Think Southern-fried chicken, and chances are the next words that come to mind are “secret herbs and spices.’’ To me, that’s Southern-fried baloney. Prolonged immersion in very hot grease is not a method that coaxes out bouquet; the only elements likely to survive are garlic and cayenne. But spicing aside, the sine qua non of good fried chicken certainly is the crust, the best being a simply seasoned flour- or cornmeal-based coating delicately but thoroughly welded to the skin in a crisp, delicious synthesis. Biting into good fried chicken produces what I call the “howdy moment’’ - mouth greeted by a smooch of warm, clean grease, then toasty-nutty crunch, then mild, ingratiating poultry flavor.
Fried and true
We set out to find the crispiest, tastiest, juiciest chicken
It’s pretty universally agreed that the best means of achieving this is pan-frying. Unhappily, that’s not a commercially viable method - frying a pan of chicken takes 30 to 40 minutes - and it’s not practiced, as far as I can tell, by any restaurants in the Boston area. Deep-frying is the standard here, and though it may not be ideal, some of our restaurateurs are quite handy with the method. And some not. In our quest to find real Southern-fried chicken - a summer staple on many tables - we encounter chicken so botched it looks like an industrial accident. Probably the worst flaw of inept deep-frying is the sludgy institutional flavor of exhausted grease.
For pan-fried, you could head to Mrs. Rowe’s Restaurant & Bakery in Staunton, Va., where I usually stop on my way down the Shenandoah Valley to North Carolina. On vacation in the South, I’m on Eastern Slow Time, and can contentedly wait as long as it takes for a fried chicken plate. In times past, it came with real pan gravy, which is a treat you won’t find around here: no frying pan, no pan gravy.
In Boston, we have these faves:
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