All-American Picnic

We frequently watch America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Country and think "we should try that". Between a recent episode called "All-American Picnic", Ryan's craving for fried chicken, and a beautiful weekend, we decided to give some of the recipes a try.

The side dish was "All-American Potato Salad" (you can find these recipes on their website). Both of us generally shy away from homemade potato salad, but this looked interesting and relatively quick. The "secret" to making this was to add pickle juice to the hot potatoes, which absorb flavor "like a sponge" when hot (but if you add the mayo at this point, the salad will turn out dry). I didn't measure the chopped pickles and added only 1/2 of the called-for 1/2 red onion, and both Ryan and I thought it was a little oniony. Next time I will make sure to add all the pickles (we think it might balance out the onion flavor). Otherwise this tasted fantastic and was a mostly hands-off hour long process.

The main course was extra-crunchy fried chicken. It looked like a pretty simple recipe, and having failed multiple times in the past trying to get that true crispy crust that only seems achievable if you are a southern colonel, we dove right in. The recipe calls for a whole chicken, cut up into 8 pieces and marinated in a buttermilk brine for an hour. During this time, we realized we forgot to get peanut oil at the store, but a quick trip to Walgreens for a $4, 32 oz. (!!) bottle of vegetable oil saved the day. The "secret" to getting the extra-crispy is to make a sort of shaggy flour breading to pack onto the chicken (they noticed that the last few pieces they breaded generally got that crisp crust due to the clumpiness of the batter) by adding a small amount of buttermilk to the flour /seasoning mixture. Everything looked beautiful at this point as the oil continued to heat up to 375º, and we thought we were 20 minutes from the best fried chicken meal outside the White Fence Farm.

Ryan added the chicken to the dutch oven, and put the lid on like the recipe says. One thing they note is that the temperature will drop significantly, but you shouldn't turn the heat up or the end result will be burned. Ryan immediately thought as he was adding the chicken to the

pot that it was way too small to fry up the entire chicken at once, but that is what they had done on the TV show. So alas, he threw in all the chicken parts and lidded it up. A few minutes later, he opened it up to check the temperature, and it had dropped to 240º, which was WAY too low, so he turned up the heat and moved around the pieces to find that the large ones at the

bottom had burned, and in the meantime the "cool" ones at the top were loosing their breading like a chicken molting. We went into "rescue" mode from there and took out half of the pieces and tried to fry them in two batches. The end result was a variety of pieces, some with burned bits, some with no crust, and some looking perfect:

We took our meal outside and enjoyed a "picnic" in the waning daylight with a glass of beer. Overall the chicken tasted really good, was exceptionally moist, and the pieces with breading were, in fact, extra crunchy. Our impression was that this recipe has potential, but there are lessons to be learned:

#1) Don't crowd the pot. Fry in batches if making a lot of pieces.

#2) Heat management. Keep an eye on the temperature, keep things moving in the pot so you don't end up with "hot" and "cold" spots.