Why Restaurant Chicken Tastes So Good & Tender

Are you trying to find out how in the world restaurants’ chicken is so much better than yours? This will tell you step-by-step how restaurants make their chicken taste so good. Restaurants prepare and cook their chicken very differently than how most individuals would do at home.

They have hundreds of pounds of chicken delivered to their store atleast twice a week. The chicken is stored in freezers if it will not be used in awhile, but most of the time, it is just placed in a cooler that is similar to a refrigerator, just a lot bigger. The chicken comes from a plant, so they aren’t feeding the chickens something special in the back of their restaurant until it is time to prepare and cook them if that is what you thought at some point in your life. It is just regular chicken shipped in large quantities.

When it is time to prepare the chicken, it is usually brined first (placed in salt water to marinate) for atleast 24 hours before it is cooked. Doing this makes the chicken juicy, tender, and gives the chicken that flavor that makes you crave more after every bite. Sometimes chicken restaurants will do a little extra by quickly rubbing on a simple seasoning (or even a complex seasoning), but it is really the salt that does the work.

After the chicken has been marinating for a day or two (usually just one day), it is used for cooking. Many individuals think that there is more to it than just this, but it is just battered, floured, and placed in the deep fryer after this if it is fried chicken.

This is also what restaurants do to get their grilled chicken in their salads to taste so good. They use the same brined chicken for their fried chicken, and their grilled chicken for making salads and other dishes. They even do the same for roasted chicken.

To make their fried chicken even more tender and juicy, they deep fry it instead of using oil in a pan. Having the chicken fully submerged in liquids when it is cooking, helps every part of the chicken to come out juicy.

What is restaurant’s secret recipe to making great fried chicken?

Here we will go over some secret recipe techniques used by restaurants to create their great tasting chicken. You can even try a combination of two of them to see if you can even make better chicken than what they can!

Recipe #1

Marinate chicken for 24 hours to 2 days in salt and water.

This is all that is needed. I recommend doing a batch of chicken all at once. This can be done by using a large container and filling it with salt and water. The water has to be enough for all the chicken to fully submerge in the water. It needs to be kept in a refrigerator until it is ready.

The amount of salt used per cup of water for marinating the chicken to make it taste really good is 1 ounce of salt. After the chicken has marinated like this for about a day, it can be used for cooking in any form or fashion. Chicken tenders marinated with just salt and water will be the best for dipping into many different sauces, and for salads. Your guests will love it.

As stated, this is the start of what most restaurants do to make great chicken of any kind.

Recipe #2

If for some reason you don’t like the first method, then you can try doing the chicken the same way that KFC does it for frying their chicken. They use a plethora of herbs and spices combined with paprika to season their flour with the seasoning, instead of their chicken.

If you don’t want to wait for the chicken to marinate in salt water, then you can do this method. It can be done right as you are preparing, and cooked right after. Try this combination:

• 3 cups of flour.
• 1 tablespoon of salt.
• ⅔ of a tablespoon of thyme.
• ⅔ of a tablespoon of basil.
• ½ a tablespoon of oregano.
• 1 tablespoon of celery salt.
• 1 tablespoon of black pepper.
• 1 tablespoon of grounded mustard.
• 1 tablespoon of 6 tablespoons of paprika.
• 3 tablespoons of garlic salt.
• 1 tablespoon of grounded ginger.
• 4 tablespoons of white pepper.

This is supposedly the same ingredients in KFC chicken. All of these ingredients are mixed together in flour. They take the chicken and dump it in water, then they thoroughly toss the chicken in the flour recipe.

Because they only use water for the batter, it has to be tossed and pressed many times over in the flour to cover the chicken in the flour mix. Afterwards, the chicken is taken out of the flour and tapped together to remove any excess flour before it is deep fried.

I recommend using an easy batter mix to cover the chicken in before putting flour on it to ensure that the flour doesn’t come off. Doing so means that the chicken doesn’t have to be tossed forever in the flour in order to get it to stay on. Some restaurants just simply use buttermilk to cover their chicken in before putting it in flour and frying it.

Recipe #3

Use a great sauce. Some restaurants rely on sauces to make great tasting chicken. Some will use sauces plus brining too. You don’t necessarily always have to have a secret complex recipe for everything. Some restaurants just keep it as simple as possible with a very simple ‘secret recipe’.

Some restaurants just use chicken that may not even taste that good on its own, but it tastes amazing with sauce. Some of the best sauces for dipping chicken in is ranch dressing and cayenne ranch. With these two sauces, most guests are content if they taste great. They have a mild sauce, and a spicy sauce that can go with anything. Usually small wings are done this way too.

Making your own ranch and cayenne ranch for fried chicken, roasted, and grilled chicken is actually doable. Either ranch can be used to make your chicken taste great, and also grilled chicken that is placed in salads too.

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Chicken restaurants use a lot of different ways to make their chicken taste great. Yet, most of them don’t do the crazy, magical, and weird techniques from the rumors that you hear. These restaurants are owned by people with lives like everybody else.