New cooking methods ... sous vide

[DJ's left nut]

Originally Posted by Sorce

Tried the chef steps fried chicken on Friday, no pictures but it was hands down the best fried chicken. The breasts came out so juicy.

We are going out of town for thanksgiving but my parents have a turkey breast we are going to do sous vide when we get back.

I used a combination of the chef's steps method and a Hatty B's recipe to make fried chicken sammiches for a tailgate and it couldn't have worked any better.

I cooked boneless, skinless breasts at 150 for about 2 hours; 6 per bag. I didn't mess with any seasonings but I probably should have put some salt in there. Then I took them to the tailgate with my big dutch oven on a turkey friar burner.

I used my trusty ol' bass pro fish fry breader that I highly recommend:

Spoiler!

Picture is bigger than I realized

I'd open a pack, toss 6 of them in there for a coat, roll them in egg then put them back in for a second coat. Put them in oil until the outside is brown and you're done. Then you take some oil from the fryer, put it in an aluminum pan and throw a shitload of cayanne in there with some brown sugar and garlic powder to create a bloom. After it cools a bit, you put it in a plastic squirt bottle and set it alongside for people to make their chicken as hot as they want. Throw some pickles and some provolone on there and you're golden.

The method worked extremely well for 2 reasons - the first is the most obvious one; since they're cooked, I don't have to be nearly as finicky with the oil temp because I don't have to worry about the outside burning before the inside is cooked. This allows a slightly higher oil temp, faster evaporation from the inside and thus 'seals' the chicken better to keep the grease from getting to it. So in the end, the chicken is less greasy.

The second reason didn't occur to me until I was cooking but because it's already cooked, you can dump 6 of them in there and not crash your oil temperature. The meat goes in much hotter so you're not sacrificing heat to get it up to temperature. When your oil doesn't crash and the cook time takes 3 minutes, you can knock out 20 sandwiches in about 15 minutes. The timing is great because at about 425 degrees, it takes the batter just as long to brown as it takes me to batter 6 more and then hot swap.

Really couldn't have gone any better.