STOP Frying Your Chicken Thighs — This Old TEXAS FARM Trick Keeps the Skin Crisp

Everything I know in one place. The Cookshack Book: https://earlhargrove.shop/ Turn over the package of chicken thighs in your refrigerator and read the small print. Up to so many percent retained water. Most chicken in this country gets cooled in a tank of ice water at the plant, and a good share of that water ends up in the skin. Then you put it in hot oil and wonder why it steams instead of browning. My daddy Roy fed fourteen men chicken thighs three days running in the spring of 1961, two skillets and not one drop of oil. You could hear that skin across the table. I was standing right there. I'm Earl Hargrove. Eighty-four, cattle and a little field in Gonzales County, Texas. Forty years cooking for fifteen men at a time, out of one skillet. In this one: why WET SKIN can't brown, and what that retained water label is telling you. Why you PRESS, never rub, and never rinse. SALT EARLY, and why salting right before the pan makes it worse. The COLD SKILLET with no oil, where the thigh fries in its own fat. The WEIGHT on top, so the skin crisps edge to edge instead of black in one spot and flabby in the next. MEDIUM heat and no lid, ever. The THERMOMETER, and why a thigh wants 175 to 185, not 165. And the eighth piece, Roy's: THE NIGHT. It is what makes the other seven work. You can't fry the water out of a chicken. You let the night do that. Safety, said plainly in the video: don't wash raw chicken. Never serve it under 165°F. Keep it on the bottom shelf, away from anything you eat raw. Did your daddy fry his chicken in oil or start it in a cold pan? Tell me his name and what county he cooked in. I read every one.