Popeye's & Chick-fil-A Hybrid Fried Chicken Sandwich - Food Wishes

hello this is chef john from food wishes dot caramel with fried chicken sandwich that's right because of all the recent hoopla I attempted to make a copycat Popeye's fried chicken sandwich and you'll be happy to know I was actually very successful in making a copycat chick-fil-a fried chicken sandwich at least appearance and texture wise the taste really was very close to Popeyes so I guess what we have here is the best of both worlds and to get started with this incredibly delicious hybrid what we'll do first is make our marinade which is going to consist of some buttermilk some salt some hot sauce and then by far the most important ingredient in this entire operation some dry ranch dressing mix and then what I'm using here is from a certain Valley that's fairly well hidden but anyway we'll go ahead mix this up and the reason for the dressing mix is not just because of the herbs and spices it's because it contains copious amounts of MSG which in case you're wondering is really the reason that people line up for fast food right besides the convenience and low prices ok it's a proven scientific fact that MSG makes everything taste better like a lot better and some might even say addictively better and then what we'll do once our marinades mixed let's go ahead and find a couple chicken breasts to toss in there now what I'm using here is some boneless skinless breasts which do not contain the Tenderloin or filet or finger as it's called ok so if you see that piece of finger shave me you should probably pull it out and use it in a salad and then one thing I like to do before we dunk these is take a sharp knife and make a few relatively shallow slashes in the thick end all right like 3 or 4 one way and 3 or 4 the other and you may have actually seen us do this trick when we prep chicken for the grill and what that's gonna do is help our marinade get into the chicken a little better plus it will also help that thicken cook a little more evenly in relationship to the thinner end and then what we'll do once those are prepped is go ahead and toss them in our marinade until they're very well coated and submerged and once that's been accomplished what we'll do is transfer this into the fridge to marinate for anywhere between two and four hours all right that is my recommendation some people say you can go overnight but for me that might be a little too long and then what we'll do well that's chilling in the fridge is go ahead and make up our breading mix which is gonna be mostly all-purpose flour to which we will add a little bit of corn starch as well as some salt along with its good friend freshly ground black pepper and of course some cayenne and not a little a lot if you want your fried chicken breast spicy which I do and then we can finish up with the rest of our dry and ranch dressing mix powder because msg and please note I added that with one spoon and then grabbed a different spoon to give this a mix for no apparent reason and then once that is combined we can move on to the final component the wash which for me is going to be nothing more than one egg plus some buttermilk and a little splash of regular milk and once that's all in there we'll give it a mix and by the way in future experiments with this recipe I'm gonna figure out a way to turn our marinade into our wash but for now we're just gonna do it separate and that's it once all our components are ready and our breasts have marinated for a sufficient amount of time we can begin the breading process and that will involve using a fork to pull our chicken out of our marinade and we will add almost all the excess drip off at which point we will coat that very thoroughly on both sides with our seasoned flour breading mix and for filming / demonstration purposes I'm just gonna do one here so I'm gonna go ahead and pop that other one back in the fridge so I can make that for Michelle later and then what we'll do after that first flour just go ahead and shake off the excess before giving it a dip in our wash and then once that surface has been saturated we will go back into the flour again coating it very thoroughly on both sides and we are actually going to do this twice which is hopefully going to give us a nice thick sort of gnarly in a regular surface which will hopefully fry up nice and crispy and crunchy and I'm not sure but for some reason I switch to my hands here which did not work as well as the fork right your fingertips are gonna sort of rub off that coating so when you do this just use the fork all the way through oh and I should mention some people claim that Popeyes uses corn flakes in this breading which they say creates that extra crunchy surface but I've eaten a lot of that stuff as in like a dangerous amount I've never really seen or tasted what I thought were cornflakes so I'm not really sure about that and of course if you have any inside info let me know but anyway getting back to this I managed to give it the OL double-dip after which I transferred it down to this rack so we can let it dry for at least 50 minutes before we fry it okay you really do want to give your coatings time to adhere before you fry things and at this point I was thinking this is looking pretty good right that surface sort of looked like what I was going for although some people say you can dip and dredge that like three or four times to get even more of a gnarly coating and maybe more similar to what you see a Popeye's but anyway I stopped it - and like I said we're gonna let this sit for at least fifteen minutes before it hits the hot oil which of course you've heated up all your waiting to a temperature of 350 to 375 and once up to temp we will carefully place that in and we're going to go ahead and fry this for about four to five minutes depending on the size of your breasts or until it's beautifully golden brown and crispy and safely cooked through and you don't have to but about halfway through I gave mine a flip because I really do love to play with my food and yes in case you're wondering you can totally pan fry this and like an inch of oil in a cast-iron skillet that will work just fine if you don't have a deep fryer so that's up to you I mean you guys are after all the olive oils of your fried chicken sandwich toils and I don't mean olive oil the oil I mean olive oil Popeye's girlfriend which is spelled o yl and if you know that you're old but anyway like I said we'll go ahead and cook this for about four or five minutes at which point we'll pull that out and transfer it onto some crinkled up foil and that's so the bottom doesn't get soggy which can happen if you drain this on a paper towel since that bottom will steam but here with the foil we have room for that to escape and speaking of crispy this sure looked right but of course we have to check and as you well know fork don't live in fact I saw someone wearing a t-shirt that said that the other day but anyway that sounded just about right on both sides and I couldn't wait to see if it tasted right so I spread some mayo on a lightly buttered and toasted hamburger bun and for the full fast-food experience do not buy some beautiful artisan bun from a bakery right go to the grocery store and look for the package that has the most ingredients because that's the one you want another than the Mayo the only other thing this is gonna get us some sliced dill pickles and then we will place our absolutely gorgeous chicken breast on the top and then lean our bun like this and take a bunch of pictures at which point we'll place our bun directly on top I'd take a bunch more pictures and then finally about 10 minutes later I went in for a bite which as you're about to hear was still very crispy and just as importantly incredibly delicious all right that meat was super juicy and flavorful and really was reminiscent of Popeye's fried chicken but while that Kodi really was beautifully crunchy it really did not have the same level of crispness the Popeye's fried chicken does and was way way more similar to a chick-fil-a sandwich which I realized is good news for some of you but bad news for others so like I said in the intro I somehow ended up with a hybrid of both versions but there was one problem that really doesn't even sound like a problem to large breasts okay the breasts I use were like 8 ounces and what you really want for this sandwich is like something between 4 & 6 all right the chicken that crispy breading ratio is off here and when you have this amount of steaming moist meat and that thin amount of codeine it's actually going to start to separate and come off as you can probably notice from these eating shots which is not like an actual serious problem like fast food addiction oh and one other thing that wasn't really a problem was this coating not staying crunchy after sitting for a while right this was like over 15 minutes later and as you can hear it still had the sound to astound but anyway that says my attempt at a crispy fried chicken sandwich while this didn't come out exactly like the ones that those aforementioned chains it was still very very good and by being able to make this at home you don't have to worry about some fast-food store running out and if you want you could eat these on Sunday so amen to that and I'll finish by saying I really do hope you give this a try soon so head over to food which is calm for all the ingredient amounts of more info as usual and as always you

Channel: Food Wishes

Views: 1,052,421

Rating: 4.9212151 out of 5

Keywords: Popeye, Fried, Chicken, Sandwich, Chick-fil-A, crispy, chef, john, food, wishes, cooking, recipe, secret, copycat

Id: WnsWgfL3j7Y

Length: 9min 18sec (558 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 29 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/RancorHi5]

Chef John is my hero

[u/funknjam]

The best part of this might be the misspelled words in the captions. How I love good, crunchy codeine on my fried chicken!

[u/MWDTech]

What??!?!?! a chef John recipe without cayenne ? or did I miss it?

Edit: Cyan to cayenne

[u/TeaBagInFirst]

Genuine question, why does he speak as if the sentence is about to end?

[u/I_am_sorrow]

Im a simple man I see Chef John I upvote

[u/experts_never_lie]

Occasionally you can see how much things have changed in your lifetime. This video did that, because chicken breasts (and chickens in general) have gotten so much bigger over the years. I mean, I knew that was true, but occasionally one is reminded of change.

[u/ZhiQiangGreen]

Saving just for his Walken-esque speech pattern.