Beat Up Chicken Is the Standard Procedure

The standard breading procedure is one of the easiest, and probably the most useful methods used in the average professional kitchen. It is always the same, even the ingredients change slightly.

The first thing you want to do is prep your main ingredient for frying. In this case I used some whole, boneless organic chicken breast from the market. I cut them in to manageable pieces.

The smaller the pieces, the faster it will cook. You want the center of your food, especially if it is a meat that needs to be cooked all the way through like chicken, to be done at the same time as the coating on the outside. You don't want it to look like the picture below where the outside of the chicken is brown, but the inside is still thawed. If you're getting this, that means you have the oil too hot.

THIS IS A BAD EXAMPLE

In every single case you are almost always going to take your protein or vegetable, cut it into manageable pieces, then season it thoroughly. In the picture you can see chicken that I've drained after being brined in a solution of salt, pepper, dried oregano, fresh basil, rosemary and thyme for an hour. You don't have to brine your chicken, but letting your protein sit in it's seasoning/marinade/brine really adds another level to the end product.

So once you've seasoned your main ingredient, you're going to lightly coat it in seasoned flour

 In European and American Kitchens, all purpose white wheat flour is the norm, but you can use corn starch, soy flour, really any finely ground seed/grain. This initial coating/dusting allows the rest of whatever coating you're using to stick. If whatever you're breading/battering to be fried is dry and the flour doesn't stick, that's OKAY. I would suggest just using a wet batter in that case and skipping the standard breading procedure altogether.

There's multiple ways you can go from here. If you fry that just like that, and the toss it in some buffalo sauce or hot sauce and butter, you have some great boneless buffalo wings.

If you want your chicken to look like Church's or KFC, you're going to have to follow the standard breading procedure. Which begins with beating up some eggs:

When your eggs are all beaten up, toss your lightly floured chicken in and coat thoroughly. From here on it gets messy or involves some scalding hot oil, so be careful! Wash your hands after everystep if you are dealing with raw meat!

So once you've got your chicken coated nicely in that egg batter/wash, your going to take the chicken out (let it drip for a minute), and drop it in some seasoned flour like so.

If you want it extra crispy, take it out of the flour and drop it back in the egg wash, then put it back in the flour and coat it in again.

And maybe a third time for good measure. From there, it's straight into the oil you've got going in either a fryer set at 350, or 1/2 inch of oil in an oversized skillet, and cook until it's thoroughly browned and the meat is firm. If you did it right, it should look something like this:

 Now let's say you're in the mood for chicken, but something different. Try waffle battered fried chicken. Now, usually I would recommend doing everything from scratch, but this saves a lot of time. Start with the lightly dusted chicken, but instead of using egg wash, dip it into waffle batter...

It should look something like this in terms of coating:

 And drop it in the fryer.. flip over halfway through when the bottom becomes a deep golden brown.

 If you don't like using flour as a coating for your chicken, after you dip it in egg, you can dip in instant mashed potato flakes, like I did below.

Below is the finished result of the three kinds of fried chicken. Top is the traditional, bottom is mashed potato coated, and the sides are waffle batter chicken.

There a lot of ways you can apply the same technique to other foods. Take some zucchini, coat it in corn starch, then dip in some instant tempura batter. Or you take some peeled raw shrimp, and use coconut instead of the other final coatings to make fried coconut shrimp! The possibilities are endless if you know what you're doing.