 All right, y'all. We're just gonna make our delicious fried chicken. And this is the way I used to make fried chicken back years ago when I started the show. I've changed it since then, but it's still a good recipe. And our volume one cookbook, me and Chris are gonna fry a chicken today and show you how to do it. So we've got two cups of self-rising flour in here and I'm gonna add one and three quarter teaspoons of salt, one and a quarter teaspoons of pepper, two and a half teaspoons of paprika, and then a tablespoon of Hidden Valley Ranch. And I'm just gonna use my teaspoon to get the tablespoon, it's three of these, and that way I don't have to mess up another scooper. I'm gonna take a whisk and whisk all of this together real good so that when we dip our chicken, it gets a good coating on it and you wanna make sure you get all your spices and extend good and not have them on one side of the plate. Now I like to use pipe plates because they got sides on them and if you want to, you can do it the old way and throw it all in a Ziploc bag and put your chicken down in the Ziploc bag. Today, I'm gonna show you how to cut up this chicken right quick. Now I wanna be honest with you, I'll typically grab my chicken and I would cut her up in the sink, okay? But I want y'all to be able to see me cut up this chicken so you wanna get a young fryer chicken, not a hen. A hen is fatter, she's for roasting and if you try to fry her, she'll be chewy and you'll wonder what you've done wrong. Make sure on the package it says young fryer chicken, okay? Next, I start with legs and if you're new to it, you can take the skin, I'll show you an easy way and open it up and pull it back and when you do that, you can see a fat line on the meat. See that line of fat? And that's where you cut to get right through the leg. And you can do that with the thighs as well. If you want a good, nice, clean cut, they actually have the same thing. But what I like to do is I just like to pop it like that and go right through there and I cut off the excess. So there's a thigh. This is not a real big chicken, I can tell you that. All right, so when you've got the wing, you loosen the skin in between the two and then you just go right behind it like that. Now, some people cook the back and some people don't. I don't fry the back, but now I know a lot of people do. I just cut the back off and there you have it. And then now the breast is two pieces and you go right down the middle like so and you cut it. But now when I fry chicken and I tell you this in the book, you're gonna have these before you fry them. So don't fry a piece this big and you can half on this direction and then they're more like frying a thigh. But if you've got a really fat one, you really wanna go this direction like this. It's just according to how big a breast you got. So you just gotta have a good knife. But most of the time when it's a smaller chicken like this, I cut it the other way. And you'll notice that the skin come off. You'll notice the skin came off and actually chicken is good without the skin on the top. Me and Chris have tried it both ways. If you leave the skin on there, everybody thinks it's just delicious, but it actually holds a lot of grease. It makes the chicken real greasy. So don't worry about it if some of your skin come off. I'm using buttermilk. So you can soak your chicken in buttermilk overnight if you want to, but it's not required. You really need to dip your chicken into the batter and let it sit for 10 minutes before you drop your chicken in your oil and that way your crust will be nice and intact and it's not gonna fall off, okay? Sometimes it won't be any way, but to be on the safe side, it's good to do that. And it also helps get the chicken a little bit more to room, temperature, kinda, and not cool your grease off too much. It makes a really good crunchy crust too. So we're gonna grab our chicken. So you're just gonna grab a piece of chicken, make sure it's got buttermilk on it on both sides and then you're gonna dip it into your flour and do a really good coat of flour. I usually just really press it onto the chicken good and then once you coat it, you're going to shake it a little bit and put it right here and you're gonna let it sit about 10 minutes. So after you get them good and coated and we're waiting the 10 minutes, that's when your grease is gonna heat up. Now I have a lot of different fried chicken recipes. We have our famous fried chicken, which we batter with egg batter instead of buttermilk. We have our own seasoning that goes on that chicken and it's amazing. We also have the way that my granny made it in a skillet with just a little bit of oil and that way you use a lid and it doesn't cost as much because you're not wasting as much oil. So you can fry it cheaper that way for the family. So I've got that recipe online as well and I'll link all three recipes in the description post for you. So we're gonna turn a timer on. I'm gonna go ahead and turn my grease on after I wash my hands. So you'll see right after you batter it, it still kinda looks dry and you can look over here and then as it sits, it's gonna start looking more wet looking. All right, I got a good bit of grease in here. It's about an inch, inch and a half, I guess. An inch and a half. This is a three inch skillet so I think it's about an inch and a half. We're gonna turn it on high. I'm gonna actually put a lid on it to bring it up to a good hot temperature pretty quick. I'm just gonna drop a little piece of fat and then there's a test piece so that I can see about how hot my grease is getting. And when I drop this chicken, it's gonna cool it down some. It's pretty hot. There's a lid. And I got about enough room for another half of rest. So about half the chicken at a time. I'm gonna turn the heat down just a little bit because I don't want it to get too brown because of the buttermilk. Now I will say this, when you use buttermilk on a bone-in piece of chicken, it is automatically gonna turn a lot browner. So if you want it to be like golden pretty, then you need to use an egg wash. If you don't mind it looking dark, then you can use buttermilk. I typically nowadays, after I've been cooking since the show, use buttermilk on chicken tenders and fingers because they cook quicker. And then I use egg wash on bone-in. And that way it's a prettier color. So this is automatically gonna be a little darker because we're using the buttermilk. You can see that we have right here laid out some paper towels and I've got a cooling rack laid on top of it. And that's what our chicken's gonna sit down on. And you'll also notice when you're using cast iron that it doesn't evenly distribute the heat as much. So where the chicken is sitting right above the flame, it's going to get darker, okay? That's just the way it is when you're using a cast iron skillet. So just expect that, okay? Now to keep them from getting too brown, I'm gonna turn them already. If you've got a thermometer, it's great to use one and the biggest pieces of chicken. Or you can just use the time I tell you to. But you might wanna rotate them a good bit so that you don't get them too brown and turn your heat down. Once you turn the chicken, you can turn the heat down a little bit more. So your total cook time needs to be about 16 minutes, which is a long time. So that's why you gotta get that temperature down there and regulate it as it cooks. Cause the longer it cooks, the more the grease breaks down and you have to adjust that temperature. There's just really no other way to fry chicken the right way besides to walk it. It already looks delicious. So what we've done is turned it down as low as we can. As long as it's continuing to fry in that way, it won't get too brown. All right, we're gonna turn these and set our timer for another eight minutes. All right, we're gonna turn these over and I'm gonna turn my heat up just a little bit. For the last, so all they got is two minutes left. So we're turning up this heat. Okay, I turned that heat up just to give it a good sear before it gets out of here and it also gets this grease good and ready for the cold chicken coming back in. Now if you like this handy dandy little tool I'm using, it is called a pig tail food flipper and it has to say jacker. A lot of people buy the cheaper one when they go on the website. They click it and they see that there's cheaper ones, but they don't have this real sharp thin tip on them. And then they get all disappointed when they get them in the mail. So if you get one, make sure you use the link or at least make sure that it says jacker. All right, we're getting out the second batch. Start with the wing. Now we're gonna let it sit for a few minutes and then we're gonna eat. It's crunchy, Tammy. We're letting Chris taste from a zero to 10. That's a 10. For real? It's tender, it's crunchy. It's juicy. If you get that coating on it good and let it rest, you cook it 16 minutes and it's not gonna dry it out or anything, that's perfect. Let me let them sit up close. Let them see the inside of it. Turn it all around here. Perfectly done. All right, y'all, it's good and done. Yum, yum. And this is the chicken man. So this was my original chicken recipe and it's good, ain't it, Chris? Mm-hmm. Even before I learned a whole lot with colored belly cooks, I was a good cook. Mm-hmm. All right, we're just gonna cut into a piece and let you see how it looks. Oh, it is moist, ain't it? And good. Oh, it looks good. Look at this crust, y'all. Oh, my heavens. Holy smokes. That's good. I wish I could make this and mail it. I bought you one cooked boot. It's got some old capers in it that just can't, you can't go wrong with. We will see you guys next time on Colored Belly Cuts where we cook like our momma's did and you ladies out there that hadn't had your tautosh checked in October. Make sure you check them. See you next time.