There are three nominees for my favorite fried chicken. In chronological order, they are as follows:
1970s – Rachel’s in Ehrhardt, SC. Â My family sometimes went there after church on Sunday when I was little. It was a family-style restaurant in a beautiful, white, old house with a wraparound gray porch. I remember in particular two things–one was once chasing a lizard around the concrete steps to that porch, and the other is the fried chicken being the highlight of any visit. I once went back to the kitchen and saw it being cooked on the stove in huge cast-iron pans. It was a long time ago, so I don’t recall what made it so good, but I do remember it was delicious.
1980s – Zach’s cafe on the campus of Wofford College, Spartanburg, SC. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, lunch could be a tight fit for any student who had one class ending at 12:20 and another starting at 1pm. To relieve some of the pressure on the cafeteria during that lunch crunch, they started offering lunch at the small cafe across campus near the (now old) football field. One of their dishes which I tried not to miss on the days it was served was fried chicken. The chicken breasts were large, juicy, and remarkably flavorful. I wondered for a couple of decades how they got such a good flavor throughout the meat, which was good not just by the skin but well on down to the bone.
2000s – Home. When I was growing up, my mother always let each child pick what he or she wanted to eat on his or her birthday. For a while my choice was always steak, particularly when Dad started marinating them in Italian dressing before grilling them. As a teenager, quantity became more important and I switched to Mom’s spaghetti. After I moved to Boston for grad school, though, I started requesting Mom’s fried chicken. Mom had given me her old electric frypan when I moved away. I used it in our first apartments mostly for French toast, pancakes, and fried chicken. I did most of the cooking, but on my birthday, my loving wife Debbie would oblige me with fried chicken, even though she didn’t like how grease splattered all over everything, made the apartment (later, house) smell greasy, and required a lot of attention and time for turning and adjusting the temperature while it cooked in several batches. We started with my mom’s recipe, who had in turn gotten it from her mother-in-law (with the addition of garlic salt, courtesy of my grandmother’s cook). Somewhere in the 2000s, I started using brine for some pork and chicken recipes on the grill. This led to brining the turkey I roasted for Thanksgiving as well as the realization that this was probably the source of the flavor I had enjoyed in the fried chicken from Zach’s at Wofford. In addition to this leap in the flavor of the chicken, my wife also purchased a large Fry Daddy, in which she could deep-fry a whole chicken all at once, more quickly, with less splatter, and without any need for turning and temperature adjustment. Whereas before having Debbie’s Fried Chicken was a once-a-year occurrence on my birthday, now sometimes I come home from work or a bike ride to be delightfully surprised by the aroma of chicken frying–e.g., simply because chicken was on sale at the store. Between the flavor, the frequency, and the availability, I have to give the nod for the winner to DFC.
As an aside, I note that Debbie making fried chicken is certainly an exception to the “10,000-Hour Rule”. Making chicken on average only about 1.1 times for 15 years (maybe 20-30 hours) in 2006, she was definitely an expert by then.