uk1

KFC chicken has crumb and yours didn't ... and KFC, might not be as good as it was ..... nertheless it is all cooked in a pressure fryer........

BamaVol

Breading plus 11 herbs and spices. Do I have that number right? It's been so long since I've been in a KFC or seen an ad. I assume broasting doesn't have a seasoning requirement, so broasted chicken from different restaurants would likely have different flavor profiles.

All this talk of chicken is making me hungry.

javabytes

Crispy breading outside, juicy inside, is why (I believe) people enjoy fried chicken relative to other cooking methods. Broasted chicken claims to get you even juicier chicken with less fat than traditional fried chicken.

uk1

Funnily enough .....

I don't enjoy the drive down to our place in Devon so left home at 1am and arrived at 3am this morning. The special treat was bbq wings cooked in the airfryer and an elegant box of wine as a reward for getting us down safely.


Happy days!

phillygold

Yep, made from the Colonel's secret recipe of 11 herbs and spices! I can still hear the commercials now.

2 things about KFC. 1) The chicken is absolutely no where as good as it once was. For starters, the pieces are much smaller. I swear that they are frying pigeons in that place now.
2) Those 11 herbs and spices have changed as well. To the point where eating the chicken leads to a sure fire trip to the restroom a little later.

Thus...I no longer eat KFC. Plus, my own fried chicken tastes much better!!!

Madone59

AFAIK the Boarsting company in Wisconson that makes their version of borasting/ pressure frying equipment has seasonings too. Every place I have had it, it has been the same. If it says "Broasted" on the menu it always seems to have paprika based seasonings.

uk1

I must say I totally agree. Some of those southern places selling what grandma has been making in a cast iron skillet all her life is something you will never get from a pressure fryer or KFC.

cubbie

Just a few details:

The term "broasted" is trademarked by the Broaster Company of Beloit, Wisconsin (as at least one person mentioned above). A restaurant or food-service business that uses that or related terms to describe the equipment or process they use must be licensed to to so.

As this article on Broasting explains, "Colonel" Harlan Sanders, the founder of KFC, pioneered the use of pressure cookers for frying chicken. As the article also says, KFC chicken is still pressure fried (as uk1 said), although various types of pressure-frying equipment are used.

As it happens, there are at least three places that serve "broasted" chicken with equipment from that company within 5 miles of my house.

KFC and Chik-Fil-A, among other fast-food restaurant chains, serve pressure-fried chicken, but they do not advertise it as broasted chicken because they do not use equipment from the Broaster Company.

How broasted chicken differs from otherwise-pressure-fried chicken, I don't know, but I do know there's a lot more to fried chicken than the oil temperature and cooking pressure.

Delta Hog

I recall broasted chicken as being largely available in gas stations -- those types of gas stations that had a large fry station selling hot food along with the gum, drinks, and gas.

And yes, KFC is not what it used to be. My tastes have changed over the years, though, so I wondered whether that is a large part of it.

uk1

I was a bit surprised a few weeks back visiting a KFC to buy for the first time for a very long time a plain old KFC with some fries to take back and I really couldn't see anything that looked like traditional stuff I knew and wanted.

I remember the first KFC I had in the US, a long time ago. Not far from the Big Chicken in Atlanta. We still recall that experience.

Everything changes.

dolcevita

Is this change in KFC taste a result of moving away from hydrogenated oil? Krispy Kreme certainly changed significantly when they did, and not for the better.

Clint Bint

I'm still not quite sure how broasting is any different from deep-frying a piece of chicken coated in flour ?
The tastiest chicken I cook is always upside down in its own juices with nothing added.

uk1

I think the theory is that adding the pressure cooker aspect ensures the chicken is cooked quicker and more safely (pasteurisation) and is juicier as "drying out" is greatly reduced.

Clint Bint

I understand the fast food concept of broasting but juicier ? To me anything fried in oil tastes more of the oil rather than the meat juices.
I'm not really an expert however - I haven't eaten a fast food takeaway in decades.

uk1

If you taste the oil it isn't being fried correctly. Oil however is more efficient at caramelising surfaces because it is hot and in contact with all the nooks and crannies and it is the surface caramelisation which is where the majority of flavour comes from. So there is more of it. Longer cooking tends to dry out proteins as the juices start seeking the surface so fast cooking reduces oozing and retains internal juices. Decent pressure fryers properly used should be a perfect way of cooking chicken because they have precise temperature controls and timers which also means reliable replication. This is great for fast food as few people should safely attempt pressure frying at home. I think this is why so much of what many of us remember of earlier KFC is so tasty in recollection.

There is also a myth that all fried food is unhealthy. This is untrue. Most fried food is unhealthy because of it's preparation, but there has been a lot of interesting counter intuitive work ...including a PHD thesis from a guy in New Zealand that worked out what had been going "wrong" with chip frying .... and devised a methodology of making chips healthier and tastier. It is close to the Blumenthal approach .... slightly different.