- 5 weeks ago
Chef Eric Huang of NYC’s Pecking House shows how to make the ultimate fried chicken sandwich. Using a buttermilk brine with MSG and five-spice, a double-fry method, and crispy chicken thighs dunked in special Pecking House chili oil, this sandwich delivers maximum crunch and juiciness.
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:04Hi, I'm Eric Huang. I'm the chef of Peking House here in Chinatown, and today we're
00:08gonna make my perfect fried chicken sandwich. I started working in Michelin-starred restaurants
00:14in 2010. After a long, somewhat illustrious career in fine dining, I make fried chicken now.
00:20A perfect fried chicken sandwich has hot, crispy, juicy chicken, nice soft bread,
00:26kiwpie mayonnaise, chili oil, and bread and butter pickles. Let's make a fried chicken sandwich.
00:31Let's make a fried chicken sandwich. I like the knife end. It feels more strong and confident.
00:40When making a fried chicken sandwich, I think thighs or breast meat are the way to go. We use
00:46thighs because I think it has a lot better of a texture. I'm gonna look through these chicken
00:50thighs. I'm cool with all these little extra bits here. They're just gonna be more interesting fried
00:54textures later. Obviously, Western culture kind of puts a preference on white meat. We're in Chinatown.
00:59Chinese people love dark meat. If you cook dark meat past 185, that is the temperature after which
01:04collagen, gelatin, all those things break down, it's going to be really tender. The buttermilk marinade
01:08is going to increase that perception. Cartilage is never going to cook down. We want to remove it for
01:13like a boneless eating experience in a sandwich. Here's a little bit of something here. I'll cut that
01:17out. Just a little piece. So when you're poking through the grocery store aisle for chicken thighs,
01:22look for ones that are big and uniform and you'll be able to make a really nice chicken sandwich.
01:26All right, let's buttermilk marinate slash brine slash season our chicken here. So we're going to
01:30obviously start off with some buttermilk. This is kind of a weak acid that helps with improving the
01:34texture of what we're marinating and it's going to add a little bit of fat and the serve as sort
01:38of
01:38a binder for the other things we're adding. We call it the marinate step, but it's actually combining
01:42a lot of steps. We're marinating, we're seasoning, and we're brining all at the same time.
01:47Brining basically means that you're adding salt to your product and that will help it retain moisture
01:52and waters. This is our seasoning mix. This is a blend of salt, sugar, and MSG. Three parts salt, one
01:58part
01:58MSG, one part sugar. That for us is the perfect balance to bring moisture retention, savoriness, and
02:03just like a hint of sweetness to balance the salt out. And whenever you're seasoning meat, you're using
02:07more than you think because meat just really takes a lot of salt to get seasoned all the way through.
02:11And obviously MSG, I've been on my soapbox here many times talking about MSG and why it has been
02:17wrongly maligned throughout history. Anyone trying to tell you that MSG in crystalline form is different
02:21from MSG in tomatoes is fear-mongering and giving you bad science. And then I'm going to add some
02:29Dijon mustard here. You can use any kind of mustard. I just like Dijon. When you cook mustard,
02:33the pungency dies down a lot, a lot of soffier compounds dissipate. So really what it adds is all the
02:38savory mellow notes that are behind the spiciness. I'm going to add garlic powder. Huge prevalent
02:44ingredient in southern fried chicken. Onion powder as well. I'm going to add my five spice powder.
02:49Five spice is primarily the anise flavor from the star anise pods. Such a prevalent flavor in all
02:54Chinese cooking. And then this is kind of our secret little trick. We add flour. So the flour is going
02:58to absorb the moisture from the buttermilk and the chicken overnight. That's going to cause the starch
03:04granules to swell with water. And that's what gives gluten its strength. And giving the hydration,
03:09giving the gluten some strength, is going to improve the crust later. We're going to marinate this
03:13at least for 12 hours. 24 is probably ideal. Chicken. It has been marinating. We're going to dredge it.
03:24Our dredge is a mix of flour, potato starch, cornstarch. Marries a lot of crunchy and crispy textures.
03:29Cornstarch, potato starch, definitely on the crispy side. Flour more on the crunchy side. So I think this is
03:34right in the middle. We're going to let it sit in the dredge for a little bit. Because it's a
03:37thigh
03:38and there's a lot of uneven surfaces, as you see, there's a lot of craggly textures to be over here.
03:43If you don't literally press the flour into it, it won't stick too. Shake it off a little bit. Then
03:48we use Evercrisp, a modified starch. It's basically Benafiber, modified weed dextrin. We use about 10%
03:54by weight of the dredge. What that does is slows the movement of water. So it traps water and that
04:00makes for
04:00some super crispy chicken. I think the biggest mistakes that home cooks make is they don't get
04:06the dredge timing quite right. They either go too quickly and it's not coated evenly and then they
04:11get this like patchy fried chicken where the crust kind of falls apart or they let it sit too long
04:17and it over hydrates and it becomes like a really thick shell that doesn't have like a lot of nice
04:21crispy textures to it. It's kind of right in the middle and it's kind of a visual cue. You can
04:25kind
04:26of see it where there's all these little small bits. So I, as a time reference, use for about
04:31a minute or two to sit in the dredge, making sure it's really evenly coated and then go into the
04:35oil.
04:37Gently lay it in there. Probably don't have one of these in your home. I don't blame you. Deep
04:42fryers are dangerous, messy. I recommend pan frying at home. I'm frying at 325 degrees Fahrenheit. That's
04:48kind of the Goldilocks zone where the starches and the protein are going to brown and the water is still
04:52going to evaporate. If you go too cool with your oil, you're not creating enough steam. The steam
04:57that's escaping the chicken is repelling the oil, which is going to prevent your crust from being
05:02too greasy. If it's too hot, obviously it's going to burn and it's too dark. That's unpleasant. So 325
05:08F is kind of the golden zone. This is going to be frying for about eight minutes, but that's just
05:11a
05:11guideline for true precision. Use the thermometer. The temperature for cooking chicken is 165 F for dark
05:18meat, for getting the right texture, where it's tender, it's not bouncy, and it eats well like in
05:23a sandwich. You need to get past 185 F, past the point where gelatin and collagen will break down.
05:28We're also going to be double frying. So this is the first fry where we want to get the protein
05:31to
05:31the temperature we want. So above 185 F. Resting, the most important thing we're trying to achieve is
05:36just bringing down the temperature of the protein. Letting the moisture redistribute. When we fry it the
05:41second time, we're really just bringing the crust back to where we want it. Hot, shatterly crisp. That's kind of
05:46the
05:46whole purpose behind resting it. This looks nice and rested. This is still quite hot. So for our
05:51second fry, we're going to do about a minute to make the crust really, really, really crispy.
05:56Obviously fried chicken needs to be somewhere on the spectrum of crispy, crunchy. Crispy is the front
06:02of your teeth. Crunchy is the back of your teeth. We try to go right in the middle, maybe a
06:06little bit
06:06more on the crispy side. All right, chicken fried for the second time. This is our chili oil,
06:12Packinghouse's chili oil. This is what makes Packinghouse Packinghouse. It looks very simple,
06:15but there's a lot of love and technique in here. We toast our own chilies,
06:19toast our own Sichuan peppercorns, grind them ourselves. We use Tianjin chilies. They're like
06:24a medium heat. We add sugar, salt, MSG, vinegar powder. We bring acidity to it. And then we make
06:29an herb duck fat. Duck fat basically improves anything that's fried. Also high quality Sichuan
06:34peppercorns. The redder they are, the better they are. The more citrus aromas they'll have
06:39and the more tingly they'll be. And then we're going to dunk it. I used to delicately paint this on,
06:45but we got too busy. So we started just dunking chicken in. You want to do this when the chicken
06:50is hot and the chili oil is room temperature, because then they're going to kind of repel
06:55one another. It's going to drain ever so slightly. Look at it. Look at this thing. It's gorgeous.
06:59Isn't it? So we didn't trim it up too much. So you see, there's all these little crispy textures.
07:03That's going to come through really beautifully when we put this on a brioche bun. We're going to let
07:07it drain while we build the rest of our sandwich. I'm going to toast this bread up. We're using a
07:16brioche bun. You can use butter. I like using mayo because this makes for a really even crust.
07:21And basically what's going to happen here is the mayonnaise is going to break into oil and egg
07:26and brown really beautiful. Brioche has a ton of butter already, so I don't think we need more butter.
07:31Toasting creates a lot of Maillard reactions. The browning caramelized notes kind of bring out the
07:35sweetness in bread and also heating up bread, especially brioche changes it. It makes it a
07:40little more chewy feeling when you're eating it. I really like pressing bread while it's toasting
07:45on a griddle. If you are making a singular perfect sandwich as we are today, then I highly recommend
07:50this step. All right, so we have all the things. We have our beautifully toasted brioche. We have our
07:55Kewpie mayonnaise. Different from normal mayonnaise. As you can see here, it has a very dense texture,
08:00almost like a shiny appearance to it, and it stands very firm and smooth in this way. Having tasted
08:05these side by side with kind of more pedestrian mayonnaise, if you will, I think the Kewpie makes
08:10a big difference. Bread and butter pickles. Crinkle cut. A little bit sweet. Definitely a little bit
08:14tangy. And then of course we have the fried chicken thigh dipped in chili oil. And then as I was
08:20saying,
08:21you have to give it a delicate little smoosh. Just a little bit. You don't want to smash the bread.
08:25I don't
08:25know how to say smoosh in Spanish though, so I think my staff think I'm crazy. Look at that. Glorious.
08:30Look at all those textures. Looks like a food style dad, except it's completely edible and delicious.
08:36You know, I really love that we didn't trim this up too much and we weren't too precious about making
08:40it a very specific uniform shape. You know, it's not like a burger or anything. It's got all these kind
08:45of craggly textural bits. I think that's the stuff that makes it really wonderful.
08:52It's pretty good, man. Look at that. Structural integrity. Took a singular bite out of it and
08:57nothing moved. It's checking all the boxes. Structural integrity. Crispy, seasoned, juicy, hot.
09:04It's got the nice texture of the pillowy bread against the crispy, meaty chicken. A little bit of
09:09papa zing and crunch from the pickles. Creamy mayo. It's good, man. It's really, really good. Chicken
09:14sandwiches. There's a reason they're so popular. They just hit all the things in your brain, in your
09:18in your silly little caveman reptile brain. This lights all the things up. Makes you happy.
09:23You need a little bit of that because it's dark out there, you know?
Comments