The Genius Way To Add More Spice And Flavor To Your Fried Chicken

Fried chicken is serious business. We love it so much, over 5 billion servings of fried chicken meals are sold every year in the United States alone — and that's just counting servings sold at quick-service restaurants. We don't know exactly how much homemade fried chicken the country eats every year, but we can be sure that a lot of us take it seriously enough to obsess over perfecting it. We get tips from expert chefs on how to upgrade fried chicken, fiddle around with different seasonings and sauces, and even swap regular flour for another kind to get the crispiest chicken possible.

Another way to boost the flavor of fried chicken is by adding a few extra ingredients to the frying oil. One method starts by tossing some garlic into your oil until it browns a little, making sure to remove it before it burns. Follow this up by adding onions, scallions, and sliced jalapeños, cover your cooking oil with a lid, then cook everything on medium-low heat for about six to eight minutes. This loads the oil with sweetness, spice, and earthiness that completely coats the chicken, packing each bite with a ton of flavor. The aromatics don't even have to go to waste if you use the fried veggies as toppings for the chicken, which adds all that delicious caramelization you get from the Maillard reaction to the overall flavor profile. The best part about this technique is you don't need to stick with the above ingredients; if you want to experiment with other kinds of spices, you totally can.

This is actually a centuries-old technique to get more flavor from spices. Blooming spices, also known as tempering, involves extracting as much flavor from these ingredients as possible by heating them in fat. In this regard, the adage "fat carries flavor" is more than just a catchy alliteration; it's a matter of chemistry. Many of the flavor compounds you find in garlic, spices, and other aromatics are fat-soluble, meaning they can be pulled from these ingredients and absorbed into oil. At the same time, the aromatic compounds in these foods are volatile, which means they evaporate quickly. When you fry the ingredients, the heat causes these volatile compounds to be quickly released and "caught" by the oil, essentially trapping all those scents and flavors inside to give you a more intensely flavored frying oil. When you bite into chicken fried in this oil, the fat disperses all over your mouth, coating your tongue in all that flavor.

If you plan on using this technique the next time you fry chicken, keep in mind that some of these compounds might not stand up too well to the heat. For instance, allicin, the compound that gives garlic its signature pungent flavor, starts to degrade pretty quickly at around 167 degrees Fahrenheit — well below the temperature you need your oil at to cook perfect fried chicken. If you want to give your fried chicken a bigger punch of garlic — or any other ingredient with similarly delicate flavor compounds — you're better off tossing the cooked meat in infused olive oil instead.