Howdy doody partners!
Welcome back to Hilah Cooking.
So over the summer I had a whole lot of requests for chicken fried steak.
Fortunately for you, you know who you are, my dad has a really awesome recipe for chicken
fried steak.
So today I’m going to make my dad’s special chicken fried steak for you which is the best
in the world and that is not a lie or an exaggeration, scout’s honor.
I don’t know.
I’m a girl.
It might be three.
[music]
[Chicken Fried Steak Recipe]
Okey-dokey smokey.
OK.
So all we need is some eggs, some saltine crackers, some flour and then I have here
a round steak which a lot of times you can get something that’s called the cube steak
which is like a cheaper cut of meat that has already been tenderized, which is I’m sure
what my dad used when I was a kid.
But I spent the extra like 79 cents a pound or whatever and got this round steak.
So it’s going to be a little bit more tender.
But I am still going to tenderize it.
So that is step number – and this is about three quarters of a pound.
Just start with the flat side and kind of like boop, boop, boop.
And this is not like the time to like take out your aggression.
You’re not trying to like beat the hell out of it because you will punch holes in
it.
You don’t want to do that.
Try and make it a little bit thinner, a little bit bigger and then just go lightly over the
little serrated side, the forky side.
Awesome.
See.
Look, before and after.
It’s like twice as big.
All right.
So these are all hammered out.
I’m going to sprinkle in with a little bit of salt and then just set them aside while
I prepare my dredging mixtures.
So that’s also going to be seasoned but, you know, what the hell.
I do that on my meat too.
OK.
So first thing is I got my eggs here.
I’m just going to beat them up to make my little egg batter which is actually just eggs.
OK, that looks pretty uniform.
Now I’ve got the saltines here.
I have successfully also used oyster crackers in the past which sometimes are better because
they’re cheaper.
In this case, I’ve got saltines.
I don’t know why I do these things but you can use oyster crackers too.
Basically the same thing and I’m just crumbling these up with my hands.
I know a lot of people would tell you to like get a Ziploc bag and pound it out with a rolling
pin and all that stuff, but to me that just seems like a waste of a Ziploc bag.
So I’m just going to use my little paws and it’s totally fine if you have like big
chunks.
Like I like it that way because then when you fry up the chicken fried steaks, you get
these big, like crispy, croutony things on your steaks and it’s delicious.
Cool.
Step five down.
I don’t know how many steps.
I haven’t been counting.
OK.
Then I’ve got just some corn flour and then this is where we’re going to put our seasoning.
Maybe half a cup of flour will be fine.
So I’m going to salt that.
Maybe not that much just because the saltines – I got the salted crackers so there’s
a little bit of salt there too.
But I am going to put on a whole lot of pepper because I like pepper so blam.
Aha!
Now the order of operations is – OK, so my dad always does it egg, flour, egg, crackers.
So that’s how I do it.
Now a lot of things when you’re breading stuff will have you dip it in flour first
but that’s not how my dad did it.
And who am I to question my dad?
So egg, kind of let it go a little bit and then we got our flour.
Just a light, little one-two.
OK.
And then back in the egg and over to the crackers.
Yay!
And get some of your like little cracker crumbs from the underneath side and get them all
over there too.
Okey-dokey.
Awesome.
This is actually perfect amount of crackers.
OK.
So let’s cook them.
Actually I am going to wash my mitts first and kind of get some of this junk out of the
way, so just a second second people.
OK.
So my mitts are clean.
I’m going to turn my skillet on and start to heat up.
I’ve got here a jar of bacon grease that I save every time I make bacon in the skillet
and it’s perfect for making chicken fried steak with – if you don’t have bacon grease,
you can use vegetable oil or lard or you could use shortening, although – you didn’t
hear that from me because I don’t ever use shortening but whatever.
You could.
So we’re not going to like deep-fry these like they do in a lot of restaurants.
This is more of a panfry so we’re just trying to get maybe a quarter of an inch of oil in
there and I also like using bacon fat because it melts real fast and heats up real fast.
So hooray!
OK.
That might be enough.
Let’s see.
Yeah.
OK, cool.
So give that a minute to heat up and then the cooking part is actually pretty quick.
OK, let’s put the small one in first because that’s the first one I did, I think.
So the longer – anytime you’re like breading something, the longer you let it sit, before
you go try to cook it, the better the breading is going to stick.
So yay!
Oh, daddy.
OK.
So this will probably take – oh, I don’t know – three minutes or something and then
we will flip it and get the other side and then I’m going to start getting my gravy
ready, I guess, while that’s cooking.
All right.
So totally OK to flip it more than once if you need to, if it starts getting extra brown,
and I turned it down to like medium heat.
So we will give it a couple more minutes and then we will eat it.
OK.
Awesome.
So carefully let it drip a little bit and then now some people serve this with ketchup.
I do not.
So I made some gravy and there’s another episode on gravy if you don’t know how to
do it.
A lot of times people too will like get the chicken fried steak made and then use this
grease to make the gravy but I don’t like to do that because then the chicken fried
steak gets cold.
So I just use some of my bacon grease to make up a little separate thing of cream gravy.
So let us – and also I’m not going to dump the gravy all over the top because then
it’s just going to get all like soggy and my delicious crispiness is going to get ruined.
So I’m just going to get me a little bite like that and then it’s just like chicken
nuggets.
You can just dip it in there.
Just kidding.
It’s not like that at all.
It is actual food.
OK.
Cool.
Beautiful.
Oh man, that takes me back.
Awesome.
Well that’s the world’s best chicken fried steak thanks to my dad.
So check that out.
I hope you make it.
It’s about to get like kind of wintery times and you need to have this with some mashed
potatoes and stuff and be old-timey, so awesome.
I’m going to go finish this and I will see you later and also I want to give a special
thanks to my girl Jenny Thompson who made me this cute apron.
Thanks, girl.
All right.
See you all.
[music]