Image courtesy of ladybugbkt and Shuttershock.
One secret about fast food is that it’s often pretty easy to make the same greasy stuff at home, where it ends up tasting more delicious anyway. This is great news for those boycotting Chick-fil-A on account of its owner’s “traditional” views about same-sex marriage: It’s still possible to get your fried chicken sandwich fix and keep your moral principles intact. Serious Eats’ J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is on the case.
I don’t normally like to mix my food with my politics, but the thought of where my chicken sandwich dollars might be going is enough to leave a bad taste in my mouth, no matter how crispety-crunchety, spicy-sweet and salty that juicy chicken sandwich may be.
So in the interest of keeping my Chick-Fil-A consumption at a reasonable level, I did the only logical thing: figured out how to make them at home. Here’s how it’s done. And yes, you can even make ’em on a Sunday.
I’ll leave it to him to give the blow-by-blow directions, but here’s the general gist: Take a basic hamburger roll and toast it in a skillet with butter. Get some jarred pickle chips. Take a chicken breast and brine that sucker until it’s salty as all get-out.
Season it, dip it in milk and egg mix, dunk it in seasoned flour and fry it in peanut oil. (The real secret, apparently, is mixing some of the milk and egg mixture with the flour mixture before dipping in order to get a really textured, fast-food-worthy crunchy crust.)
For those who don’t understand what, exactly, is so addictive about this sandwich, Lopez-Alt explains: “This is no dry, stringy, bland chicken bosom, this is a breast of unparalleled juiciness, with a dense, meaty texture and deeply seasoned flavor.” And because you’re making it at home, you get to see exactly where that tastiness comes from. Not required for signature Chick-fil-A taste: funding to anti-equality organizations. Required: salt. So much salt. You knew that. But it makes it that much more real when you’re measuring it out yourself, doesn’t it?
