So good because they take forever.
I have no idea what these are—it’s just fried chicken basically. But my kids absolutely love them. It must be the amount of love I put into these that make them so good. This recipe has not been a staple for long and only existed after I had kids. But it gives you the best of both worlds: fried chicken and a clean kitchen.
Ingredients
- onion
- chicken breasts; boneless, skinless
- breadcrumbs
- flour
- olive oil
- ranch
- Worcestershire sauce
- salt, black pepper, cumin, curry powder, garlic powder (not garlic salt, you beast), onion powder, chili powder, paprika, ground thyme, whatever else you want, just wing it
Method
This is a recipe you can really sink some hours into. Your whole family will love eating all of this while you sit back and say to yourself this was hardly worth all the trouble. For whatever reason you chose to make this dish, you will need to start by gathering all the ingredients. You really should spring for the cast iron pan for this one if you have the strength capacity to lift it. The cast iron helps it get crispier because iron holds heat better. I don’t know the science behind iron except that it’s labeled as “Fe” on the periodic table; I still had to google that to be double sure, because as I stated, I do not know the science behind why cooking on iron is so much better. It doesn’t matter why, but just know that there is a difference. Regardless of the pan you choose, you want to get it up on the stovetop; you can let it sit there while you prepare the chicken off to the side on a countertop.
Unwrap the boneless, skinless chicken breasts and place them into a large mixing bowl. Be sure to put on a pair of latex kitchen gloves. If you are allergic to latex, you may want to use nitrile gloves instead, or simply forego the gloves and be good about washing your hands. However, I highly recommend using gloves. Cut the chicken breasts with a pair of kitchen scissors into small, bite-sized pieces, about an inch; it doesn’t have to be perfect, but you certainly don’t want them to be too big because that takes the fun out of eating it.
Once you finish cutting the chicken into bite-sized pieces, sprinkle some Worcestershire sauce and mix it up with your hand—it really needs to be your hand, so it gets in there good. That’s precisely why I’ve been so adamant about using gloves. You know the funny thing about Worcestershire sauce is how nobody knows how to pronounce Worcestershire. I pronounce it, “Worcestershire,” and nobody has ever told me otherwise.
The amount of Worcestershire depends on how many chicken knockers you are preparing. The rule of thumb is that you want to get all the meat lightly colored, so for three pounds that would be probably a “couple two three” teaspoons as they might say from Minnesota. I learned that phrase from my wife who is from Minnesota. Me being from Northwest Florida and her being from the Iron Range, boy I’ll tell you; we could not understand each other when we first met. You can see how I proposed to her at vikingsproposal.com when you’ve got these chicken knockers in the oven. Yes, I said the oven; it’s oven-baked fried chicken!
After you color the meat with the appropriate amount of Worcestershire sauce, you want to drizzle some ranch on it and then mix that around with your hand. The amount is like the Worcestershire sauce, eyeballed, but you’ll want to make sure all the chicken pieces have a thick coat of ranch around them. It helps to smell the mixture to ensure you have a good balance of Worcestershire and ranch; you can keep nudging it to get it right only so far before you’ve over done it with the Worcestershire sauce, so be careful.
When you feel good about what you’ve done with the chicken and how you pronounce Worcestershire, cover the mixing bowl with some aluminum foil and place it in the refrigerator. Many recipes will advise you to let a concoction like this marinate for 30 minutes, but here’s where you can literally stretch this out for hours; you could even do this in the morning and take all day to finish the rest later. I like to chop an onion while I wait for the chicken to marinate, because my wife always says I take forever chopping an onion when she can do it in like, one minute. She uses a hand chopper, whereas I am a purest and believe in using a proper knife and cutting board. My poor mother has chopped an onion using a steak knife on a Styrofoam plate—an action at which I physically gasped when seeing.
Eventually you’re going to need to make the breading. I use a typical knock-off Tupperware container. You know the coolest thing I learned in college was in an advertising class about how sometimes a brand name becomes synonymous with the thing that it is, like Kleenex, or Xerox. Tupperware is one of those funny words. If a Department of Words existed, I would write to them and request that they create a word for this situation. It could have prevented this whole sixty-eight-word digression!
If I’m making three pounds of chicken knockers, which is usually the number of pounds I will make in a batch, I will put one cup of flour in my Tupperware bowl, followed by two cups of breadcrumbs; always in that order, not because it matters, but because I am methodical. Next you want to mix that up with a whisk. A funny story—when my wife and I first moved in together, there was this “combining of kitchen equipment” and my wife convinced me to throw mine away and keep hers because “we didn’t need that many whisks.” Love-struck and helpless, I gave in only to find that her whisks—some fancy gadgets that you pushed down to make spin—didn’t work worth a hoot. I had to purchase a new set of simple, metal whisks without that mechanical doohickey which serves no purpose besides keeping me from having to rotate my wrist. Just like a damn onion chopper—why not use a simple knife as mankind has done for over 2.5 million—if you believe in that evolutionary stuff—years?
Now is the fun part. You get to add the spices. Now I’m going to be a little loose with the direction here because it’s up to your personal preferences, but the secret is going to be a little touch of curry powder and cumin. But mainly you will use—again, for three pounds of chicken—one tablespoon of each: garlic powder, onion powder; then you want to bump down to a teaspoon and add: paprika, cumin, curry powder, salt, black pepper; then bump down to a quarter teaspoon and add: cayenne pepper, powdered thyme. That’s a good start. You can mix it all up with a non-mechanical metal whisk and put a little on your tongue to taste. Yes, I know there’s raw flour in there so don’t do it maybe, but you can fluctuate these seasoning levels to be whatever you want. Just be sure you do all this long before it’s time for dinner!
Now this is the time when I like to preheat the oven to 350°— (Fahrenheit, of course, we’re not slow-cooking ribs!) — and assuming you don’t walk away and leave the kitchen to do anything else, you are ready to take the chicken out of the refrigerator now.
This next part will require some careful setup to avoid making a huge mess. First, I like to set the baking sheet on the countertop by the stove so it’s right next to the pan. I overlap it onto the stove so that oil does not drip between my stove and the countertop when I transfer chicken from the pan to the baking sheet. These are the little things I do that I feel like my wife never notices because she’s so worried about me leaving my socks all over the living floor at the end of the day. You must absolutely use a grate on this baking sheet to keep the chicken elevated so that air can circulate underneath as it finishes cooking in the oven, and you should thoroughly oil the grate with olive oil before placing the chicken on it. The breading will be very delicate so you cannot afford any sticking. I like to use a basting brush to make quick work of this because we don’t have all day to get this dinner done. There have been some nights when the kids are in bed by the time I am done with this recipe, so anywhere you can save time is smart.
Now you want to set up a few things on the countertop: the mixing bowl that has had the chicken marinating in it for probably several hours by now, the Tupperware container with the mixture you whisked, a plate, and a fork. I’m going to be honest—you might need a second plate and that’s okay. Just dirty it up. None of what we are doing here involves washing dishes anyway so don’t worry about that. We are cooking for the family right now.
At this point I highly recommend using a new set of gloves. It’s very unlikely that you have kept the same pair on since cutting the chicken hours ago, and if you have, oh my God you are going to kill everyone. Read this part carefully—you need to pick a hand that will be responsible for going into the breadcrumb mixture and the breadcrumb mixture only. For me, this is my right hand. My right hand uses the fork to pick out the chicken from the mixing bowl and place it in the Tupperware that has the breadcrumb mixture. It’s important to do this one piece of a time, and with your left hand shake the Tupperware bowl to cover the chicken before you add the next piece. You can put up to four or five pieces in total before you need to pull them all out to make room for the next batch. When I have shaken the breadcrumb mixture enough so it sticks to the chicken, I set down the fork so that with my right hand still I can scoop up the breaded chicken and squeeze it so that the breadcrumb mixture doesn’t flake off; it’s making a tight, little ball of breaded chicken. This is why it’s important to not use the same hand that you reach into the mixing bowl with to remove the breaded chicken from the Tupperware bowl; you’ll ruin all your breadcrumb mixture and have a huge mess on your hands—literally. And I don’t mean “literally” in poor form; gosh I can’t stand when people use that word carelessly because it removes all the world’s weight from the word for others. For instance, in this scenario, you will certainly have a sticky batter clumping around your fingers if you do not heed my instruction. Maybe I should have used the word “certainly” instead of “literally” to convey my message. Nevertheless, I put all these breaded chicken pieces onto the plate and keep going until it’s all breaded.
When you’ve completed the breading portion of this recipe, it’s a great feeling, so it’s nice to amplify that emotion by cleaning up the kitchen a bit before moving on to the cooking portion of the recipe. You can toss the remaining breadcrumb mixture in the garbage and rinse out the mixing bowl in the sink. You’re also done now with the Tupperware and metal whisk, so give those a wash or at least let all this soak in the sink, which is a controversial method of kitchen management. It would be a great idea as well to wipe down the countertops with a cleaning solution since we’ve been working with raw chicken. I am very finnicky with raw meats, especially chicken for some reason. There used to be an old television show called Wife Swap, where—strangely—families would agree to each wife living with the other family for some amount of time. The spectacles that ensued were sensational, the most remarkable of which was this one family that ate all raw meats—even raw chicken. They imposed this on their own children, which in hindsight is surprising to me that the show’s producers allowed this to happen without contacting Child Protective Services for child endangerment. As it turned out, the visiting wife unequivocally refused to eat the raw chicken. Good for her. You should strive to avoid raw chicken in life whenever possible.
The oven should be good and hot by now, but we’re not quite ready for it just yet. We need to turn on the pan, hopefully it’s the cast iron version, but again it does not have to be cast iron. You want to set up your area so that the plate of raw, breaded chicken, the pan, and the baking sheet with a grate are all lined up in that order; for me it’s left-to-right. This is to help with your flow. I’m starting to read about “flow state” and I’m not sure if this is the same thing, but it’s important that you take a moment to get this workstation set up correctly.
Turn on the pan to a low-medium heat. If the kids are secure, this is a safe time to walk away for a few moments to let that pan get consistently heated. With a cast iron pan, sometimes you can go even lower than low-medium. You can also opt to do this step on medium heat, but patience is a virtue and by now the kids have probably already gone to bed anyway, so there’s no rush anymore. Let that pan start slow and get to a consistent, controllable heat. If you do this step slowly, you don’t have to put the olive oil in until you’re ready to start cooking. It’s better this way in my opinion because olive oil gets nasty when kept at a high heat for too long, and going straight to medium heat means you can’t put the oil in after the pan is hot because it will be too violent, so therefore you must put the oil from the beginning and sit there to watch the pan heat up so you avoid a fire. Also, the method using the lower heat means there will be less grease splattering all over your kitchen; it just requires you to let the pan reach a consistent heat.
When you’ve got the pan at the appropriate low-medium temperature, fill the pan with about an eighth-to-a-quarter inch of olive oil. At this point you should refrain from walking away. The oil will not take long to become hot, and you may even see a little tiny bit of smoke starting to appear. Grab some tongs from the drawer where you keep them and pick up a piece of the raw, breaded chicken to place into the hot pan. If you do not hear it simmer right away, stop, let the pan get hotter and try again; you have come too far to settle for soggy chicken knockers.
Go ahead and fill the pan with a circle of chicken and wait for one minute, then flip them in the same order you put them in the pan. The only goal here is to make the breading crispy, we are not trying to cook them all the way through yet. As soon as the outside breading gets crispy, you can use the same tongs to move the chicken from the pan to the greased grate on your baking sheet. I know this is counterintuitive to use the same tongs for raw chicken to pick up cooked chicken but remember, we haven’t fully cooked the chicken yet. When you’ve filled up the grate on the baking sheet with the crisped chicken, place the baking sheet into the preheated oven for thirty minutes.
When you pull these out of the oven, get ready to dip them in your favorite sauce. I usually create some sort of buffalo sauce and dip them in ranch, Sometimes I’ll just use the hot mustard sauce which came with the chicken nuggets my wife had to go get from McDonald’s three hours earlier so that the kids wouldn’t go to bed without dinner.
