- [Eric] Great fried chicken
obviously has to have a crunch on it,
and that should yield
to really tender, seasoned, juicy meat.
That is a perfect fried chicken.
Everything else from there is kind of
the spinning wheels, if you will.
The main difference in American fried chicken
is completely a flour crust.
Definitely veers more towards
the crunchy spectrum of things.
Whereas an Asian fried chicken
would usually be smaller pieces cut up in dice
and fried with pure starches,
and it's very crispy and light.
So it kind of exists in between that.
It's crispy. It's crunchy.
It's has a little bit of sweetness,
but it also has that intense savoriness
of American-style fried chicken.
Then when you add all the chili paste together,
it adds a lot of flavors.
So it seems to work out.
(upbeat music)
This is very important.
This is probably the foundation
upon which this fried chicken temple was built.
The rock, if you will.
If I'm busting out the scale,
it means I'm taking it very seriously.
(Chef laughs)
Normally, just kind of freehand it all.
It's a mixture of these Tianjin chiles here,
which we dry and toast a little bit.
Then we blend them into a fine powder.
Got Sichuan peppercorns here that we toast and grind.
Very aromatic.
The idea here is it's hot, it's spicy, it's warm.
If I'm doing it right,
I don't have to taste it too many times.
Anyway, after I taste it two or three times,
my taste buds are pretty shot.
It's imperative I get it right
within the first couple tries.
It's tingly.
Not that it's "melt your face off" kind of hot.
While the recipe is fairly true,
it needs little touches here and there.
(energetic music)
Nice.
(Chef coughs)
Yeah.
Then we're gonna mix it with our warm duck fat.
I think when you think of fried chicken,
you have to think of the oil as an ingredient.
It's a cooking medium.
There's a little bit of oil
that percolates throughout the crust.
That's what makes it different from baked food.
And that's what the chicken is brushed or dipped in.
(energetic music)
We're currently in our pop-up space in Rosalu Diner
while our permanent space is being built out.
So this is our temporary home.
Once the diner's all set
and they're finished with their day,
they'll typically clear out of the kitchen
and finish the dining room up at 2:30,
and then we'll get in there
and we'll start flipping it into what we need to do.
So originally,
this started in my family's restaurant in Queens,
which was an abundance of space,
but unfortunately, that lease ended.
We needed a temporary home to keep the business running.
So we came over here to Rosalu Diner.
It's very challenging to have two menus
that just don't have any overlap.
I think there's a reason restaurants don't share spaces.
It's a hectic process.
It's very challenging, but we try our best.
So we get these really beautiful whole air-chilled chickens
from Pennsylvania.
Then we break 'em into 10 parts
just like true country-style.
Legs, we'll take out the oyster,
obviously, super important here.
Best bit on the thigh.
Then, obviously, everyone likes a drumstick.
Nice little handle on it.
It's what the emoji for fried chicken is.
So yeah.
Then we'll split the chicken
right down the breast bone.
We're real delicate
about the way we process the breast skin.
This is really delicate.
It's very easy for it to slide off and slip off.
You know, I'm very much a stickler
about it being a whole chicken
and an air-chilled chicken.
Vast majority of industrial chickens
are cooled via ice bath.
The skin gets really soggy and soppy.
When they're air-chilled,
they still maintain this beautiful skin integrity.
So I think, you know,
when people are talking about how crispy the skin is
and how chewy it is, it's tender,
everything kind of falls away in one bite.
I think that's where the detail really is.
We have the 10 pieces right there.
We're gonna start marinating the chicken.
Ideally, we do this ahead in a 24-hour window.
They do the buttermilk marinade
with onion powder, garlic powder,
Chinese five-spice, mustard,
and then we're gonna add a little flour.
It makes the paste kind of sticky.
The flour hydrates overnight,
and that way, it adds a really nice substrate, if you will
for the dredge to adhere to.
I would say the only thing
that's not traditional about it is the five-spice.
Having the exact ratio is really important
for it to be a great product.
I think this is also another part
of probably a more unusual bit
of how we fry chicken,
and probably what makes it unique.
It's a combination of pure starches and flour.
In a traditional country-style chicken,
it would just be flour,
which is great.
We add pure starches like potato starch, corn starch.
Those are more prevalent in Asian cooking.
They are super crispy.
We add our seasoning mix to it, which is salt, sugar, MSG.
Then we also use a product called EverCrisp.
It's a cost worth that minor detail
of someone going to the fridge at like two in the morning
to have a bite and it's still crispy.
That's worth it to us.
We try to keep a mix of white and dark meat
as best we can.
So he spends every day
starting off by counting exactly what we want to use,
what the ratio of white to dark meat is.
Then he'll pre-fry probably 40, 50 orders
just to give us a head start.
Then we'll see how the night goes.
It would be impossible to fry all this chicken to order.
We kind of do all this par-frying to get ahead,
especially with only TB fryers.
There's just no other way.
These thighs - he's frying thighs right now -
they'll fry for a solid nine minutes.
They'll take some time to get cooked through
and nice and tender.
So yeah, he'll fry,
depending on how busy the day looks,
anywhere between 35, 50 orders
just to get us a head start
and then we'll keep rolling it throughout the night,
if it's busy.
But without par frying, it would be impossible.
I mean, when we did the delivery operation,
we par-fried 100, 150 orders a day,
then cooked everything
right before we started going out the door,
driving around Manhattan.
So yeah, par-frying is the key to success here.
This is definitely a logistical step that we need.
This all started in September, 2020.
It was completely through Instagram,
through friends of friends.
Then it kind of just became a thing.
We caught fire with some presses
and then all of a sudden my Instagram inbox
was flooded with 600, 800 requests for chicken.
I didn't really know how to build a website.
So the only way to lock the order page
was via password.
So that's kind of how
the password wait list chicken started.
At its apex, it was 8,000,
9,000 people.
Took us about 10 weeks to get to people,
which was challenging.
This is for our chicken sandwich.
It's a de-boned, skin-on chicken thigh.
Chicken thigh is great, in general.
Very juicy.
Has a lot of beautiful connective tissue
that breaks down.
Has a really nice bite for a sandwich.
We liked keeping the skin on.
We were trying to do a chicken sandwich
that had not been done before.
We felt that was an extra detail that was kind of nice
because dredge adheres to it in such a way.
It has that kind of crunchy texture.
It's really something special.
Everybody has a chicken sandwich.
So we were trying to do something a little different,
something that no one had really done before.
So we kind of had a starting point of,
"What if we glazed it in this kind of dark soy caramel?"
I know there's a million ways
to make caramel the right way, supposedly,
but I don't do any of those.
I just heat up sugar
until it turns the color I want it to turn.
While I joke about how kind of a casual
and imprecise approach I take to cooking,
there is a lot of thought that is put into it.
I'd like to think it's a detail-oriented kind of approach,
and meticulous.
There is a lot of thought
as to why things are put together the way they are
and why things are supposed to taste the way they are.
So there is balance and thought put into it.
We'll season it up with dark soy.
Then we'll simmer it with these aromatics,
garlic, ginger, cinnamon, star anise.
Then we'll add a little chicken powder, as well,
to add the savoriness.
(upbeat music)
I've been cooking in fine dining
in New York City for 10 years,
like Cafe Boulud and Gramercy Tavern.
Then finally at Eleven Madison Park as a sous chef.
You know, my goal had always been
to open my own fine dining restaurant.
To me, it was about
launching Chinese cuisine into modernity.
That one had always been my mission.
There was a lot of ways to introduce Asian flavors
and Asian cooking into what is generally a menu
centered around Southern tradition and country cooking.
But this was something
that still seemed authentic
to the way we like to cook
and where our background was coming from.
Once I settled on really liking the dark soy caramel,
that kind of led me to the pineapple part.
So we take these really nice pineapples
and we blend it.
You know, we wanted to tie all the spices together
with cinnamon and star anise.
So like almost every level.
Then that's just the basis
for our 14 sandwiches.
That's what it looks like when it's done.
It's translucent, it's brown, it's caramelized.
This is a charred cabbage slaw.
Cabbage and grilled flavors and charred flavors,
they take really well.
It brings out a lot of the meatiness of cabbage,
and obviously there's a crunch
and a vegetal note to it that's really great.
In our original restaurant, Pecking House,
we would have wok-d,
where we would just toss this
in a huge fire-breathing wok
for the whole day,
and get it really nice and toasty.
But, not an option here, unfortunately.
So we're using this plancha,
which the diner uses for pancakes,
(Chef laughs)
and we repurposed it to our use
to make our charred cabbage slaw.
So we'll char it on the plancha,
let it get really nice color on one side.
We'll just marinate in Worcestershire sauce,
some fish sauce,
then Tabasco.
Dining room's arriving.
They'll flip the dining room over
from the diner into Pecking House for the evening.
(energetic music)
It's 5:00.
We've got people coming in.
Every now and again,
we'll get a big old kick in the butt at 5:00 PM,
and here we go.
Fine dining was a very kind of ego-driven thing.
You know, it was about showing everyone
how great you were
and these cool techniques you were doing and such.
Obviously, the pandemic changed a lot of things
for everybody.
We went to this extremely casual,
really approachable food in fried chicken.
It gets you back to your roots a lot as a cook, as well.
Not just from a cultural standpoint.
At that time,
we got so many beautiful heartfelt messages
from people who were like,
"This meal just meant so much to me
in a time where people are locked inside
and kind of freaked out."
It became kind of a pivot
back to understanding the emotional impact
that a chef can have.
How it can really mean a lot to people
to do this kind of stuff.
Every culture has its fried chicken for a reason.
It's something everybody enjoys
and there's maybe just slight nuances
and slight differences in how we enjoy it,
with seasonings and dipping sauces
and marinades and methods.
I think everyone can appreciate fried chicken
in its own way.
This was a very simple approach to just,
"We're cooking food for people
and making people happy."
(dramatic music)