I like to go against the grain.

So, its New Year's, the day when people put away the holiday cookies and dust off the treadmill. For me, its the perfect day to make some fried chicken:

Just call me Colonel Popeye.

The recipe for this fried chicken is one of the first things in Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc at Home, which is Chef Keller's cookbook aimed at mere mortals like myself (as opposed to culinary Gods). Like most of the other recipes in Ad Hoc, this one is manageable for a reasonably skilled at-home cook, but its still a stretch. Doing it right means buying and butchering a whole chicken, making lemon-herb brining liquid, brining the chicken for 10-12 hours, tempering it for another 90 minutes, preparing the flour/cayenne/paprika/pepper coating, executing a 3-step coating process, and then frying everything on the stove in the right order and without burning down your house. This is what Michael Pollan is talking about in his book Food Rules when he says that you can eat all the junk food you want, as long as you make it yourself. If I wanted to eat this chicken everyday, I would have to quit my job.

I started working on this Thursday night, when I went to Whole Foods for the ingredients and prepared the brining liquid. Today, I had no plans other than running and writing a sermon, so I spread the other chicken-making steps out over the course of the day. Early this morning, I cut the whole chicken into pieces and put it in the brining liquid. In the afternoon, I made the flour/spice coating and set it aside. A little later, I realized that I didn't need all the buttermilk I had bought for coating the chicken and decided to make some biscuits. There's a biscuit recipe in Ad Hoc, but it called for two whole sticks of butter to make only 12 biscuits. I was sure that the Weight Watchers ETools would crash if I tried to calculate the Points for that, so I turned to the very-helpful Cooking Light Everyday Favorites and found a more reasonable (and still quite tasty) recipe. A couple hours after I made the biscuits, I took the chicken out of the brine, rinsed it off, and let it come up to room temperature for the precribed 90 minutes.

Finally, a little before 8, it was time to fry. In the book, Chef Keller lays out a very specific order and timing for how to execute all the steps involved in cooking the chicken. I did my best to follow along, but I definitely made a few mistakes. Coating the chicken involved three steps: dredging in the flour/spice mixture, dipping in buttermilk, and then dredging in flour/spice a second time. After that, it all got fried in batches in oil heated to very precise temperatures. I screwed up the timing and temps a little, which made some of the coating come off and resulted in slightly oilier chicken than I wanted, but it still looked pretty good when I put it on the plate.

Then came the best part: the first bite. Chef Keller claims that his is the best recipe for fried chicken in the world. When I read that, I thought it sounded a little arrogant. After tasting it, I am a believer. This chicken is AMAZING. The lemon-herb brine makes the meat juicy and flavorful, and the flour/buttermilk/spice coating has all the crispy goodness you want from fried chicken with an added little kick from the cayenne and paprika. My version of this chicken- made with my amateur, semi-skilled, home-cook hands- is easily the best fried chicken I've ever tasted. I can not imagine what it must be like when the Man himself makes it. I'm not sure I could handle it. 

So, take that New Year's resolutions! I will definitely be putting in extra treadmill and spin class time to make up for this chicken, but it will be worth it. A delicious start to 2011!