Time for the great debate

buttermilk and flour
anything else is garbage (which I may still consume if sufficiently desperate)

Potato starch/cake flour 50/50 blend.

CAPTAIN CRUNCH

Cereal.

Panko, as I'm an exotic weeb.
Also I like sushi!

It depends on the context

Is it buffalo wings? Then flour and buttermilk.

Is it Chicken Parm? Then breadcrumbs.

Coca Cola and flour. You're welcome.

Brine in the cola or just brush?

>using any of those if your intention is to let it swim in fat for a few minutes.

>hey guys i've been on Veeky Forums for the past three weeks let me tell you it'll change your life

Crushed Lays potato chips just like The King liked.

There's no room for positivity on the internet

Brine that shit. It's supposedly how they make the best fried chicken in the US at Willie Mae's. I've had it several times and can vouch for it.

>hey guys i'm here to show that I can make fried chicken with using only breadcrumbs because I wanna show how cutesy and crafty I am, since I cook at dinner parties

neither
seasoned cornstarch for the win

First one, then the other.

>egg + hot sauce, seasoned flour
This is the correct answer

>corn
Monsanto shill detected.

Mix cornflour with plain flour 1:3 by volume respectively for fried chicken. Unless you have pastry flour, in which case, just use that. You want some protein in the flour for browning but higher amounts of starch for crunch. Pastry flour has the perfect ratio while plain flour has a tad too much protein and should be cut with cornflour to both bring the protein content down and the starch content up.
Dredge chicken cutlets in flour then dip in egg wash then coat in breadcrumbs for cutlets.

Pakoda mode: mix chickpea flour and cornflour with a bit of baking powder and salt then triple coat the chicken: dredge once then let sit long enough for the salt to leach moisture out then dredge again and repeat. Finally, dredge a third time and into the hot oil it goes.

someone explain breadcrumbs to me. you can get perfectly crispy restaurant quality chicken without breadcrumbs. so why do people still insist on using them? is it just a meme like cream in carbonara where someone stupoid recommended it once and everyone started doing it not knowing any better?

In ye olde days, fine breadcrumbs (back then, known as breadmeal) was used as a substitute for flour in some recipes as a way to reduce waste (using up bread gone too stale to enjoy in other ways) and to save money (by using old bread that would otherwise be tossed than using fresh flour, which means spending money). There are, for example, noodles and dumplings made with breadcrumbs/breadmeal rather than or in addition to flour. There are even recipes subbing in breadmeal for flour when making a roux.
Knowing this, I strongly suspect breadcrumbs/breadmeal were first utilised in frying as yet another way to sub it in for flour to scrounge another couple pennies where possible.

Flour. People who use breadcrumbs should be flogged.

Both though

I like shrimp with both flour, then egg, then breadcrumbs, but chicken should just be coated with flour. No batter, no egg wash ever.

that doesn't explain the panko meme or traditional recipes from my grandma's generation all used plain flour. the breadcrumb thing is all millenials trying to make tendies at home.

potato or corn starch is the best because it stays extremely crispy way longer

I use both when I make fried chicken.

Sure it does.
As flour became more accessible, its use became more widespread and it caught on and spread.
As for millenials using breadcrumbs, lolwut? Since when is breadcrumb a millenial thing? My mother is fucking ancient and uses breadcrumb to fry shit because the only shit we fry in my country are cutlets, dough and what Americans call 'funnel cake.'

As for the panko meme: all nip foods have been getting more and more "cool" in the west since the late 80s. The logical end of this progression is widespread western consumption of whale and dolphin.

Flour or tapioca/potato starch is even better

like I said your reasoning doesn't make sense since older fried chicken recipes are more likely to use flour than breadcrumbs. kfc is from the 30s, and all the old ladies making fried chicken for church dinners all use flour breading. the only time I ever see people recommend bread crumbs is online.

also cutlets and chicken kiev or chicken parmesan aren't the same as fried chicken.

>those people who use crunched up corn flakes
I don't care what your friend HEARD about
nobody does it because its not good! fuck you

>the 1930s is, like, a really, really long time ago.
lol
Maybe if you were born in the 2000s.

if the great depression wasn't enough to make people use old bread to fry chicken instead of flour what was?

>being this fixated on one point only while ignoring the other ones
Asperger's much?

I'm not the one forcing a dumb theory that's obviously wrong

reread the posts : )

that’s crazy . i like these things too. i even like kimchi
i’m hoping to marry oriental

/thread

We only used breadcrumbs if we were doing cutlets or baked chicken. Breadcrumbs for southern style fried chicken ends with chunky batter or a lot of burnt crap in the oil.

I use crushed Frosted Flakes.

fite me

It's a tradition, can be practical if the breadcrumbs are homemade, and can be easier to add a crunch to the chicken or add a different taste/texture if desired you fucking absolute moron. It's not some "crafty millenial thing". It's like asking why someone uses extra virgin olive oil when "light-tasting" exists. ffs

It's not even like "panko" is a Japanese thing outside of American branding. It's closer to traditional home breadcrumbs. If all of east Asia kept making normal ketchup while Heinz changed over to the green and purple shit for a couple generations, would we call the red stuff "kechappu" when it was reintroduced?

Certainly it has nothing to do with Asian chicken-frying, where the baseline is a flour-starch mix and the questions are "add egg or no" and "add fried batter drops or no".

seasoned potato starch

srs

seasoned potato starch
egg wash w/ a bit of milk
then
seasoned potato starch

enjoy your x-treme crisp

also marinate in buttermilk and pickle brine overnight
the seasoning in the potato starch should be a bit of salt, a hefty amount of finely/freshly ground black pepper, paprika, and a bit of cayenne

Original breadcrumb theorist here.
When I said 'ye olde days,' I wasn't talking about any point in history anyone you know or anyone you know might know or anyone you know might know might know would have been alive. I'm talking way, way, way, way, way before that. Before America. Before African slaves in North America. Before KFC.
Fried chicken, in its original Scottish form (from which southern fried chicken gets its roots) was made as I described: breadcrumbs.
Furthermore, without the aid of reliable storage, people back then had to buy fresh flour every time they intended to use any, which costs money. This is why I said 'fresh flour' in my post. It needed to be purchased freshly milled because otherwise (again: because of lack of proper storage), it would get infested with insects, which is money out the window. On the other hand, bread was something a peasant was going to have daily anyway, so he always had some around to use and, owing to its nature as a relatively solid mass, bread is more shelf-stable than fresh flour was at the time.
I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. I thought you'd be able to connect the dots.

With flour becoming more accessible due to better storage, it became more common to use at home.
As for why breadcrumb still happens with some iterations of fried chicken, I would guess it's because the US still has people moving there from the old world, where breadcrumb was never ousted by flour in the use of frying chicken.

Does that make sense?

I was at a friend's place and she fried up some chicken coated in Cap'n Crunch crumbs. She served it with some chili-spiked maple syrup for drizzling over it. Was fucking wonderful. If that's good, I can't imagine cornflakes being so bad.

Your fanfiction about historical food preparation would be funny if it wasn't sad to think someone might believe it.

First off, chicken was a luxury food in the west, even compared to other meats, until the early 20th century. You certainly wouldn't see it as peasant food, never mind the food of peasants who could barely scrape together flour.

That said, you're also wrong about the shelf stability of flour vs. bread. Historical bread goes unchewably hard (yet still gratable or choppable!) over the course of a few days, while the shelf-life concern with flour was its tendency to go rancid after several months if the wheat wasn't mechanically degermed. Insect contamination at the household level was not considered as significant, and in any case the modern state-of-the-art technology for keeping flour pure was still what it was 3,000 years ago: putting it in a jar, ya dingus.

Incidentally, there's no evidence that a breaded coating is particularly Scottish; the oldest extant Scottish fried chicken recipe is presented as a recent German import and calls for a batter, in fact.
archive.org/stream/b21530130#page/268/mode/2up

Sorry that your expertise from fantasy novels and what you remember your grandma (tl note: named McGee, other three grandparents were Italian) doing doesn't count in reality.

a tradition where? why do I only hear about it online then while all of the traditional recipes in restaurants and cook books use flour?

>chicken is a luxury food
When and where? What's a luxury in one place and time is poverty food in others. The oft-mentioned lobster is a prime example.

>flour is more shelf stable than bread because jars
The isles were aceramic from the 4th century AD until the early 16th century when the pottery wheel was reintroduced so jars with proper lids were rare in common households. Flour was easily contaminated so, for home use, it was purchased fresh.
>bread would go stale but flour would go rancid
Stale bread is still edible in the form of breadcrumb but rancid flour is not. That's my whole point of using crumb v flour.
>but the rancidity took months
If the weevils didn't get to it first.

>no evidence that a breaded coating is particularly scottish
Maybe not. And I never said it was. I said that old school Scottish methods used breadcrumb when frying chicken. Many-to-most old world fried chicken recipes use breadcrumb.

>lady clark
Published in 1909, user. Hannah Glasse pre-dates her by 200 years. And uses breadcrumbs.

>but hannah glasse is English
Barely. Her family is from the Breamish, which borders the Cheviots. She included several recipes of Scottish origin in her cookbook, such as cock-a-leekie.

>expertise from fantasy novels
Hate fantasy novels.
>grandma named mcgee
Not a terribly common name in my part of the world.
See above: I said we fry cutlets, dough and strauben natively in my country. Where could that be?

Finally, there's no reason to get this upset about it. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. I offered a possible explanation but I in no way said it was the only possible explanation. This is how inductive reasoning works.

Austria and Switzerland for two. Look up backhendl IE Swiss/Austrian fried chicken.

>When and where?
In the British Isles after the Conquest, followed by the American South through the 1700s and 1800s, ya pompous misinformed bint.

Flour, it's not even a question.

How do I into cooking? What are important starting recipes to learn?

Plain corn flakes.

ok so all of the breadcrumb plebs are yuros who don't know shit about fried chicken? it's all starting to make sense now.

>the american way is the only way
t. Breitbart

Egg -> flour and spices -> egg -> flour and spices
It's how we make the chicken at work and it turns out pretty decent fampai

what do you guys do with the leftover egg

Down the sink or feed it to the dog.

my grandma used to mix the leftover crumbs with the egg and make dumplings to fry in the oil

she was a terrible cook though

I've been thinking of using grated firm tofu as an outer coating, with Greek yogurt as the "batter/wash." Tofu fries up real nice, crunchy, and firm compared to something wheat based, and can be fried longer, since I sometimes have a tendency to fry at a suboptimal temperature where the coating is more than done while the chicken isn't, so I have to finish in the oven. I already use Greek yogurt regularly since it's thicker and stickier so you use less to coat the chicken, and when I fry just plain or marinated tofu, the outer crush is always super nice but not too greasy like fried chicken.

people outside of america eat kfc. how many muslim chicken restaurants are there in america?

I have to admit, I've never heard of a grandma that was a bad cook.

KFC isn't done the same way abroad as in the US.