Nashville Hot Chicken - How to Make Crispy Nashville-Style Fried Chicken

hello this is chef john from food wishes calm with Nashville hot chicken that's right when I first heard about this stuff I thought it was some kind of Internet hoax I was supposed to believe that they take crispy southern fried chicken and then before serving it they drench it with cayenne infused lard I mean that sounds totally made-up and possibly illegal well as it turns out it's not made up and completely legal and one of the most amazing fried chicken dishes you will ever taste so I am very excited to show you my version and that's gonna begin with what's basically a marinade so we're gonna go ahead and add some buttermilk to a mixing bowl and by the way for the record in the original recipe this is just regular whole milk but I do prefer the buttermilk and then as you may have noticed from the intro picture this is always served with pickles which of course come in a brine and I'm gonna add some of that Bryan right into this mixture followed by a very generous amount of hot sauce and that one people like to use that wings is very popular for this but I don't like that brand Shh don't tell them they might be a sponsor so I'm gonna toss in a less-popular but what I think is a more delicious Louisiana Hot Sauce and then last but not least we will crack in one large egg and then we'll take the whisk and mix that thoroughly and as soon as all that's been completely combined our marinade is done and ready for our chicken which as you can see here has been cut into the traditional eight pieces of course we have your two legs your two thighs a couple breasts and a pair wings and I know I've showed you guys how to cut up a chicken before so I'll try to remember to add a link to the blog post but anyway we're gonna need one cut-up chicken which ideally you've tossed with some salt the night before and left it in the fridge but I'm gonna be honest I didn't do that since this was kind of a last-minute decision to film and as you'll see this is still gonna work out beautifully but if you can plan it out seasoning the night before is better and that is another issue I will explain in detail on the blog but either way what we'll do is go ahead and pour that marinade over our chicken and then take our tongs and make sure all that's mixed around very well okay chicken pieces are famous for their nooks and crannies so I'm editing this but take a minute or two and make sure all those pieces are thoroughly thoroughly coated then once that's been accomplished what we'll do is wrap this and transfer this into the fridge for two to four hours now can you do it last time yes can you do it more time sure but I only guarantee these same results if you do it two to four hours so we will pop that in the fridge and while we're waiting we can go ahead and do our seasoned flour which is super easy because all we're gonna do is take some all-purpose flour and add in some fine salt sure if you want you can use kosher but I much prefer the taste of the fine yes that was a joke at least to some people but anyway we're gonna add some salt to the flour and we'll give that a stir in case you're wondering why we're not adding a bunch of other spices into this that's because we're gonna be finishing this by brushing on that highly seasoned spicy sauce so we're just going flour salt here and then once that's prepped and assuming our chicken is marinated long enough we can go ahead and pull that out and start the dredging double dredging to be more exact so how I like to do this is to pull that chicken out of the marinade and sort of wipe off any excess and let it drip back into the bowl before placing that on some paper towels because what I want to do here sort of blot off that excess liquid and I'm doing that for two reasons since this is going to be double dredged meaning it's gonna go in the flour twice I like to do that first application of flour without the chicken being too wet so we'll pull that chicken out of the marinade and sort of blot it off a little bit with the paper towels and then the other reason because we didn't do the overnight seasoning with the salt I'm gonna give these pieces a little extra seasoning with salt right here and at that point we can start the double dredging process so we will take our chicken pieces along with our reserved marinade oh don't throw that away we're gonna need that and we can start this double dredging as shown so we'll take a piece of chicken and toss it in our flour and we'll roll that around until it's completely coated and there are no wet spots to be seen and we'll go ahead and shake off the excess and pop that right back into our marinade and we'll kind of toss that around until it's coated and then let most of the excess drip off before we're turning it back to the flour for the second dredging and once that's been thoroughly and thoughtfully coated a second time we will transfer that to Iraq and that's it okay so to summarize first we make it wet then we make it dry then we make it wet then we make it dry and that really is the key to Nashville hot chicken perfection and speaking of keys we want to make sure we using the old wet hand dry hand method okay you see how I'm using my left hand just for the flour in my right hand just for the milk mixture that is definitely the recommended technique otherwise it's just super messy to work with I mean as it is it's already super messy but we don't want to make that worse by having our fingers all gunked up so using that old wet hand dry hand will continue on until all our chicken has been double dredged and then what we're gonna do next which is a very underrated step is we're just gonna let this sit out on the countertop for 15 minutes to sort of dry out a little bit all right that's gonna give this time for that coating to kind of set up and I really think you do get better results and it really does help if you use a rack like I'm using here so we get some air circulation underneath but if you don't have a rack for whatever reason you could just crinkle up some foil that works too and then what we want to do during that 15 minutes is go ahead and make our sauce so into this pan I'm gonna toss some butter and some lard I don't believe I've ever said that before and then to that we're gonna add a little touch of cayenne actually we're gonna add a whole spoon you know what make it 2 spoons and by the way if you think that's an insane amount of cayenne the actual original recipe is about three or four times that much so I'm going to do this only with two tablespoons of cayenne and then we'll also do a little bit of garlic powder as well as some sweet paprika and then speaking of sweet we want to do a little bit of brown sugar and a touch of salt as well as some freshly ground black pepper and once we have all that together what we'll do is place this over a medium-high heat and all we need to do is cook this for a couple minutes stirring until those fats melt and everything gets heated through and sure this might look a little scary but don't be afraid the food gods hate it coward so have faith and if everything goes according to plan it should look something like this and once that set we'll turn off the heat and just keep that on the back of the stove warm until we need it and assuming that our chicken has now sat out for 15 minutes we can go ahead and start frying and today we're gonna be doing that in a cast-iron skillet which will fill about 1/3 of the way up with vegetable oil and heat to 350 and once our oil is reach temperature we will carefully place in our chicken skin side down at least for the breasts and thighs legs and wings don't matter and of course once we add that in the temperature of the oil is gonna drop but then it's gonna come back up and what we're gonna try to do is maintain a temperature of 325 which could mean you're just gonna stay on medium high heat but maybe not so that's gonna be you cooking just in that temperature tweaking it a little bit up a little bit and as far as the cooking time goes here it's gonna be about eight to ten minutes per side but I guarantee nothing and you really should check with a thermometer and go to at least 160 internal temp and if you want feel free to turn this just once but that's not how I do it what I like to do is let the first side go for about six or seven minutes then I will go ahead and turn those over and I'll give that second side about six or seven minutes and then I'll turn it back over for another minute or two and then if it needs more time I might even turn it again and what I think happens with these additional turns is because some of that codeine is above the surface it cools down a little when we turn that back over we get kind of a twice-fried effect which is going to result in an unbelievably crispy crunchy chicken so that's how I do it and I have great results with that and if you're afraid it's gonna absorb more oil that way don't be it really doesn't and even so did I mention we're gonna brush this with lard so I'm not sure that's really gonna be a problem and of course if you fried chicken before you know all the pieces aren't gonna finish the same time so I pulled my wings out first because they finish first and then I continued on until everything was cooked perfectly and again to be safe you'll want to check with the thermometer we're shooting for at least an internal temp of 160 so once we've determined our chicken is cooked long enough we will remove that to a rack to drain and by the way in case you were wondering Noah was not trying to be artistic with this shot where you blur the foreground and then focus on the background that's really more so me not knowing what I'm doing so at this point let me go ahead and distract you by grabbing a fork and letting you hear just how crispy this stuff comes out but as good as that sounds it tastes even better so let's go ahead and play it up and there's really only one acceptable way to do this and that's on top of sliced white bread okay the cheaper the better okay we want something that contains no fiber and even less nutrients so we'll place that on our hot fried chicken on what technically qualifies as bread and then we will finish this up by generously brushing over our spicy sauce preferably to both sides and by the way down in Nashville they literally dunk the pieces of chicken in like vats of this stuff so I'm sure there's a few people down from those parts they were laughing at me with my dainty brush so if you'd rather toss these pieces with the sauce or dip a man that's up to you you are the t-bone Pickens of how to Sasha our Nashville hot chicken but anyway we're gonna generously apply our spiced butter lard mixture and then we're here if I was a famous food photographer I could have left those drips but I'm not so I cleaned them up and then for a final touch we'll finish this off with some slices of bread and butter pickles we definitely want something on the sweet side here so we can balance the heat from the cayenne and that is it our Nashville hot chicken is done and looking absolutely stunning so let me go ahead and grab this napkin in silverware and now use them and I'll go ahead and grab a leg and bite into it is probably the best fried chicken ever just insanely crispy that meat is moist and flavorful thanks to that spicy buttermilk marinade and then permeating everything we have that kind and spice infused butter and lard that is just an absolutely incredible bite of food and because I was in a hurry and only brush sauce on one side of the chicken I'm gonna stop and brush out a little more and I believe in the business this is called burl aardeen but anyway that's it might take on Nashville hot chicken normally I would have film me eating the rest of that piece and probably one or two more pieces but this video is already way too long so I'm gonna stop right here and finish off by saying I really really really hope you give this a try soon so head over to food wishes calm for all the ingredient amounts and wonderful as usual and as always enjoy

Channel: Food Wishes

Views: 3,741,316

Rating: 4.9009342 out of 5

Keywords: Nashville, Hot Chicken, Chicken, Hot, spicy, Fried, chef, john, foodwishes, southern, crispy, crunchy, fry

Id: 5UKssrLusBo

Length: 10min 29sec (629 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 15 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/ohlongjohnsonn]

I think this was the first time he actually used less than the recommended amount of cayenne.