Smallgree's musings

Originally I didn't buy prepared mixes because they contained silica sand dust. Now most mixes and sauces contain guar and xanthan gums, which I despise. I buy whole, and prepare my own. I have copycat recipes for about everything under the Sun. The most difficult one has been KFC, due to the enormous amounts of historical misinformation. Original McDonald's french fries are delicious, but takes an act of God to prepare and cook. No wonder they changed the procedure. And yes, beef bouillon is used.

My progress. And I will welcome comments.

I've often created the note with "willy nilly" techniques, mixing, matching, combining, and downright drunken recklessness, never to create it again. This time I've kept a record.

1) I took mostly my chili seasoning ingredients and developed a chicken recipe. 26g seasoning, 24g fine salt, for 160g pastry flour. I used a combination dry and wet brining with toasted black pepper and kosher salt, and brined the flavorless chicken for three days. I let the chicken openly dry in the refrigerator for at least 24 hours. Then I individually wrapped each piece in plastic wrap and froze. I would thaw out a certain amount of chicken, and prepare it and cook it in a cast iron skillet, or a cast iron Dutch oven, in flavored corn oil. I reduced the amount of cumin I use for chili, and cooked my first batch. Good chicken.

2) Days later, I added 1/2 tsp cumin and 1 tsp ginger to the leftover flour, and repeated the process with the next batch of chicken. This chicken was much better, but lacked the "bite" I'm always looking for. I decided to add some Italian seasoning, savory and caraway seeds to the same left over flour. I opened the lid to the flour, and was struck with what I describe as a mutated smell. After sitting for days, the flavors had melded resulting with a much stronger smell. It was very early KFC like.

3) I added the new ingredients and will be cooking later after the chicken thaws. There are points to consider in what I have posted that I will ponder, and certain rules to apply. I hope this is helpful in some way.

I will need to save some of the flour left to see if melding is really an integral part of developing the note. I always supported melding because of the expiration dates on the bags of hermetically sealed KFC seasoning bags. That shows, in my mind, that the flavors do develop with age, one way or another. Sit too long and the powerful elements may overshadow the more delicate ones.

Great chicken. I wish I could still pressure fry. I wish I had a piece of 1959 KFC chicken to try to fine tune which ingredients need to go up, and which need to go down. I'm leaning towards believing that the Shelton story was fake. KFC did butter his bread.

I did finally get some whole white peppercorns today, so the race is on.

I'm inching closer. The best I've fried. Now that I finally got my white pepper corns (my daughter bought them because I won't buy online), I can backtrack and not use the store bought white pepper chaff I've been using. I like caraway seeds as they do not overpower, but this is all preliminary. What I should do, and I might later, is find my old Sexton dominated recipes and post them. But that might be seen as mockery. Right now, many are guessing at the Sexton formula and adding all types of licorice tasting herbs and spices, thinking they are on top of finding the OR. This time next year, if anyone is still around, they will still be arguing whether they should be using .15g, .25g, .5g, 1.0g, 1.5g, etc., of this or that.