Design Thinking and Fried Chicken

I love food. I love cooking, I love eating, and I love gathering around a table of people who are chomping on something I’ve served. Of all of the foods I love, nothing satisfies more than chicken; and, in American tradition, nothing is chicken until it is fried chicken.

The challenge

A few months ago, I started a subtraction exercise based on a challenge I had in the kitchen: “How Might We develop the most objectively incredible fried chicken recipe that is also able to be eaten by all of my fowl-eating friends?”

Most people think the best fried chicken recipes include a buttermilk brine. The fat content of buttermilk acts to tenderize and confit the chicken before frying; even those that don’t adhere to the church of buttermilk inevitably add a bit of milk to thin out their egg-wash (a good technique to keep the crust thick and ensure it sticks to the skin).

If I want to feed all of my friends and make a comfortable fried chicken by my own kitchen, dairy won’t do me any good. So how might we create a tender and juicy brine without the fat content of a rich milk? Stay with me, let’s keep subtracting: If milk is only used to improve the egg wash for breading, what if we did away with breading entirely? And what if the product itself was objectively superior?

Gluten-free. Kosher. Vegetarian. No, just kidding on the last one. It’s still chicken, silly.

I would be lying if I told you I created a stakeholder map to understand the needs of all of my guests in this subtraction exercise. The title of this post is more of a good clickbait to have you follow me on my kitchen chicken quest. I did, however, track all of the qualities of the tastiest fried chicken on sticky notes in order to determine the best possible recipe:

  • Saltiness

This is traditionally achieved with a bit of salt added to the buttermilk brine.

  • Sweetness

  • Acidity

  • Tenderization

Buttermilk is a delicious cop-out. It achieves all three of these goals without a second thought. The buttermilk itself is sweet and slightly acidic, while the fat content works to trap the chicken in a thick brine that results in an insatiably tender fry.

  • Crunch

Obviously, crunch is achieved through an egg wash, flour dredge, egg wash, breading dredge. I believe we can make it crunchier. I believe we can eliminate the messy process of a dry-hand wet-hand wash station. I also believe in aliens. Don’t you?

The method

Enter karaage, or Japanese fried chicken, which became the gateway to the answer. In Japan, most fried foods are prepped first with potato starch instead of flour. Flour is a glutenous coating that doesn’t do the best job at trapping in and simultaneously deflecting moisture. Starches, on the other hand, are light enough to not get too oily and crisp up as the molecules clump together to deflect moisture. A superior crunch without any necessity for breading. In fact, some say that starches work best when created as a slurry and applied to the food.

What other cultures fry chicken? Chinese cuisine has a fried chicken method that dates back to the 6th century, written about in the Qimin Yaoshu. The secret includes cooking wine and soy sauce. Soy sauce adds the salt content while cooking wine adds both a sweetness and acidity when lightly brined. In addition to that, these ingredients add an umami flavor that buttermilk methods can’t match.

That leaves tenderization, which can be accomplished through spice - specifically, raw ginger. Ginger contains zingibain, a useful enzyme that tenderizes meat even more powerfully than a fat-laden buttermilk brine might. I know what you’re thinking: “What about that 2016 Wired article that demanded Americans stop adding raw ginger to their marinades?” Why are you still reading Wired? What good has the tech community ever brought to accessible and beautiful cooking?

After testing various recipes and iterating slowly between batches to the benefit of my partner, I settled on a few other logistics of the process, one of which being the Korean twice-fry. After frying chicken, moisture from the center of the meat migrates to the surface as the food cools. This makes the surface soggy when not eaten immediately. Letting the chicken cool and then frying it again helps to boil off the excess moisture, ensuring a crispy product for hours, even after refrigerated.

Armed with an unnecessary amount of fried chicken knowledge and my kitchen cabinets littered with post-it notes of ideating and iterating, affinity mapping feedback, and carefully constructing my recipe, I was ready to deliver my final artifacts.

Sweet victory

This is, indeed, a superior fried chicken. I served it with some charred slaw, rice, and fresh bread & butter pickles. The chicken’s sauce is a sweet and spicy barbecue using Szechuan chili crisp. It paired well with a Mexican lager.

Try it yourself and let me know what you think.

For the chicken:
- 3 pounds of boneless, skinless chicken thighs, trimmed and cut into 2-3 inch pieces

For the marinade:
- 1 tbsp ground mustard
- 3 tsp freshly grated ginger
- 1 bulb garlic, minced
- 4 tsp sugar
- dash of liquid smoke
- 1 tsp sesame oil
- 1 tbsp sriracha hot sauce
- 4 tbsp sake
- 4 tbsp rice vinegar
- 1/2 cup Mexican Coca-Cola
- 6 tbsp soy sauce (if gluten-free, use San-J Tamari)

For the fry:
- A neutral oil, like canola or peanut
- 2 cups potato starch
- 1/4 cup panko crumbs (if gluten-free, omit)
- 1 tsp kosher salt
- pinch of freshly ground pepper

Mix together all marinade ingredients until combined. Marinate your chicken thighs for 4 hours. 30 minutes before preparing to cook, remove them from the refrigerator and allow to come to room temperature.

In a large cast iron skillet, pour oil until it fills about 2/3 to the top. Heat to 350 degrees. While the oil heats, prepare a sheet pan with paper towels or newspaper below a wire rack.

In a bowl, combine the potato starch, panko if using, kosher salt, and ground pepper. One-by-one, remove 4-6 pieces of chicken and cover completed in dredging mixture, ensuring to get it in the crevices of the chicken thighs. Gently shake off any excess and carefully lower each piece of the batch into your heated oil. The key is to not let it sit in the dredge for too long, so make sure to prepare and fry in batches.

Fry for about 3 minutes, until just golden, before removing and placing on your wire rack to cool. After all batches are fried once, increase the oil temperature to 375 and fry each batch again until the crust is a deep golden brown and the chicken temperature reads at least 165.

Cover with your sauce of choice and serve however suits your heart.