How to Make KFC’s Vegan Fried Chicken at Home (Copycat Recipe)

hey everyone how's it going I'm Chris and I am 1/2 a sweet simple vegan Jasmine's behind the camera today and I'm gonna be showing you guys how to make some vegan fried chicken with this block of tofu so before you click away I promise you should stay for this because it's gonna be awesome I know tofu sometimes gets a bad reputation but let me just clear things up now this isn't gonna be mushy this is gonna be tasteless this is gonna be crispy full of flavor and honestly it's gonna size up right next to a real fried chicken and one other thing before we get started I did want to clarify because we get the question all the time a lot of people ask us why we want to recreate different meat meaty things if we're vegan the answer is quite simple we didn't go vegan because we don't like the taste of animal products I enjoyed eating meat and everything under the Sun for probably 23 years of my life just about so if I can recreate the same flavors textures and tastes that I've always enjoyed without having to harm an animal why wouldn't I so help people transition and to make things a whole lot easier we'd like to turn plants into things that people are familiar with like meat and cheese and whatever else so I'm gonna stop ranting and we're gonna start cooking we are taking this medium firm block of tofu today and we're turning them to fried chicken as I mentioned earlier this process is a little bit involved but with the right planning it is gonna be just perfect so we're using medium firm tofu because it is the perfect consistency it's not too firm but it's also not too soft and when prepared properly it has the perfect chickeny consistency so essentially what we're gonna be doing is freezing this twice so we're gonna freeze it once we're just gonna pop the whole package into the freezer once it's fully frozen we'll let it defrost and then we're popping it back into the freezer and then once it's fully frozen again we're gonna let it defrost one more time so the process of freezing and defrosting and freezing and defrosting really helps give the tofu a really chickeny and I don't know it's really I don't know that full science behind it but the texture that happens after you follow this process is pretty spot-on - fried chicken or - chicken in general so we actually got the method from Mary's Test Kitchen she has an awesome YouTube channel if you wanted to check it out we'll link it down below that's how I learned this process and was inspired to create my own fried chicken recipe so once our tofu is fully defrosted for the second time we're gonna be draining all the liquid out so basically we'll just cut open the package well empty the liquid and then using two cutting boards we're just gonna press all the liquid out of the tofu this is a little bit of an involved process and the tofu gets really delicate at this point so you want to be extra careful but basically we're just gonna slowly draw out all of the liquid and then once we think it's pretty dry we'll just take a clean towel and we'll damp it dry even more and then once the tofu is fully pressed and all the liquid it has been drawn out we're gonna carefully piece apart the tofu so basically we're just gonna it's gonna be like a natural kind of feeling as you like pick apart the tofu and it'll fall into like some chunks that are about this size they will be a little bit delicate but they'll kind of naturally fall you'll see once you do it but it's kind of hard to explain you could see in the video also but now we're gonna be marinating the tofu so basically what we're gonna do is carefully put these pieces into a deep dish and they can stack on top of each other if need be but you just want to be as careful as possible because they are pretty fragile and there's gonna be some little pieces too so we're just gonna add those in also and we'll be able to salvage what we can if it's large enough yeah exactly and basically what we have here is some vegan chicken broth so we're using the no chicken bouillon cubes we have two cups of water and basically we just heated that up and we mixed in the blue young cubes we're just gonna pour this over so it absorbs the flavor we just give it a quick little press down so it gets nice and full of flavor and then we're just gonna set this aside really quick and while that's marinating we're gonna be making a buttermilk for our batter so this is a very simple process basically we have some unsweetened oat milk but you can use unsweetened almond milk any unsweetened plant milk that you have available should work perfectly and we're just gonna take some apple cider vinegar and we're gonna add that to our oat milk and then we're just gonna give this a quick mix through and we're gonna let that curdle up it should take maybe about five minutes and we'll set that aside with the chicken with the tofu Brown so the next thing we're gonna be doing is making our seasoned flour blend so basically just using some all-purpose flour and then we have a seasoning mixture here I did some research and I tried to find like the KFC spice blend and I kind of ripped off that it's not exactly the same but I think it's like top secret or something but I did find something that's similar and I've tested this maybe four or five times now and I've had to tweak things each time but I think it's finally perfect essentially what we have here is some Italian seasoning we have some paprika some white pepper some garlic salt some celery salt some mustard and some ginger so it's mustard powder if you've ever had that you can just buy it at any conventional grocery store oh and then we also have some black pepper so basically we're just gonna add all of this into our flour and then I have his mini whisk and we're just gonna carefully mix everything together this bowl is a little bit smaller than ideal but we're gonna make it work so after our flour and spices are all mixed through we're just gonna transfer this into a plate I just figure it's easier to mix the seasonings together in a bowl but it's easier to coat the tofu pieces in a plate so transfer that over real quick so what we're gonna be doing now is battering our tofu before we fry it so this is a 3-step system they're actually gonna be double battering so you might be more steps but basically we have the buttermilk we made our seasoned flour blend that we put together and the tofu that we marinated so we're gonna be taking our tofu we're gonna be dipping it in our buttermilk and then we're gonna plop it into our flour and I'm gonna use Forks here because it's gonna stick to my hands otherwise and we're just gonna slowly coat the tofu in flour and then we're gonna carefully transfer the to a food over to our plate and then we're just going to continue this process dissolve the tofu is fully coated [Music] so who has been coded once we are going to double code it but first we have our flour mixture and now we're just going to add some corn flakes to it I'm using some organic nature Valley corn flakes not actual corn flakes you can use corn flakes but I've heard they're not vegan because the d3 in them but I don't really know I think it's really hard to verify for for what it is but they are there's plenty of organic and not Kellogg's versions of corn flakes so you can choose to use whatever you'd like but basically we're just going to be crumbling our corn flakes not like fully but just a bit personally crumbling them so this will give the fried chicken and / fried tofu a good texture like you know with fried chicken has like that yeah I don't know how to explain it but has like that yeah the plate this helps kind of like emulate that and now we're just gonna mix this through the with the flour so you want to do your best to break it up as much as possible one thing I forgot to mention earlier is that you can also use just egg for this recipe we opted to do the buttermilk variety to do the first coating but just egg works fine I've tested it before we've just we just thought it would be a little more accessible to use just a plant-based milk and apple cider vinegar as opposed to a premade product like that that's not available everywhere and can be a little bit expensive but if you have that it'll work just as well in place of the buttermilk so once the corn flakes are coated with the flour we're gonna be shifting our tofu back to the other rearranging a bit I'm gonna get another plate for the final product now we're going to be double battering our tofu so we're just going to be taking all the pieces that we've just coated we're gonna dump them back into our buttermilk and then after the buttermilk we're just gonna toss our tofu into the flour in cornflakes and then we're just gonna set it down again we'll repeat this whole process until all the tofu is fully coated and then we'll fry [Music] thing is battered and ready to fry we have our oil heated up here sorry it's a little bit loud this induction pan or cooktop is loud [Music] I wasn't planning on being in the video so I'm in my pajamas sweater but it's okay we got to do a taste test I'm so excited mmm Wow how did you the skin Wow the skin is crazy it's like chicken perfect it's like perfectly moist on the inside and then perfectly crunchy on the outside Wow unbelievable Wow look at them all lipstick photos we will have instructions to bake and airfryer also have two frags on your things totally get it of course deep-frying is the preferred method but whatever you'd like we have all the options on the blog post should be linked down below so that is all for today we are going to eat some being fried chicken and show for the rest of the night but I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please give it a thumbs up comment down below let us know if there's any other ingredients to turn into sorry about the recipes yeah share your thoughts down below these dudes are going nuts over here because [Music]

Channel: Sweet Simple Vegan

Views: 182,051

Rating: 4.9484696 out of 5

Keywords: Veganism (Diet), vegan, food, vegan food, easy, simple, Cooking, Kitchen, vegan meals, lunch, dinner, what i eat in a day, vegan couple, jasmine briones, chris petrellese, sweet simple vegan, sweetsimplevegan, recipes, KFC, copycat, vegan fried chicken, tofu chicken, vegan chicken, vegan meat, mock meat, vegetarian, KFC recipe

Id: aDkjty2JYaI

Length: 12min 41sec (761 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/YoungAdult_]

Man I’m definitely trying this tomorrow, all I’m missing is the cornflakes

[u/YoungAdult_]

Okay I tried these and I didn’t get the tofu drained as much as I liked. Maybe it didn’t defrost thoroughly cause some pieces were still kinda cold on the inside which was strange.

When I make tofu wings I usually press, then freeze, then thaw and press again before cooking. I followed the videos instructions this time.

Other than my messing up the tofu freezing and thawing, my only other issue is the coating wasn’t as flavorful as I expected. It looked amazing and had a great crunch, but I wanted it spicy. Years ago when I made fried chicken I had the same problem, skin was crunchy but didn’t have a lot of flavor.

So I’d recommend making the coating more spicier (any recommendations?) and I’m thinking of skipping the marinading step. I don’t do that when I make tofu wings so I think I can skip it.

Also air fryer works great! Way less oily.

Overall pretty easy to follow recipe that I’m going to tweak for personal tastes. SSV also has a recipe for meatless meatballs that used eggplant and chickpeas which is great because I’m growing so many in my back yard!