Tyler Florence's Secret To The Juiciest Fried Chicken

Lovers of baking, grilling, and frying chicken will know there's a near-constant quest to find the juiciest, most tender chicken recipe possible among professional and at-home chefs alike. In the case of fried chicken, brining the poultry first and foremost will give it an incredible level of juiciness. Celebrity chef Tyler Florence knows this well, but doesn't consider it the key to his ultra-tender fried chicken. Instead, the South Carolinian takes things a step further by baking his chicken before cutting each part of the chicken up, breading them, and throwing them in the fryer; a seemingly counterintuitive method that works wonders when put to the test.

Florence demonstrated his use of this technique for making fried chicken in a video released from the 2015 Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, where he took the time to describe how and why he chooses to bake his fried chicken first. For starters, Florence bakes the chicken at a mere 200 degrees Fahrenheit (for two long hours) in order to allow the chicken to retain its fat while it cooks. "The fat inside the chicken itself doesn't get extracted," Florence explained. "When we cook it at 200 degrees, all the moisture stays in the chicken, and it cooks very slowly. The fat melts, but it stays inside the bird."

Tyler Florence's method isn't the first time the idea of pre-cooking chicken has been thought up (poaching chicken before grilling it is a common way to make the meat juicy), but it is a fairly unique way to handle the classic dish. By baking the chicken at just 200 degrees, not only does the oven do a great job of retaining the fat and making the end product tender and flavorful, but it also reduces the amount of time the meat requires in the fryer. Florence noted that individual pieces of chicken only take around six minutes to fry after using the pre-baked technique, making it a great choice for restaurants or event hosts looking to make dozens of pieces of fried chicken in very little time.

Florence warns that cooks shouldn't expect the chicken to "look like anything spectacular" right out of the oven because chicken should be baked at 400 degrees (and needs to achieve at least 165 degrees internally) to get optimal results. This low and slow bake in the oven will be far from enough to make the bird ready to eat. Instead, Florence recommends you cut the chicken up and bathe it in buttermilk, hot sauce, and sugar for an hour in the fridge before dredging it in your go-to flour mixture and frying it to perfection.