture here which is we’re going to dredge our chicken through. As it is, it’s regular all purpose flour. We’re going to take some ground black pepper and some Kosher salt, mix that together. Take the chicken out of here, dredge it, put it in the oil. And we’re going to fry it for about 10 to 12 minutes. So, let’s get started with that.

Essentially, I’ve got I cup of flour in here. I’m going to measure out in my hand here, probably about a good tablespoon of salt, put that in. We’re going to do probably about a couple of teaspoons of black pepper and we’re about two teaspoons. We’re going to put that in. I’m going to take a fork and I’m going to mix that around. And see how I just kind of mix it around, and you’re going to get that pepper incorporated with the flour and the salts in there. Mix it around real good. That’s our coating. And this is going to be very simple, very easy, very quick.

Now, as far as soaking your chicken in the buttermilk, the buttermilk actually has high acidity content which helps softens out our chicken, make it nice and tender. And it’s also going to act in the replacement of egg which is typically used for breading. It’s going to, do you see how it kind of gets thick, it’s sticking and gooey and man that’s good stuff right there. So we’re going to take this out, dredge it through here, just turn it a couple of times and get it coated all the way around. If you have to pack it on there, that’s good stuff right there.

Now, we’re going to take this very carefully. Now our hot oil, we’ve got to about 300 degrees. What you got to remember is don’t go over 2/3 on your pan or when you drop this in, it’s going to boil over. So we’re going to drop this in very carefully, there it goes. The same holds true for this.

Now you could see how that’s bubbling up. If I have been fuller with that oil, it would go over. We don’t want that. So essentially what we’re going to do is come up 2/3 on the side of the pan, that’s all the full you want to be. At this point, I would probably not add anymore chicken. I would let these two pieces cook and we would move on to the next.

So, right now, we’re going to let these cook for couple of minutes, keep an eye on them, and then in about 10 minutes we’ll be back and these will be done.

It’s been about 10 minutes. Our chicken is nice and very golden brown. You see it finished off really nice, we’ll set it here. Look at that nice looking chicken. Now you want your chicken to end up being about 180 degrees. It’s what you want the inside temperature of that chicken to be. But that’s basic fried chicken, right there and that should do it. Chicken basics, everything that we’ve told you here today, give it a try. It’s very simple, very easy, and enjoy.