A Southern Delight

Some Southern cooks think that what I'm about to do is sacrilege... but I don't care. I'm going to share my fried chicken recipe with you and we'll also go over how to make buttermilk biscuits!

First, let's start with the biscuits because the fried chicken is going to demand all of your attention once you start:

Step 1: Ingredients

4 cups of all purpose flour
4 teaspoons of baking powder
1 teaspoon of baking soda
1 teaspoon of salt
1.5 cups of buttermilk
Between 2/5ths and 1/2 stick of butter

Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees.

Step 2: Mix the dry stuff together

With a fork, mix together all of the dry ingredients. Also, I'm holding the butter to show you about how much you want to use. Once you have the dry ingredients mixed together:

Step 3: Pinch little dabs of butter

This picture came out a little oddly, the camera didn't like the contrast of the butter against the flour but I hope you can pick out the little dabs of butter in the flour there.

Step 4: Butter a piece of foil

Before your hands get too gooey, tear off a piece of foil and butter it. Yes, you can use non-stick spray but... why would you?

Step 5: Add the buttermilk and knead the dough

Add all of the buttermilk at once, then reach in there and knead the dough until it makes a ball like this:

Step 6: Make biscuits!

Tear off chunks of the doughball and roll them around in your hand, then clap your hands together until you have biscuit shaped pieces and place them on the buttered foil. As you can see, this recipe makes 12 biscuits. You can half the recipe if you only want to make 6.

Slide them in the oven for between 13 and 15 minutes, depending on your oven. Now, on to the chicken!

Step 1: The Soak

Chop your chicken in to nugget sized pieces and soak them in buttermilk for at least 20 minutes. The longer you let them soak, the better the end result will be, so for the best results, let it soak overnight.

Step 2: The Breading Mix
Fill a bowl with about this much flour:

Coat the top of the flour with salt, coat the salt with garlic powder, coat the garlic powder with onion powder:

Now, the secret ingredient in my fried chicken is red curry powder. I like to use the Chiang Mai Red Curry blend from World Market. Coat the top of the flour with the mix, then stir it around with a fork until it's all evenly mixed together.

At this point, you want to put a frying pan on the stove and give it a quarter inch of olive oil, then turn the heat on Medium-High so it can get nice and hot while you're doing the next step.

Step 3: Mix it together

Pour about half of the buttermilk out of your soaking chicken, then add the entirety of everything else in to the flour mix. Reach in and start mixing everything together until every piece of your chicken is coated in the flour mix.

Step 4: Fry the Chicken

Add your chicken pieces to the frying pan and let them fry until you see them get a bit "leaky", like this:

To give you a closeup of what I mean:

Notice the little white liquidy bits around the edge there? That's when you know it's time to flip your chicken:

Let it cook on the flip side for about 45 - 60 seconds, then:

Step 5: Let it Rest

Move the cooked chicken to a draining rack or wire rack over foil while you put in successive batches of chicken until you have a big pile of chicken nuggets, like so:

and here we have it, folks, a real Southern delicacy. Fried chicken with mashed potatoes, green beans and buttermilk biscuits: