- I wanna be that Colonel
that was famous for the old, because now, today, we have
reinvented fried chicken, and have you noticed how popular it is? I have cooked millions and millions of pieces of chicken over my lifetime. We just pulled in a delivery of chicken, and we wanna right away
get this chicken marinated. That's one of our secrets, marinating. This is a one and a half
size cup of marinade. I learned practically
everything you need to know about a chicken from
the farm to the table. We have a farm that is
absolute highest standards for producing chicken in the country. My middleman and I have
been doing business for over 25 years. He knows what I need as a chef. So it starts with this raw product that comes here fresh
every day, six days a week. So that's the process for
seasoning the chicken. Now we're gonna take it to the cooler. - The new goes to the top. The stuff from the day
before it goes to the bottom. And then we kind of
cycle it in the middle, is what's used in the day. Make sure that it's marinated
for at least 24 hours or so. You can only imagine how many biscuits and how much chicken we go through if we get these once a week. And the brown mix is for chicken. The white is for the biscuits. So we load them here. We count it, make sure we have enough, and then we bring it in and
we load it for the restaurant. So right now I'm gonna get the batter and I'm gonna walk you
guys through how we get that process going. Yes, we used to do this back
in the restaurant in Compton, and that was actually one of
my first jobs in high school. I would have to drive all
the way out to the restaurant that my dad had in Compton
and make this by hand. - Trenton is my middle son and he works real closely with me on everything Honey's Kettle. He's an amazing chef, a truly amazing. - So here's the mix and
it has all, you know, the ingredients, the flour of course, different spices and seasonings and different types of salts. So we start with filtered
water, fresh filtered water. That gives us the best
flavor, the best crisp. My dad has been doing these recipes and creating his recipes for years. So every so often he changes
up the amount of water we use 'cause he wants it to be
a perfect consistency. - We're probably going through
something like 100 pounds a day of batter mix. That would be two of
those bags you just saw. - We pour that in. So we ready. And it's like the perfect consistency after the three minutes and
the amount of mix we did. I like to call it like a
melted ice cream milkshake type of consistency. - So what we do is we come
to the raw chicken here. This is the marinated chicken and we put it to one side like that. And the purpose for that
is when we go to dip the chicken in it, we don't
want the batter to fall off really slow because then
it's gonna be caked on batter. And we don't want it falling off so fast that it has no bubbles to it. We dip it in our batter, and you see that nice
creaminess and how it shakes, and we shake off the excess
and then we drop it in there. And you see that batter,
see how it's dripping off? You're already an expert, as you say, it's not running off like water. It does have a certain
thickness that's holding. Our chicken is made through a process. We call it the reinvention
of kettle fried chicken. A kettle is a deep vat of oil. We're talking like 50 pounds of oil. We use 100% peanut oil. It's the highest grade of oil you can use. When we drop our wet chicken,
it goes to the bottom. So what it's doing is locking a crust of crispy crackling crust. And that crust is gonna lock in all the natural flavor of the
chicken, the marinade, and it's going to cause the
chicken to basically pulverize inside of it because of the heat. Where does the heat come from? The heat comes from the bottom. So this is a modern kettle, right? So that heat is gonna be more intense at the bottom than at the top. This is an invention of mine. It looks like, you know, a sword. But we call it a kettle fork. We can't put our hands in there, but we can reach down here
in the bottom of the kettle. And you'll notice when
I get to the bottom, the chicken has lodged itself
onto this heavy duty grate. I had these purposely made. It's a heavy duty process
of cooking the chicken, so you need heavy equipment. So then now, I take the fork and I dislodge all the chickens and any batter crumbs from the bottom. So we're gonna take that and boom! And there it goes down to the front and that's ready for the production line. My mother, who is from New Orleans, my father who's from Shreveport, are two of the best cooks that ever was. And I used to just kind
of be in the kitchen around my mother, just
sort of watching her. But it's based on all my experiences. We've been around here for 20, 22 years. I think we had something
to do with the popularity of fried chicken because
now people realize you can get healthy fried chicken, fried chicken that leaves
the oil where it belongs and gives you only the final product. And then we're gonna break it apart and get it ready for when the bell rings. - Ready to make the mama biscuit. - Biscuits are as American as it gets. The recipe for the biscuits, it came from research and
development in Compton. 1985, she joined me in the pursuit of running a business in Compton. We call her mama's biscuits. - Even at home, they call me mama biscuit. They're famous in here.
People love this biscuit. - This recipe took years
and years of development. - I have people at work
that already know how to make biscuit. As long as I'm in the store, I don't want nobody
else making the biscuits while I'm in the store. - She cuts at a angle and
then lifts the biscuit at the same time, and it dislodges the biscuit
from the rest of the dough. And then they're touching
and kissing each other, very important in baking
a biscuit that you do that so they rise together. The center of that, we
put what we call biscuits with the dimple. It's where people put their
butter and their honey or syrup. And they put it right there in the center. - Fluffy.
- Beautiful. I didn't invent fried chicken. The thing I did was perfected it. We say to people that,
what kind of food are we? We're American food. When I did my research on Honey's Kettle, I went to the central library and researched early
American colonial cooking. Kettles in the family fireplace, and guess who was in the kitchen? They all were the color of my skin. They were the cooks. Our people are very
good at flavoring food. I can tell when I eat something, when it's been cooked right. That could be in my DNA. It was my passion to deliver
a product that would last. Chicken is now the number
one meat consumed in America. We are seeing this resurgence as chicken is because some people
really know how to do it, and we're one of those people. That's my thing. Honey's Kettle fried chicken,
a new old fashioned company.
