NEVER Fry Your Chicken Like This Again (The Old Southern Trick Nobody Taught You)

In 1946 a grocery chain that had just been convicted of criminal restraint of trade started a national contest to build a better chicken. They ran it with the Department of Agriculture, they called it the Chicken of Tomorrow, and almost every broiler bird on this planet is descended from what won it. Here is what that did to your supper. In 1950 a chicken took 70 days to reach 3 pounds. Today it takes 47 and a half days to reach six and a half. More than twice the weight, in two-thirds of the time. The timing in your head was written for a bird that no longer exists, and nobody sent out the notice. So if your fried chicken comes out dark on the outside and pink at the bone, or cooked through and dry as a cracker, it isn't your fault. And I can prove it. There are six pieces to a Southern fried chicken — the bird, the salt, the dredge, the fat, the skillet and the heat — and then there is a seventh that costs nothing, takes fifteen minutes, and is the entire reason your breading falls off in the pan. Three things everybody repeats about this dish don't survive a look at the record, and I name all three. Buttermilk does not tenderize chicken, and I'll show you what it actually does. Fried chicken did not come to the South with Scottish settlers, and I'll show you the 1983 book where that claim was invented without a source. And the Colonel's 11 herbs and spices were finished in July of 1940, which makes them younger than sliced bread. What is on the record is Gordonsville, Virginia, where Black women met the trains with fried chicken and biscuits and sold them up through the carriage windows, and where one of them told an interviewer in 1970 that her mother paid for her house with chicken legs. This is Southern fried chicken the way it was actually done — pan fried in a cast iron skillet in lard and butter, not deep fried, with the fat halfway up the pieces. It's how to fry chicken when the bird in your hand is twice the size of the one the recipe was written for. I'm Ray, and nothing gets called Southern on this channel until it's on paper. 👇 Whose kitchen did your fried chicken come from, what county was it in, and what did they call the pan? And settle it for me: skillet, or deep fryer? 🔔 Subscribe, and put some South in your mouth.