I Use This Amazing Ingredient to Make Eggless Fried Chicken
The only bad fried chicken is soggy fried chicken. (And even then, frankly, a quick air fry will fix it .) However, there are undeniably great ways to get a crispy crust, and they should always be considered. The karaage method , for example, or the quick-cook method , are examples. There’s another fried chicken trick I recently learned, and unlike the other two I mentioned, this one has no extra steps. There’s no three-ingredient batter, and you don’t have to dip it in a bowl of (still expensive) eggs. It’s one step with a simple flour substitution, and it makes all the difference.
Self-rising flour is the key
I’ve always used regular all-purpose flour for frying or potato flour for its superior crisping qualities, but self-rising flour was a complete surprise to me. Always on my grocery store shelves, this flour has never been particularly useful to me. For those who don’t use it often, self-rising flour is made up of a reliable ratio of all-purpose flour, baking powder, and salt. So if you want to make a quick pancake recipe, you can use a spoonful of the stuff and skip those other two ingredients from your recipe.
I know people in the UK use it a lot, but I’ve always shied away from being able to control the baking powder and salt in my baking. But while reading through the recipes in Still We Rise , a fantastic cookbook of biscuit recipes and other things you’d love to eat with biscuits, I came across the Glori-Fried Chicken Biscuit Sandwich. You guessed it: the recipe calls for self-rising flour.
Light, crisp and crispy coating
Following the recipe is a section of notes called “The Gospel of Fried Chicken,” and Council (the author) briefly describes why self-rising flour works. The salt in the recipe enhances flavor—no surprise there—but the baking powder plays a big role in giving fried chicken a thin, crispy crust. You don’t need to repeatedly dredge it in flour or egg wash to get that shiny crust.
As a leavening agent, baking powder is meant to lift and aerate our cakes and muffins, but it does this even in that thin layer that coats your chicken. When moistened and heated, baking powder reacts and releases carbon dioxide. This looks like tiny bubbles in cakes, but on chicken, it produces a delicate, dimpled crust.
How to Use Self Rising Flour for Fried Chicken
1. Brine
Whenever I fry chicken, I like to make a buttermilk brine if time allows. Yogurt works well too, and that’s what I usually use. Even an hour can make a difference in how juicy and tender the chicken is. I brined some skin-on chicken drumsticks in yogurt with a pinch of salt for about an hour. Then I made a flour coating.
2. Cover the chicken with sauce.
I mixed together about three-quarters of a cup of self-rising flour with a half teaspoon of salt (a little more salt is needed for fried chicken), a teaspoon of cornstarch (which provides extra starch for crunch ), and a pinch of garlic and onion powder.
Then comes the easy part: coating the chicken. I drop one chicken leg at a time into the flour and coat it completely. Just once. Then I let them dry on a rack while I heat up the oil.
3. Fry the chicken.
I heated about an inch of vegetable oil in a Dutch oven until it reached 350°F and seared them until they were browned on all sides and the internal temperature reached 160°F (cooking with the remaining five degrees, where the food continues to cook off the heat for a few minutes, brings the temperature to 165°F).
With literally the least amount of effort I’ve ever put into a fried chicken, I whipped up a batch of the best drumsticks I’ve had in a long time. And with cookouts and backyard parties approaching, you deserve that ease, too.
While I haven’t tried this self-rising flour coating on other fried pieces like chicken tenders, eggplant, tofu, or zucchini, I believe it would work just as well. In fact, I think I have a bag of tofu in the fridge right now. I know what I need to do.
If you’re looking for more egg-free alternatives while prices are still high, I’ve tried other ideas, including: