Hi, I'm Betty. Welcome to Betty’s Kitchen. We're going to do Betty’s Southern Fried Chicken.
What I have here is some chicken that I bought at the supermarket. And it's two pounds worth of chicken breast. When it comes on a container wrapped like this, you never know exactly what kind of part is you're going to get. I opened it just a few minutes ago, and by the way, you do want it at room temperature. So I've had it sitting out at the refrigerator for awhile that I see I have one whole breast there, and one whole breast there. I kind of expected that would be four half breasts.
So what I'm going to have to do, since this is more than one serving for either me or my husband. I'm going to cut these into two pieces each and while I'm doing that. I'm going to remove any excess fat like this, fried chicken is fried enough and we don't need to be adding all this fat ends. So I'll get all the extra skin, fat grizzle and anything like that off. And put it all in the plate and then I'll have four pieces that are roughly the same size. So, see you back in just a few minutes.
I’ve got my chicken all cleaned and you can see that it produced this much fat and muscle and grizzle, stuff that I do not want to use on my chicken dish. So I have four pieces here now that are roughly the same size. And what I want to do is to use some meat tenderizer on them. It's is—just roughly call it but actually it substitutes for salt, so you don't need anything salt in addition to this and this is the salting of it. But at sometime, it tenderizes it, it has no MSG and has no additives that are harmful as far as I know, but I use it all the time and I think it really is helpful in terms of getting the meat nice and tender and tasty.
So just have a nice sprinkling of that and turn it like I did in order to hit both sides. I'm going to stay with that. So, now let me put it over to a plastic bag here at that has about one cup of flour. And it doesn't matter what kind of flour. This is what I used, some self-rising flour. I haven’t open it for now but it’s just identical to that. About one cup, just enough so you’ll have something to dredge these pieces of chicken.
So I'm going to cook one at a time. You can do more than one with your bog brush, sometimes I’ll put the whole bunch but over here I have a skillet which I'm readying for frying and I'm dropping a little bit of flour into it to see if it is ready, it's not quite there yet. We’re going to turn it up a bit. I didn't want to have it too high with my back to it because if it were to start smoking, then I will have to empty it out and start again. I would not fry something in grease that is smoked. I think there are harmful effects from that and also would affect the brownness of the meat. It would look kind of black and not being very appetizing.
So we’ll see again if this is ready. If it is bubbling very quickly when you put that flour in, then you know it’s ready and it doesn't really destroy this if I put it in a little too early. I think it’s about time since I had three more pieces to go. It just sizzle nicely like that. So I'm going back for the second piece and it's just a matter of shaking it gently in this bag in order to coat it all over, so very simple of coating. Now, I think I’ll need to turn that down because you see some of the flour, it’s browning around the edge there. Get the second piece in there. And then I have two more so in a very short amount of time, we will have our four pieces of our entrée which is done in fried chicken. And the last one, and just enough room left, so if you have a skillet about this size, that is an iron skillet, you could say—that’s about what you want to put in there.
Then I would like to point out to you that I'm going to be doing this in the oven. It’s going to be sort of oven-fried chicken. It will not be anywhere nearly stringy as the typical Kentucky Fried Chicken that you hear about. I am from Kentucky and any cooked at Kentucky have their own version of Fried Chicken so this is my version. And I tried to keep it as light as possible. I'm turning this as they began to turn brown. They certainly are not done because this is a very thick piece, each one of these. But you may turn them and make it brown.
And in fact, I intend to give it a little shake of like pepper. I'm not going to—the grinding of the coarse black pepper, just a little paste here of black pepper. It makes it nice in mouth and spicy. So I'm going to turn this one. If you see about the level that its cooking, you don’t want it just sizzling away and smoke coming up and being too much. But you’ve got to get keep that pretty kind of brown, as soon as all four pieces are brown, I turn this stove. I take this and I'm kind of very protective with this because it's a hot skillet. I come over to a pre-heated oven which is at 400-degree I’ve placed it inside. And you want to make sure that you have an oven-proof frying pan. If you have some kind of frying pan that has a plastic handle, don't put it in the oven.
It's been 25 minutes since I put the chicken in the oven. And you can see it all sizzling and brown and it's done. So I'm going to take it out and bring it over to the cooked pot, get the stove turned off. Be very careful with hot skillet like this. And by the way, now it’s browning, I had used about three tablespoons of peanut oil. Do you remember what this flour test to see that we had enough. Once you get this, you want to immediately move those chicken breast from the skillet and put them on paper toweling to drain so that any excess grease which might have absorbed will drain on that paper towel and we’ll place those on the platter in just a minute.
Now, we move the chicken from the paper toweling to a nice serving platter so we can serve four people. Let me just take one of these pieces on my plate and normally I would have knife for each person. And I just cut down into it see what we have. This should be the bite that I would eat, I want to show you, nice white meat, fully cooked and I’ll take half of that as a little bite to test it. Still pretty hot, it’s a really good chicken. I think you’ll enjoy it. I want to cut up here for you to see all the way through the level of doneness that you get with this recipe. It’s excellent chicken, why don't you try it?
Comments