How NYC’s Best Fried Chicken Sandwich is Made

[upbeat music]

Hi, I am Eric Huang, I'm the chef

of Pecking House here in Chinatown.

And today we're gonna make my perfect

fried chicken sandwich.

I started working in Michelin starred restaurants in 2010.

After a long, somewhat illustrious career in fine dining,

I make fried chicken now.

A perfect fried chicken sandwich has hot, crispy,

juicy chicken, nice soft bread, Kewpie mayonnaise,

chili oil, and bread and butter pickles.

Let's make a fried chicken sandwich.

Let's make a fried chicken sandwich. I like the knife hand.

It feels more strong and confident.

[upbeat music]

When making a fried chicken sandwich,

I think thighs or breast meat are the way to go.

We use thighs because I think it has a lot

better of a texture.

I'm gonna look through these chicken thighs.

I'm cool with all these little extra bits here.

They're just gonna be more interesting fried textures later.

Obviously, western culture, kind

of puts a preference on white meat.

We're in Chinatown. Chinese people love dark meat.

If you cook dark meat past 185,

that is the temperature after which collagen, gelatin,

all those things break down.

It's gonna be really tender.

The buttermilk marinade is going

to increase that perception.

Cartilage is never gonna cook down,

but we wanna remove it for like a boneless eating

experience in a sandwich.

Here's a little bit of something here. I'll cut that out.

Just a little piece.

So when you're poking through the grocery store aisle

for chicken thighs, look for ones that are big and uniform

and you'll be able to make a really nice chicken sandwich.

All right, let's buttermilk

marinate/brine/season our chicken here.

So we're gonna obviously start off with some buttermilk.

This is kind of a weak acid

and that helps with improving the texture

of what we're marinating.

And it's gonna add a little bit of fat

and serve as sort of a binder

for the other things we're adding.

So we call it the marinate step,

but it's actually combining a lot of steps.

We're marinating, we're seasoning,

and we're brining all at the same time.

Brining basically means that you're adding salt

to your product and

that will help it retain moisture and water.

This is our seasoning mix.

This is a blend of salt, sugar and MSG.

Three parts salt, one part MSG, one part sugar.

That for us is the perfect balance

to bring the moisture attention, savoriness

and just like a hint of sweetness to balance the salt out.

And whenever you're seasoning meat,

you're using more than you think

because meat just really takes a lot of salt

to get seasoned all the way through.

And obviously MSG, I've been on my soapbox here many times

talking about MSG

and why it has been wrongly maligned throughout history.

Anyone trying to tell you that MSG in crystalline form is

different from MSG and tomatoes is fear mongering

and giving you bad science.

And now I'm gonna add some Dijon mustard here.

You can use any kinda mustard. I just like Dijon.

When you cook mustard, the pungency dies down,

and a lot sulfur compounds dissipate.

So really what it adds is all the savory mellow notes

that are behind the spiciness.

I'm gonna add garlic powder, huge prevalent ingredient

in southern fried chicken.

Onion powder as well.

I'm gonna add my five spice powder.

Five spices, primarily the Anise flavor

from the star Anise pods.

Such a prevalent flavor in all of Chinese cooking.

And then this is kind

of our secret little trick, we add flour.

So the flour is going

to absorb the moisture from the buttermilk

and the chicken overnight.

That's gonna cause the starch granules to swell with water

and that's what gives gluten its strength.

And giving the hydration,

giving the gluten some strength is going

to improve the crust later.

We're gonna marinade this at least for 12 hours.

24 is probably ideal.

[upbeat music]

Chicken, it has been marinating.

I'm gonna dredge it.

Our dredge is a mix of flour, potato starch, corn starch,

marries a lot of crunchy and crispy textures.

Corn starch, potato starch, definitely on the crispy side.

Flour more on the crunchy side.

So I think this is right in the middle.

We're gonna let it sit in the dredge for a little bit,

because it's a thigh and there's a lot of uneven surfaces

as you can see, there's a lot of craggly textures

to be over here.

If you don't literally press the flour into it,

it won't stick to, shake it off a little bit.

And then we use EverCrisps, a modified starch.

It's basically Benefiber, modified weed dextrin.

We use about 10% by weight of the dredge.

And what that does is slows the movement of water.

So it traps water.

And that makes for some super crispy chicken.

I think the biggest mistakes that home cooks make is

they don't get the dredge timing quite right.

They either go too quickly and it's not coated evenly.

And then they get this like patchy fried chicken

where the crust kind of falls apart,

or they let it sit too long and it over hydrates

and it becomes like a really thick shell

that doesn't have like a lot of nice crispy textures to it.

It's kind of right in the middle

and it's kind of a visual cue.

You can kind of see it where there's all these

little small bits.

So I as a time reference, use for about a minute

or two to sit in the dredge,

making sure it's really evenly coated.

And then go into the oil. I gently lay it in there.

You probably don't have one of these in your home.

I don't blame you. Deep fryers are dangerous, messy.

I recommend pan frying at home.

I'm frying it at 325 degrees Fahrenheit.

That's kind of the Goldilocks zone

where the starches in the protein are going to brown

and the water is still going to evaporate.

If you go in too cool with your oil,

you're not creating enough steam.

The steam that's escaping the chicken is repelling the oil,

which is going to prevent your crust from being too greasy.

If it's too hot, obviously it's going to burn

and if it's too dark that's unpleasant.

So 325 F is kind of the golden zone.

This is gonna be frying for about eight minutes,

but that's just a guideline.

For true precision use a thermometer.

The temperature for cooking chicken is 165 F

for dark meat, for getting the right texture

where it's tender, it's not bouncy and it eats well.

Like in a sandwich, you need to get past 185 F.

Past the point where gelatin

and collagen will break down.

We're also gonna be double frying.

So this is the first fry, where we wanna get

the protein to the temperature we want, so above 185 F.

Resting, the most important thing we're trying

to achieve is just bringing down the temperature

of the protein, letting the moisture redistribute.

When we fry it the second time,

we're really just bringing the crust back

to where we want it.

Hot, shatteringly crisp.

That's kind of the whole purpose behind resting it.

This looks nice and rested. This is still quite hot.

So for our second fry, we're gonna do about a minute

to make the crust really, really, really crispy.

Obviously, fried chicken needs

to be somewhere on the spectrum of crispy, crunchy.

Crispy is the front of your teeth.

Crunchy is the back of your teeth.

We try to go right in the middle,

maybe a little bit more on the crispy side.

All right. Chicken.

fried for the second time.

This is our chili oil. Pecking Houses chili oil.

This is what makes Pecking House, Pecking House.

It looks very simple,

but there is a lot of love and technique in here.

We toast our own chilies, toast our own Sichuan peppercorns.

We grind them ourselves. We use Tianjin chilies.

They're like a medium heat.

We add sugar, salt, MSG, vinegar powder.

We bring acidity to it. And then we make an herb duck fat.

Duck fat basically improves anything that's fried.

Also high quality Sichuan peppercorns.

The redder they are, the better they are,

the more citrus aromas they'll have

and the more tingly they'll be.

And then we're gonna dunk it.

I used to delicately paint this on, but we got too busy.

So we started just dunking chicken in.

And you wanna do this when the chicken is hot

and the chili oils room temperature

'cause then they're gonna kind of repel one another.

It's gonna drain ever so slightly. Look at it.

Look at this thing, it's gorgeous, isn't it?

So we didn't trim it up too much.

So you see, there's all these little crispy textures,

that's gonna come through really beautifully.

when we put this on a brioche bun.

We're gonna let it drain while we build

the rest of our sandwich.

[upbeat music]

I am gonna toast this bread up. We're using a brioche bun.

You can use butter.

I like using mayo because this is what makes

for a really even crust.

And basically what's gonna happen here is the mayonnaise is

going to break into oil and egg.

And brown, really beautiful.

Brioche has a ton of butter already.

So I don't think we need more butter.

Toasting creates a lot of Maillard reactions.

The browning caramelized notes kinda bring out

the sweetness in the bread.

And also heating up bread, especially brioche changes it.

That makes it a little more chewy feeling

when you're eating it.

I really like pressing bread

while it's toasting on a griddle.

If you are making a singular perfect sandwich

as we are today, then I highly recommend this step.

All right, so we have all the things.

We have our beautifully toasted brioche.

We have our Kewpie mayonnaise,

different from normal mayonnaise.

As you can see here, it has a very dense texture,

almost like a shiny appearance to it.

And it stands very firm and smooth in this way.

Having tasted these side by side

with kind of more pedestrian mayonnaise, if you will.

I think the Kewpie makes a big difference.

Bread and butter pickles, crinkle cut.

A little bit sweet. Definitely a little bit tangy.

And then of course we have the fried

chicken thigh dipped in chili out.

And then as I was saying, you have

to give it a delicate little smoosh, just a little bit.

You don't wanna smash the bread.

I don't know how to say smoosh in Spanish though.

So I think my staff think I'm crazy.

Look at that. Glorious, look at all those textures.

Looks like a food style ad except

it's completely edible and delicious.

You know, I really love that we didn't trim this up too much

and we weren't too precious about making it a very

specific uniform shape.

You know, it's not like a burger or anything.

It's got all these kind of craggly textural bits.

I think that's the stuff that makes it really wonderful.

[chicken burger crunching]

That's pretty good, man. Look at that, structural integrity.

Took a singular bite out of it and nothing moved.

It's checking all the boxes.

Structural integrity, crispy, seasoned, juicy, hot.

It's got the nice texture

of the pillowy bread against the crispy, meaty chicken.

Little bit of popper zing

and crunch from the pickles, creamy mayo.

It's good man. It's really, really good.

Chicken sandwiches. There's a reason they're so popular.

They just hit all the things in your brain,

in your silly little caveman reptile brain.

This lights all the things up, makes you happy.

You need a little bit of that

'cause it's dark out there, you know?