Fried chicken biscuits (recipe and pictures)
Sometimes, you really need fried chicken biscuits for breakfast.
Fried chicken can be found in India (there's even several KFC's), but "biscuits" in the American sense are pretty much unknown, so I have to make them if I want them. I experimented with the washes for the chicken, and came up with something pretty awesome I thought I would share.
(Note: in both cases you can replace the milk + white vinegar with buttermilk if you can get good buttermilk; the vinegar is just to clabber the milk anyways.)
The chicken:
4 skinless boneless chicken thighs
1 pint milk
1 tablespoon white vinegar
2 tablespoons pickle juice
1 cup white flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
Secret blend of herbs and spices (see below*)
4 eggs
1 cup half and half or evaporated milk (not sweetened condensed)
Oil for deep frying
Add the vinegar and pickle juice to the milk; wait 10 minutes to allow it to clabber; place the chicken in the milk. Let it marinate in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours.
In one large bowl, mix flour, baking soda, and herbs and spices. In different bowl, beat eggs with half & half.
Heat oil to about 350F (a small square of bread should take about 30 seconds to brown at that temperature). For each chicken thigh,
1. Remove from the milk
2. Dredge in the flour mixture
3. Dunk in the egg mixture
4. Dredge again in the flour mixture
5. Drop into the oil
Should take about 15 minutes or so to cook them thoroughly. Remove, drain/pat dry, and let cool.
* In terms of the spices, salt and black pepper are pretty much mandatory; everything else is up to you. This time I did Old Bay and smoked paprika, which worked really well.
The biscuits:
2 cups white flour
1 Tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 stick butter, very cold
1 cup milk
1 Tablespoon white vinegar
additional flour for handling dough
(This is my great-grandmother's recipe I learned years and years ago and is mostly muscle memory, so apologies if I leave out something that's obvious to me.)
Preheat oven to 450F.
Pour the vinegar into the milk and wait 10 minutes for it to clabber.
Mix the dry ingredients (sift, if you're anal -- I never bother). Grate / finely chop / food process the cold butter into the flour mixture. The resulting mix should clump into balls roughly the size of green peas. Gradually pour in the clabbered milk and quickly mix with a fork.
Once this has formed a dough, flour the work surface (you'll need more flour than you think) and your hands, and gently pat out the dough until it is very flat and wide. If you're new to biscuits, let me stress that you are not kneading. That's the last thing you want to do. You are very gently patting the dough out to flatten it. Under no circumstances use a rolling pin!!!
Once you have patted the dough out, fold it in half lengthwise and again the other-wise, so that it's 1 quarter of its original size. Pat out again. Repeat this 7 times (this is what gives your biscuit layers).
After the 7th patting-out, take a biscuit cutter and cut out biscuits -- I can usually get 8 from this quanitity. It is possible to re-combine and pat out again the scrap dough that's left over, but the biscuits are never as good from that. I usually save it for dumplings, or fry it up and give it to the dog.
Place the biscuit disks on a cookie sheet and bake for 10 minutes (or until they're the color you like).
Combining these two into chicken biscuits:
Additionally required ingredients:
Pickle slices
2 Tablespoons or so of pickle juice
8 pieces of cheese of your choice (or not, if you don't like cheese on your chicken biscuits)
After the biscuits have cooled somewhat, open them (you shouldn't need a knife) and lay them out flat. Cut the fried chicken thighs in half. Put a half-thigh on one side of each biscuit. Garnish with pickle slices and optionally cheese. Pour about a half-teaspoon of pickle juice onto the empty half of each biscuit. Close the sandwiches up, and serve immediately.
Pre-assemblage:
Assembled:
= new reply since forum marked as read
