Recreating Carla Hall's Chicken Fried Steak From Taste | Reverse Engineering | Bon Appétit

hi it's rhoda and i'm here in the ba test kitchen to have a secret conversation about chris morocco once again we're putting chris's super taster abilities to the test this is carla hall's chicken fried steak with sausage cream gravy i'm challenging chris to recreate this dish using every ingredient in just one day he'll be able to taste it touch it smell it but at no point will he be able to see this dish at the end of the day we'll be back to see his final creation and i'll be the judge [Music] it's like a piece of bread with like pickle and like a little bit of onion and then there's like a crispy bit under there it's like is this a sandwich tastes like raw onion raw white onion like this doesn't this is this is not like wonder bread right it just smells like yeast bread it feels like it was probably toasted getting a little bit of like a dried out sort of texture against the side of the bread oh geez took it close off here very crisp breaded coating we could be getting a little bit of cayenne or paprika garlic and or onion powder it's staying monumentally crispy like this is actually like a pretty intimidating bit of culinary magic kind of going on here now in something like a chicken cutlet you're very often going to find an egg wash used as your liquid component i don't know if that's super common with what i think this is a seemingly flat pounded piece of beef as it cooks it kind of contracts those muscle fibers tighten i have a feeling like this really started out fairly thin okay and now there's real situation happening here wow so much black pepper in here it's just like tastes like sausage gravy could it be a breakfast sausage just with like massive application of black pepper and maybe some cayenne as well i think this is chicken fried steak super american southern not sure about this chef that's it for this tasting and it is time to make a shopping list jesus christ at least yell action or something what cut of steak do you chicken fry so what is chicken fries why is it not steak fry i don't know i don't know okay shopping list sirloin steak question mark but some options would be kind of awesome on this buttermilk for the dredge we need some ap flour let's also get like some wandra flour it's a flour made from like very soft wheat onion powder garlic powder paprika cayenne breakfast sausage milk cream i don't think we need eggs like can i just like make that statement the the truth is i mean it's very hard to tell it didn't taste obviously eggy but to what degree does like a chicken cutlet taste eggy anyway i don't know it's fine let's just get eggs so then we also need white sandwich bread red onion yellow onion sour pickles somebody's gonna go out shop these ingredients and i will have my first shot at the dish [Music] we're gonna get the meat brining assemble the dredge and then we're gonna make the gravy before we do that somebody what's this what's all this look at the last radius of the spatter oil all over this is almost certainly not a deep fried item i mean this whole thing could be a setup this could be one big brick in the set of the truman show that my life has become okay you know where you have oil sloshed out of something it's when you fry something in cast iron but like low everything's a clue that's why you smell the inside of the cloche that's why you lick the surfaces when you come into the test kitchen before the production team is here okay because everything's a so we're going to start with meat this is sirloin steak okay and then this is a top loin steak has a little bit more intramuscular fat also looks just by its very nature a little bit more tender to me this to me looks like a top loin steak that has been pounded out aggressively like sam the butcher style just like sat there and like whacked away at it you know while somebody waited in line i want to use this top lane stake i'm cutting it in half just to give it a head start because we want to end up in a very thin place keep it as even as i can and then we pound the spiky side of the meat mallet is going to increase the tenderizing effect if you take this too far the meat's just gonna start falling apart it's my one nice sweater you know this is just too big you could easily turn this into two pieces something like that you know i don't think there's any harm in doing a piece of top loin also doing a piece of cube stick it's like this like looks pretty damn good to me leaner feels a little more tender i'm gonna go with both of these and see how they are side by side now we're gonna move on to our buttermilk brine big picture the meat is ultimately going to hang out in two different bowls one is going to contain a buttermilk brine the other is going to be the dry dredging mix i'm just gonna whack a bunch of this in here and i'm gonna season it up with salt and pepper buttermilk helps tenderize meats because of the acidity which acts on the protein and the meat cube steak is in top loin top round top round top cube top gun greatest movie of all time that's the brine portion this is gonna be the dredging mix you can use a range of ingredients in dried dredges flour being one of them you can also use starches for like korean style fried chicken i feel like that is more of like a starch-based coating it's like very thin but very crispy wundra flour does have a tendency to show up a lot in southern foods flour is raw please cook fully before enjoying wow um it's like what happened that they had to start printing that on the box you know they're talking about it mostly as being something to use in gravies so i don't know should we use it in the gravy maybe like let's go for it and see but think that you'd want a higher protein flour so i'm sticking with all purpose for that a little bit of cayenne i feel good about onion powder garlic powder onion powder gives earthiness it gives umami garlic powder is really assertive they're not interchangeable for their fresh counterparts but they both do have like wonderful transformative qualities paprika is going to provide ability to pick up like that color you probably want great also want to do a lot of black pepper here and then we need to put some salt in there too steak is staying in the brine until we're ready to fry got the dredge right here just putting those aside the main components that i was tasting in the gravy were some kind of roux thickened dairy kind of fatty ground pork and a lot of black pepper i would probably expect to find some onion and probably some garlic in there as well like if it is a sausage meat that's in that gravy it's probably breakfast sausage but to be totally honest there was so much black pepper in there it made me want to sneeze immediately when i ate it i don't know that i would be able to say 100 if it's like ground pork or breakfast sausage anyway i'm looking to put a little bit of color on this ground pork bring out as much flavor from it as possible one thing i really noticed with this gravy is that the meat was broken up really finely if you try to break up the meat too quickly it kind of inhibits browning a little bit like that's good that's where a lot of flavor is going to come from put in the onion and garlic on top of that let it sweat out and then build the sauce from there craving a little bit more fat from it i'm just going to go a little bit more oil and this is where it's like did i need more meat to create more fat i might season this with a little bit of salt we're pretty much at the point where i think we could introduce some black pepper have that fat in the skillet is going to help really kind of bloom and activate its flavor man you smell it this wonder flower is some wild stuff it feels coarser almost a little bit like a cup of milk here as comes to a boil it's thickening this is pleasantly thick [Music] not bad i'm gonna put it on the back burner so to speak we can move on to frying of the steak steak has been in the brine about half an hour so i'd say so i know about this i've just never done it here's what i want to try i'm going to take a couple tablespoons of this and put it in the dry mix which is going to create some of these kind of like clumpy moments that are then going to hopefully adhere to the steak that's our cube steak pack on this mixture get as much of it to adhere next one we're gonna actually uh season first then this is the top round got like a pretty nice thick coating that's kind of what i'm talking about here i'm not hating that at all to be honest i feel like we want to get that into the oil at 360. we're going in bad idea to put these in the same time probably i'm liking the color i'm liking these ripples all this really violent bubbling make is making it look like maybe not quite the level of adhesion i might need here but i don't know maybe it's going to crisp up a little bit and solidify as it sort of cools so the look of this one which is the top round looks a little better to me i've got the gravy like a pretty tight little gravy situation here i have like my lightly toasted bread yeah this is round one i'm not hating it i feel like maybe drying off the steak a little bit more before putting it in the coating i don't know ingredients i'll go with a 78 there could be more things in the brine or not i feel like there could be more things in the gravy or not technique i feel pretty good about a pounded steak dredged wet brine i'd say like maybe an 86 in terms of appearance i feel like pretty good about that i think it's like the right elements maybe even a 90. flavor-wise i don't think i'm so far off the meat's like pretty tender i mean it's not spa food you know what i mean maybe an 85 frankly go with even more black pepper and maybe we should do the touch of cayenne in there and just wake everything up so that averages me out to an 85 on this piece of paper are my actual scores oh i'm actually looking pretty good on ingredients technique is where i'm the shortest maybe it's not a wet brine because i was a little bit upset by how much moisture was coming out of that meat you know it didn't seem like it but trust me i was feeling really upset also curious about this 87 for appearance maybe i was wrong about the toasting of the bread wouldn't it just be like some like weird friggin southern thing to just have a slice of untoasted bread on there with some pickles on top i've got one more tasting of the original dish and then i have one more shot to get it right before it has to be judged [Music] i just want to see how big this sucker is we're not quite edge to edge on the plate here but we're getting close i'm gonna dig into the gravy here wow there's just so much black pepper in this there's so much black pepper in here but there also could be some cayenne giving just like a little bit of a brightness really opening up the flavoring yeah there's this slight kind of like gummy coating on the meat what if it's the dredge but split into two things so first the meat goes into the dry mixture then into egg and then into the dredge that's what i'm wondering i feel good about the cube steak but i think we need to change up this process a little bit maybe it is about treating it a little bit more like a cutlet of sorts and then the bread yeah i don't think the bread was toasted definitely some changes to be made here in terms of my technique and i've got one more shot to get this right before i have to put this up for judging [Music] so last time we made a buttermilk brine that the meat sat in before going into the dredge this time we're just making a dredge we're gonna put egg as our wash and then the meat is gonna go dredge into the egg and then from the egg back into the dredge and that's it i don't really know that i'm gonna make changes with it so much i like the paprika i like garlic and onion powder i like the little bit of cayenne and i like the black pepper i like the black pepper like ah there we go didn't feel like it was anything that was like a big smoking gun i needed to take out i think the buttermilk brine was introducing a little bit too much moisture i'm really just doing the egg instead and maybe that's going to give me a little bit more of that crispiness i'm looking for and a little bit more of that adhesion as well i want to let this stuff sit while i work on the gravy i really didn't taste onion and garlic in the gravy i just feel like they're there it's honestly hard to taste anything other than black pepper i was clearly off by a number of points in terms of my ingredient score i do think and have said from the beginning that this could be breakfast sausage here breakfast sausage is introducing a little bit of sweetness in the form of sugar in this case sometimes it might be maple syrup olive oil feels wrong so i'm just sticking with veg oil here look at the increased browning on the meat sugar caramelizes you can probably expect like a slight kind of deepening of flavor and maybe just an overall intensifying it's almost to the point where i just don't think we have to like do the whole thing with the aromatics and all of that i think we're gonna get like quite a bit of flavor here throw the black pepper in now toast it out i'm feeling good about the amount of fattiness that's in here too so that's milk going in i'm going with cayenne i'm not trying to make it like overtly chili spicy i just want to really kind of brighten and lift the flavor a little bit yeah the cayenne just like rounds out all those edges of the black pepper wakes up the flavor like i actually feel pretty good about the flavor at this point all right so we want to get the meat going i want to go bigger than i had last time i probably want to you know have it be a little past the edge of the plate knowing it's going to shrink up so we're going to go salt and pepper going in the dredge here now it's going into beaten egg this is going to do a similar thing hopefully that the buttermilk was doing but also introduced less moisture back into the same dredge i don't know it's like that fourth beer you know probably a bad idea but damn it kind of feels good at the time you know like that's kind of that's kind of cool all right so one piece of meat going in and i hope it works out i think the dry wet dry process like did us some some good here it tightened up you know as expected but i think we've got overall just a much crispier aspect to this yeah i'm feeling good can you cut out the part where i said it was not in fact wonder bread thank you subtle changes but hopefully important ones and correct ones if i was at an 83 before in terms of my own self score i would say i'm at a 90 going hard technique is where i suffered the most i don't know let's let's go with 85 on technique appearance i was looking pretty good before now let's go with a 90. i had a little taste of the the gravy i think we're knocking on 88. that brings the my average to an 88 this is a dish that rhoda i'm just gonna guess nose intimately it's a bit of a dangerous game here hey hello weren't you supposed to have a day off today i came in just for you chris that's what makes me nervous who made this and what did they make i called this chicken fried steak with with sausage gravy and who do you think created this deliciousness i don't know i never know chris may i present carla hall's chicken fries steak with sausage cream gravy i literally have like spoken to carla hall on the phone like twice in the last month looking at the blondeness the cutlet is really kind of like presenting fairly different i think the biggest win of all was like not toasting the bread the second time around have you ever had barbecue yeah this is like a very common thing to find on a plate okay yep okay yeah that's fair i didn't i wouldn't have like yeah i didn't yep you nailed the seasoning mix however she seasons the meat then it goes into cornstarch i could see that giving you that really nice level of adhesion can i honestly sit there and say that i taste onion powder versus garlic powder we're expecting you to be able to say that yeah no well i can't so i mean cancel the show like i can't and then you said you had buttermilk first and then i went to egg okay so she actually does both then ap flour and rice flour the rice flour would account for some of the supreme sort of crunchiness on the exterior all right let's talk about your gravy why did you choose wonder flower it said right on the tin that it excels in gravies and so okay i can't wait to do a side-by-side tasting because this is just regular flour breakfast sausage correct milk correct lots of pepper is there cayenne in there yes i'm pretty impressed by your gravy i think it i think you were almost there yep okay you got the bread what kind of onion did you choose yellow this is white it tasted so punchy that onion no it's so fascinating about this like look at how the shell of carla's stayed intact and the meat shrank away from it i think it's that combination of starches yeah like truly created like an architectural shell are we chasing the original or mine let's do the original first so good i love it so peppery it's so peppery it's delicious okay let's try yours i don't need your pity it's good but the seasoning is like really good in carlos no offense yours does taste very similar though i think i'm very happy with my gravy it's good with pickle good with wonder bread too but it has to be wonderful everybody knows that are you ready for your score yeah for ingredients you gave yourself a 90. i'm gonna go with 85. mostly because of the starch situation yeah for technique you gave yourself an 85 uh-huh i'm gonna go with 84. okay really glad you got to the dry wet dry from your first round i think that was like really key in getting the coating that you wanted appearance you gave yourself a 90. i'm going to give you a 95. it looked really good at least like visually nailed that side of things and finally taste you gave yourself an 88 it tasted really similar to the original but carla is just a bit more aggressive with that seasoning yeah i'm gonna go with an 85 okay that brings your total score to 87. okay i don't get a whole lot of b pluses in this game so i think you should be proud for just being you chris for just getting out of bed and putting one foot in front of the other showing up soldiering on i like this dish you know why because there's some hidden depths to it that really make it unique and singular so fascinating and gratifying to be put into some other chef's clogs to have to see through their perspective and their context and this was no exception

Channel: Bon Appétit

Views: 710,373

Keywords: ba chris, best chicken fried steak, blind cooking, blindfold cooking challenge, blindfood cooking, bon app, bon appetit, bon appetit reverse engineering, carla hall, chicken fried steak, chicken fried steak recipe, chicken recipe, chris bon appetit, chris morocco, chris morocco 2022, chris reverse engineering, chris test kitchen, easy chicken fried steak, food, how to make chicken fried steak, make chicken fried steak, reverse engineering

Id: d6ARvbHeB0Q

Length: 21min 57sec (1317 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 16 2022