The Search for the Perfect Fried Chicken : High Flying Birds

You can tell a lot about a chef from the fried chicken he or she cooks. If, that is, you can find a chef who cooks fried chicken.

Most real chefs don’t consider the dish worthy of them. But I do remember having a particularly opulent fried chicken once at Trumps. Chef Michael Roberts had stuffed foie gras under the skin, then battered the bird and fried it. It was probably a dish that shortened your life every time you tasted it, which may be why the fried chicken that is now on Trumps menu is sans foie gras.

It’s still a pretty flamboyant bit of bird--large, heavily battered and fried so crisp it has an audible crunch. It comes with very good mashed potatoes and gravy, and excellent slightly bitter greens. The chicken itself, however, while moist and tender, is so heavily battered that it just doesn’t have much taste. Close your eyes and it could be fried anything.

Duplex is one of the few other upscale restaurants in town that offers fried chicken every night. But chef Mark Carter makes a different sort of bird. There’s nothing flamboyant about his modest plate of fried chicken; in fact it looks exactly like something your Aunt Millie might have made. This homey chicken is not too heavily battered and has a nice sprinkling of salt on the outside of the skin. It comes with fine homemade cole slaw too, and would be a perfect choice on a night you really wanted fried chicken but were paralyzed by fear of frying.

The very best fried chicken I’ve ever tasted? Without question it was the one made by Judy Rodgers at the Union Hotel in Benicia, just north of San Francisco. What made this chicken special was that once you got beneath the crisp coating your teeth bit into moist flesh that shot a rush of pure chicken flavor into your mouth. Judy Rodgers is now at San Francisco’s Zuni Cafe, where the only chicken she cooks is baked in a wood-burning oven. But I called to ask what she had done to make her fried chicken so special. “Nothing really,” she said. “We used chickens that had some character to begin with, but the main thing is that I cured them in rock salt for two hours. I believe that the salt concentrates the flavor and makes the chicken both firmer and more tender. Then I rinsed off the salt and soaked the chicken in buttermilk for another two hours to extract the salt. After that I dried the pieces of chicken and floured them and then let them rest for four to eight hours until they got a hard crust. And then I fried them--very carefully.”