Tuesday Dinners

Fried Chicken Thighs

Decidedly less than 11 herbs and spices.

⏲️ Prep Time
10 Minutes (+ 4 hours rest)

⏲️ Cook Time
30 Minutes

🍴 Serves
6

Ingredients

Meat

  • 3 pounds skinless, boneless chicken thighs

Marinade

  • 1 cup buttermilk (1 cup milk + 1 tablespoon vinegar + 5 minutes)
  • 1 egg
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • Pinch of black pepper
  • 1/2 tsp garlic powder
  • Pinch of cayenne

Flour Mixture

  • 1 1/2 cups flour
  • 1/2 cup corn starch
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 3/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
  • 1 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon cayenne

Directions

  1. Mix all the ingredients from the marinade together and add your chicken thighs (can be cut smaller if desired)
  2. Rest in an airtight container (in the fridge) for 4 hours to overnight
  3. Combine all dry ingredients and mix until evenly distributed, add any excess marinade to batter
  4. Place all chicken into flour mixture, and mix until evenly coated
  5. In a pot of hot oil add your chicken (knocking off excess flour/batter before adding) and cook for 6 minutes before flipping and cooking for another 4 minutes
  6. (Optional) If pieces of chicken are large cook in oven at 425 for another 15-20 minutes to make sure cooked thoroughly

Step by Step Directions

Make your marinade by combining the buttermilk and egg and some of the spices.

If you don’t have buttermilk you can really easily make it by adding a tablespoon of an acid (vinegar/lemon juice) to the milk, stirring and then waiting five minutes. I wondered if you could substitute a vinegar based hot sauce for this but chickened (ha) out without trying it.

The buttermilk marinade helps the chicken stay moist while we’re frying it, and we add some of the spices to help the chicken be more flavorful.

Now if you’re an idiot like me you realized after the fact that you were going to be using a bag to marinate the chicken, so transfer the liquid to the bag and add your chicken.

If you want to do the entire chicken thigh feel free, I roughly halved mine because I imagined it would be easier to manage in the oil and when coating.

Mix together your flour, cornstarch and baking powder with your remaining spices. Using both flour and cornstarch creates a different gluten structure which should make the coating more crispy. The baking powder should hopefully create a slight “rise” in the crust giving us more surface area to work with.

Dribble your excess marinade in the flour, this should create some nice clumps that when fried will be delicious.

Thoroughly coat the chicken in your flour mixture. You can add all of them to the bowl at the same time, no need to piecemeal it out. Make sure to press the chicken down into the flour mixture.

*Note: I would not expect your mixture to look like this. I believe because my chicken thighs weren’t fully defrosted that a bunch of additional moisture got into the mixture.

Heat up some oil on the stove. If you don’t own a thermometer then a good way to check that the oil is hot enough is to add a same amount of either water (don’t pour a glass in, just flick some off your fingers) or some extra coating from your chicken and the object should start to fry.

Shake off any excess batter from the chicken and place into the oil. Make sure not to crowd the pot too much or your oil temperature will lower.

Fry the thighs for 6 minutes before flipping them over and frying for an additional 4 minutes. You can also continue frying until the batter reaches your desired color, just remember that it will continue to darken as you take it our of the oil.

Remove from the oil and let the chicken rest/drain on some paper towels to get rid of the excess oil.

Continue in batches until all of your chicken has been fried.

If you are worried that the chicken hasn’t cooked all the way through don’t be afraid to throw it in the oven for a couple of minutes (or as long as you need). Fried chicken is good but it’s not worth getting food poisoning over.

Enjoy.

Variations

  • Change up your spice mixture, you can make it hot, more basic, flavor it like a wing from a restaurant, it’s up to you.
  • Try different cuts of meat. Chicken breast can work, you can use wings, you can cut it up into nuggets. Take a mallet to the chicken thighs and make them as thin as you can, it’s up to you.
  • Make less of a “wet” batter. I think mine turned out the way they did because the chicken thighs were not fully defrosted (extra water). You’re the master of your own destiny, be the master of your own chicken.

Unsolicited Feedback

  • UG: I like the Colonel’s better.
  • SL: Why didn’t you make hot chicken? I could have handled a lot more heat.
  • LK: Why didn’t you make nuggets? I like nuggets better.