Fried: Fusspot Chicken

We ate at Fusspot Chicken last night, for the first time. They're a once-a-month Portland, Oregon fried chicken popup. It's some of the very best fried chicken I've ever paid for--only misty distant memories like The Green Parrot compete with it.

In any case, you want to eat it. Really. Just sign up for next month. Pre-order for April 1 opens tomorrow morning. Yum. Hurry up.

Returning to add: You may say "Korean-style fried chicken? What's that like? I want regular fried chicken." My fried chicken "school" is Tennessee pan-fried, and if you don't use the sauce, this will fulfill that craving just fine. On the bone with astoundingly crisp skin, and it's handed to you without sauce; you add it yourself.

Mmmmmm.

Rambling: Rambling

Er...

See, I want to blog more often. That's going to result in a fair number of "Er..." posts.

Er.

Also, um.

And hmm.

See, my brain is largely empty. It has thoughts of chicken. And it's pushing away thoughts of work, because it's not work time. And again the chicken. Milk too.

Mmm, chicken.

In my head I can hear Leloo from The Fifth Element, making happy noises about the platter of chicken.

That makes me try to think of Great Chicken Moments In Film.

Like the guy in My Cousin Vinnie who stripped the whole chicken drumstick in one motion.

And "four fried chickens and a Coke" in The Blues Brothers, though we never got to actually see any chicken.

And.

Um.

Surely there must be more?

I tried searching for more, and instead learned that fried chicken for Christmas is a big tradition in Japan. Who knew?

Again, um.

That may be all.

Chicken Index: Screen Door, Portland

(The first real post of the Chicken Index, introduced here.)

I mentioned Screen Door yesterday. (Though I added a stray "the" to the name.) I've always been puzzled by brunch restaurants that have lines out the door and down the block, week after week after week. Is it something addictive about the location? Is it a meditative interval in a too-busy life? You show up, enter your name on the list of those who hope to be worthy, and hang around for an hour, perhaps two, chatting absently with friends and strangers, waiting for an opportunity to leap, catlike, at an open waiting-area bench seat, and now and then reading the menu one more time. Dedication is required--if you wander off for an hour of an anticipated two-hour wait, you'll find that roll was called and your name removed.

For some of these restaurants, I can't even praise the food. That's not true of Screen Door; they're worth the trip and the money, though I may have doubts about the wait. (We were, I admit, told that the two-hour wait this Sunday was unusual.) The waitstaff are good, too--sharp and friendly and fast. The wait wrangler is stern, but no sterner than the desperate crowds of would-be brunchers require.

The chicken portion of the event was chicken and waffles. The chicken is a very fine version of the crispy-peppery-batter  boneless-white-meat sort. Unfortunately, that's not my favorite sort, so I can't judge the flavor--me reviewing black-pepper-seasoned fried chicken is rather like me trying to review an aldehyde-focused perfume. I'm similarly handicapped in reviewing chicken and waffles; I don't understand the chicken and waffle phenomenon, despite several childhood years in the South. It's like I'm trying to review a fougere and its compliance with the classic elements--given that I don't even know the classic elements without looking them up.

I can tell you that the chicken was well-cooked and well-textured and moist, and that the batter was a very nice texture, reliably crisp, not the slightest hint of sogginess or detaching. Very good crunch. There was a lot of pepper by my wimpy standards; I needed some side honey to reach an enjoyable balance of flavors.

But I've decided that my dish at The Screen Door is the praline bacon, bacon heaped with nuts and sugar and..er...something spicy; I forget the menu description. (Image here.) It's hard to see it as bacon; I referred to it, when a nearby table asked about it, as candy that happens to involve pork.

Screen Door: White meat, crisp black-pepper-seasoned batter, deep fried. Offered as chicken and waffles. Every aspect of quality that I can judge is admirable; I can't appreciate substantial pepper, no matter how good the chicken. Recommended, with pepper caution. Side notes: Praline bacon. Get some.

Review Roundup: The Joyful Table and Breakfast in Bridgetown and Yelp and Portland Monthly and Eater PDX (about the lines, not the chicken).

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Random: Weekend Rambling

Well, that daily blogging thing fell down. But it was an extended holiday weekend--I've been off since Wednesday. That's different, right? Right? Sure it is!

We went to Portland. We ate food. We looked nervously at the notices telling us what to do about the boil-water notice. Then we ate more food. Then we cheered at the news that the boil-water notice was over, and the fact that we could now reliably get ice in our beverages. Then we ate more food.

Some of the food, such as the cured salmon at Paragon, was reasonably diet-appropriate. Some of it, such as the doughnuts at Blue Star and the biscuits at the Pine State cart, was (were?) emphatically not. The fried chicken at Screen Door was not appropriate for any normal diet, but since my diet is currently focused on sugar reduction, it was just fine. Except that they brought me honey for it. Which I used. Oh, and except for the cookie that I bought from Waves of Grain while waiting for a table at Screen Door.

Yes. Yes, I did. I walked to another business and purchased a snack to carry me through the wait between signing in at a restaurant, and sitting down. Did you ever see the Portlandia episode about the brunch line? I assume that it was based on the Screen Door. Except that the Screen Door doesn't have a cult leader kidnapping people to punish them for violations of line protocol. I assume.

You need to see their chicken and waffles. See this photo. From this post on The Joyful Table. Yes, it is customarily shared. And everyone leaving the restaurant seems to be carrying a box.

That is all.

Chicken Index: The Chicken Index

So, when I first created this blog, I thought that there would be some chicken involved. That is, fried chicken. But aside from the kinda-recipe in the very first post, there's been very little chicken talk.

I've been thinking for some time that the blog really needs an index of places that serve fried chicken.  Actually, the world needs an index of places that serve fried chicken. Because there's a lot of variation in fried chicken--bone-in or otherwise, skin on or otherwise, battered or dusted or crumbed, flavored or just chicken-flavored, and the classic question of pan-fried or deep-fried. So just knowing if a restaurant is, in general, good or not, doesn't tell you much about the chicken. A very fine restaurant that sells peppery battered chicken is not my chicken place, though it might be someone else's.

Now, classic fried chicken, in my view, is bone in, skin on, dusted/dredged with flour and not too much pepper, and pan fried. But that doesn't mean that there isn't plenty of other very fine chicken out there, some of it where you wouldn't expect. For example, who would have thought that the Medford Food4Less would have some pretty good chicken? How could you know, if you're not told, that the crust on the skinless "put a bird on it" chicken at The Original in Portland has some weird magical ingredient that makes it taste rather as if it isn't skinless? And how would you know that their evening fried chicken entree, while quite good, is an altogether different fried chicken?

The public has a right to know.

I've been debating just how to present the information, though. A chart, so you can scan across and check out just the (for example) bone-in entries? Just reviews, like perfume reviews? A cross between the two?

I'm thinking of the cross between the two--an index, and if I get around to writing a full review, I'd link to it. The index would have entries like:

Smithfield's: Chicken pieces, bone in, skin on, light breading, no excess added flavorings, incredibly moist white meat, and you can get chicken as a side! Recommended.

Tot: Wings, bone in, skin on, no breading, medium spicy sauce, juicy meat. If you crave plain fried wings, they can leave off the sauce. Recommended. Use caution if you're a spice wimp like me.

Does that work? What else does a chicken addict want to know?

Hungry now.

Image: By Douglas Paul Perkins. Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Frying the slow way

I just fried chicken "Mom style" for the first time since Mom died. I've fried plenty of chicken since then, but I always fried it the faster, less greasy, Alton-Brown-inspired way. Tonight I realized around nine o'clock that I had a whole chicken that wanted to be cooked before it expired. The crust of Mom-style chicken is better the next day, and the method works better for bone-in chicken breasts, so I did it that way. I'm eating some, wiping my greasy fingers and typing between bites. And of course, the taste makes me think of Mom.

When I say that Mom didn't love me, I don't mean that she hated me. I mean that she didn't know how. I believe that for her to understand on an emotional level that another person had a mind, and thoughts, and feelings, for her to try to bond with that separate mind and to succeed to any extent, stretched her emotional understanding to its limit. She did that with one person in the world--my brother. I'm proud of her for achieving that. I've accepted--well, sometimes--that to expect her to generalize that, to love even one more person, would be expecting something beyond her ability.

But to the extent that I perceived love from her in childhood, I perceived it most in her fried chicken. And I realize just as I type that last sentence that in a way, this whole bleeping blog is dedicated to fried chicken, and so...

Sigh. There's always one more tether to childhood and your parents, isn't there?

Mom fried chicken for me. She made her spaghetti sauce for my brother. Both appeared with equal frequency on the dinner menu. She always floured and fried the stray little bits of chicken and skin that appeared when she cut up the chicken, and fished them out of the pan along with clumps of fried flour, and let me steal these "crunchies". I ate some of that fried flour before I sat down to chicken on a proper plate. Shatteringly crisp. The taste of greedy childhood.

Chicken skin as love?

So be it.

Image: Mine.

SOTD: None. And ramblish rambling. And a discovery.

I didn't wear any perfume today. I'm not sure why not.

I just finished Dakota, by Martha Grimes. I can't decide if I'm perfectly happy with it as a novel, or if it's too focused on its animal cruelty message to qualify as a full novel. Either way, it's making me think about becoming a vegetarian.

Am I serious about that? Apparently not entirely serious, because I fried chicken wings today. On the other hand, the book didn't address chickens; the food-animal scenes were about pigs. Pigs are supposed to be smart. Social. Intelligent, possibly more intelligent than dogs.

I would probably be happy enough to give up bacon in exchange for chicken skin, but that still returns me to the ethical issues--is it just plain wrong to eat meat? Is it OK to eat meat but wrong to eat the factory-farmed meat that's almost all you can get at the grocery? Sure, the labels claim that the chickens, for example, are "free-range", but as I understand it, all that means is that they were allowed to wander around in a crowded building rather than being kept in a tiny cage; the space-per-chicken isn't exactly generous, and they're not contentedly gazing up at a sunny sky.

I once went on a long Google search to find some sort of cruelty-free certification for meat, and a way to buy meat that qualified. At the time, I found a certification but failed to find a source for the meat, but that could have changed...

Hey. Wow. Yes, something has changed. Organic Smart Chicken is certified humanely raised? When did that happen? I am well and thoroughly surprised. I assumed that if I did find a source of humanely raised chicken, I'd have to pay a small fortune for it and quite likely mail-order it frozen. But, no, it's right down the street at the Co-Op and it's... well, it's not cheap, but it's not bad.

Wow. This is cool.

OK, ramble over. I'm going to go read up on precisely what "humanely raised" means.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Link: Chicken Karaage

It's been far too long since I offered a fried chicken post. I ran across this delicious looking post for  Chicken Karaage on Monster Munching, which points to a recipe on Chowhound. I'll be returning to update when I try it.

Photo: By Sergi Larripa. Wikimedia Commons

Food: Partial Chicken Guidance on RoadFood

Well, that's interesting. Roadfood has a restaurant search category called "Chicken Dinner". They don't go so far as to specify whether the chicken is pan fried or deep fried - OK, they don't even mention whether it's fried, admittedly - but it still looks like a very fine start to finding a supply of fried chicken wherever you're traveling.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Food: Stroud's

Hey! Stroud's says that they make pan fried chicken!

Admittedly, I'm many hours away from Kansas City, but it's still exciting.

Food: The Green Parrot

Real, slow-food, family-style, sit-down fried chicken restaurants are a vanishing phenomenon. I have a fond memory of going to one white-tablecloth fried chicken restaurant, the Green Parrot, as a child. I couldn't even tell you for certain if it was the Kansas City or the Kirkwood Green Parrot, but I certainly remember the chicken. And the parrot.

Idly Googling for a memory refresher, I found that the Vintage Kansas City website has a Green Parrot page, complete with recipes. So I had to offer the links here.

Food: Slow Fried Chicken

Fried chicken is special.

It's delicious. It's evil. It's fattening. It's saltycrunchygreasy. It's got all that going for it.

It's also a food that cannot successfully be mass-produced. Real fried chicken is pan-fried in shallow fat, watched intently by a focused cook who dodges grease splatters while waiting to turn the pieces at exactly the right moment.

Deep fried chicken can be a perfectly edible, even enjoyable food, but it's just not in the same class.

And the crunch isn't about batter - it's about getting the skin rendered to perfect crispness, without destroying the meat in the process. Just dredging the pieces in flour is plenty, for breading. And the flavor isn't about spices - salt, preferably applied an hour or so before cooking, is plenty for seasoning. Fried chicken is simple ingredients transformed by careful cooking into full-on luxury gluttony.

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