What Does Buttermilk Do to Chicken? Uncovering the Culinary Magic

Crust Lust: Making the Crunchiest Fried Chicken

Next up: add some extra crunch to that crust. I reasoned that there were a few ways to do this. First off, I wanted to increase the crusts thickness. I tried double-dipping my chicken—that is, dredging the brined chicken in flour (seasoned with the same spice blend as my brine), dipping it back into the buttermilk, and then dredging it once more in flour before frying, a method chef Thomas Keller uses for his justifiably famous fried chicken at Ad Hoc. This worked marginally better—that second coat definitely developed more crags than the first coat did. But the breading was so thick that it often fell off the chicken breast because it was so heavy. ***.

***You may notice the redness of the center of the chicken. This is not because it is undercooked, but because I cracked the bone when cutting it open, revealing some of the chickens red marrow. Occasionally bones may snap or crack on their own, or while you are breaking down the chicken, leaving a few red spots inside the chicken even when it is fully cooked. This should not alarm you.

Much better was to simply add a bit of extra structure to the breading in the form of an egg mixed into the buttermilk.

Now my crust was thick enough, but I ran into another problem: it wasn’t crisp and crunchy like it should have been; it was almost tough and dense like a rock. Knowing that gluten—the network of proteins formed when flour meets water—was the most likely culprit, I sought out ways to minimize its formation. First, replace some of the protein-dense wheat flour with pure starch like cornstarch. This will help the breading absorb more water without adding extra protein. Replacing a quarter of the flour worked well. By adding a few teaspoons of baking powder to the mix, some air was brought in. This made the crust lighter, crispier, and with more surface area, which is what we all know: more surface area = more crispness.

Finally, I used a trick that a friend, a former employee of the Chick-fil-A Southern fast-food fried-chicken chain had told me about. Hed mentioned that once the chicken was breaded, the later batches always come out better than the earlier ones as bits of the flour mixture clumped together, making for an extra-craggy coat. Adding a couple tablespoons of buttermilk to the breading mix and working it in with my fingertips before dredging the chicken simulated this effect nicely.****

****This method is also employed in Cooks Country magazines fried chicken recipe.

The last problem—the coating overcooking long before the chicken is cooked through to the center—was simple to solve. Just fry the chicken until golden brown, then transfer it to a hot oven to finish cooking at a gentler pace. The result is chicken with a deep brown, craggy crust thats shatteringly crisp but not tough and that breaks away to meat that bursts with intensely seasoned juices underneath.

Inside Out: Brine Before You Fry

I started with a working recipe of chicken pieces simply dipped in buttermilk and tossed in flour seasoned with salt and black pepper, then fried in peanut oil at 325°F until cooked through. A few problems immediately became clear. First off, timing: By the time my chicken was cooked through (thats 150°F in the breasts and 165°F in the legs), the outer crust was a dark brown, bordering on black in spots. Not only that, but it didnt have nearly as much crunch as I wanted. Finally, the meat underneath the crust wasnt completely desiccated, but I wouldnt exactly describe it as moist, not to mention its rather bland flavor. I decided to fix my chicken from the inside out.

*For those of you squeamish about “undercooked” chicken or who insist that breast meat must be cooked to 165°F to be safe and tasty, please read this discussion on real world food safety, which is quite different from what the U.S. government would have you believe.

The problem is that with fried chicken, the crisp well-seasoned coating is merely a surface treatment. None of that flavor penetrates very deeply. Surely brining and/or marinating should help with that problem? Brining is the process by which a lean meat (most often chicken, turkey, or pork) is submerged in a saltwater solution. As the meat sits, the saltwater will slowly dissolve key muscle proteins—most notably myosin, a protein that acts as a sort of glue, holding muscle fibers together). As the myosin dissolves, three things take place:

• First, the meat’s ability to keep water in increases. You can think of meat as a bunch of long, thin toothpaste tubes that are twisted together. As you cook the meat, the toothpaste tubes get squished, which forces out the good juices. By slowing down the transfer of energy to the meat, breading will help lessen this effect to some extent, but the chicken will still be squeezed a lot no matter how well it is breaded. One of the main proteins that makes this squeezing action happen is myosin. By dissolving it, you stop a lot of water loss from happening.
• Second, brining changes the texture of the meat by letting proteins that have been dissolved connect with each other. This is the main idea behind making sausage: proteins that have been dissolved can stick together, giving the meat a nice, springy, tender texture. When you brine a chicken breast or pork chop, you’re basically giving it a very light cure. This is the same process that turns raw ham into soft prosciutto.
• Third, the brine slowly ages the meat below the surface as it works its way into it. A brine that you leave on the meat overnight will get a few millimeters deep into it, seasoning it before you even roll it in bread crumbs. Brines also make meat more juicy by making muscles better at keeping water in. It takes me anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours to brine chicken breasts normally. In this case, though, a much, much longer brining time was needed to completely counteract the effects of high-temperature frying. This gave the meat a unique, juicy, and smooth texture.

A full six hours submerged in salt/sugar water produced the beauty below. Weighing the meat confirmed that an overnight-brined-then-fried bird loses about nine percent less moisture than an unbrined bird does and is significantly tastier.

Ive experimented with tossing certain animal preparations with a mixture of baking powder and salt a day in advance in order to improve their crispness. The salt acts as a brine, while the baking powder raises the pH of the skin, causing it to brown more efficiently and the thin film of protein-rich liquid around it to form microbubbles that can add crispness. I tried this method on my fried chicken, but it ended up drying the skin out too much, making it tough to get the breading to remain attached down the line.

Knowing that Id be soaking my chicken in buttermilk the next day anyway, I wondered if Id be able to kill two birds with one stone by replacing the water in the brine with buttermilk. Not only did the chicken come out just as moist as with water brine, it was actually significantly more tender as well, due to the tenderizing effects of buttermilk on food (soaking it for more than one night led to chicken that was so tender that it bordered on mush). Finally, hitting the buttermilk with spices helped build flavor right into the surface of the bird. I played around a bit with the mix before arriving at a blend of cayenne pepper and paprika (for their heat and peppery flavor), garlic powder**, a bit of dried oregano, and a healthy slug of freshly ground black pepper. The Colonel may use eleven secret herbs and spices in his chicken recipe, but five was quite enough for me (and both my wife and my doorman heartily concurred).

**Some folks shun garlic powder, saying that its nothing like real garlic. I agree: garlic powder is nothing like real garlic. But that doesnt mean it doesnt have its culinary uses. Its particularly effective in spice rubs and breadings, where fresh garlic would be difficult to incorporate, due to its texture.

How to Buttermilk Brine Chicken