- I wanna be that Colonel that was famous for the old,
because now, today, we have reinvented fried chicken,
and have you noticed how popular it is?
I have cooked millions and millions
of pieces of chicken over my lifetime.
We just pulled in a delivery of chicken,
and we wanna right away get this chicken marinated.
That's one of our secrets, marinating.
This is a one and a half size cup of marinade.
I learned practically everything you need to know
about a chicken from the farm to the table.
We have a farm that is absolute highest standards
for producing chicken in the country.
My middleman and I have been doing business
for over 25 years.
He knows what I need as a chef.
So it starts with this raw product
that comes here fresh every day, six days a week.
So that's the process for seasoning the chicken.
Now we're gonna take it to the cooler.
- The new goes to the top.
The stuff from the day before it goes to the bottom.
And then we kind of cycle it in the middle,
is what's used in the day.
Make sure that it's marinated for at least 24 hours or so.
You can only imagine how many biscuits
and how much chicken we go through
if we get these once a week.
And the brown mix is for chicken.
The white is for the biscuits.
So we load them here.
We count it, make sure we have enough,
and then we bring it in and we load it for the restaurant.
So right now I'm gonna get the batter
and I'm gonna walk you guys through how we get
that process going.
Yes, we used to do this back in the restaurant in Compton,
and that was actually one of my first jobs in high school.
I would have to drive all the way out to the restaurant
that my dad had in Compton and make this by hand.
- Trenton is my middle son
and he works real closely with me
on everything Honey's Kettle.
He's an amazing chef, a truly amazing.
- So here's the mix and it has all, you know,
the ingredients, the flour of course,
different spices and seasonings
and different types of salts.
So we start with filtered water, fresh filtered water.
That gives us the best flavor, the best crisp.
My dad has been doing these recipes
and creating his recipes for years.
So every so often he changes up the amount of water we use
'cause he wants it to be a perfect consistency.
- We're probably going through something like 100 pounds
a day of batter mix.
That would be two of those bags you just saw.
- We pour that in.
So we ready.
And it's like the perfect consistency
after the three minutes and the amount of mix we did.
I like to call it like a melted ice cream milkshake
type of consistency.
- So what we do is we come to the raw chicken here.
This is the marinated chicken
and we put it to one side like that.
And the purpose for that is when we go to dip
the chicken in it, we don't want the batter to fall
off really slow because then it's gonna be caked on batter.
And we don't want it falling off so fast
that it has no bubbles to it.
We dip it in our batter,
and you see that nice creaminess and how it shakes,
and we shake off the excess and then we drop it in there.
And you see that batter, see how it's dripping off?
You're already an expert, as you say,
it's not running off like water.
It does have a certain thickness that's holding.
Our chicken is made through a process.
We call it the reinvention of kettle fried chicken.
A kettle is a deep vat of oil.
We're talking like 50 pounds of oil.
We use 100% peanut oil.
It's the highest grade of oil you can use.
When we drop our wet chicken, it goes to the bottom.
So what it's doing is locking a crust
of crispy crackling crust.
And that crust is gonna lock in all
the natural flavor of the chicken, the marinade,
and it's going to cause the chicken to basically pulverize
inside of it because of the heat.
Where does the heat come from?
The heat comes from the bottom.
So this is a modern kettle, right?
So that heat is gonna be more intense
at the bottom than at the top.
This is an invention of mine.
It looks like, you know, a sword.
But we call it a kettle fork.
We can't put our hands in there,
but we can reach down here in the bottom of the kettle.
And you'll notice when I get to the bottom,
the chicken has lodged itself onto this heavy duty grate.
I had these purposely made.
It's a heavy duty process of cooking the chicken,
so you need heavy equipment.
So then now, I take the fork
and I dislodge all the chickens
and any batter crumbs from the bottom.
So we're gonna take that and boom!
And there it goes down to the front
and that's ready for the production line.
My mother, who is from New Orleans,
my father who's from Shreveport,
are two of the best cooks that ever was.
And I used to just kind of be in the kitchen
around my mother, just sort of watching her.
But it's based on all my experiences.
We've been around here for 20, 22 years.
I think we had something to do with the popularity
of fried chicken because now people realize you
can get healthy fried chicken,
fried chicken that leaves the oil where it belongs
and gives you only the final product.
And then we're gonna break it apart
and get it ready for when the bell rings.
- Ready to make the mama biscuit.
- Biscuits are as American as it gets.
The recipe for the biscuits,
it came from research and development in Compton.
1985, she joined me in the pursuit
of running a business in Compton.
We call her mama's biscuits.
- Even at home, they call me mama biscuit.
They're famous in here. People love this biscuit.
- This recipe took years and years of development.
- I have people at work that already know how
to make biscuit.
As long as I'm in the store,
I don't want nobody else making the biscuits
while I'm in the store.
- She cuts at a angle and then lifts the biscuit
at the same time,
and it dislodges the biscuit from the rest of the dough.
And then they're touching and kissing each other,
very important in baking a biscuit that you do that
so they rise together.
The center of that, we put what we call biscuits
with the dimple.
It's where people put their butter and their honey or syrup.
And they put it right there in the center.
- Fluffy. - Beautiful.
I didn't invent fried chicken.
The thing I did was perfected it.
We say to people that, what kind of food are we?
We're American food.
When I did my research on Honey's Kettle,
I went to the central library
and researched early American colonial cooking.
Kettles in the family fireplace,
and guess who was in the kitchen?
They all were the color of my skin.
They were the cooks.
Our people are very good at flavoring food.
I can tell when I eat something,
when it's been cooked right.
That could be in my DNA.
It was my passion to deliver a product that would last.
Chicken is now the number one meat consumed in America.
We are seeing this resurgence as chicken
is because some people really know how to do it,
and we're one of those people.
That's my thing.
Honey's Kettle fried chicken, a new old fashioned company.