The Food Lab: How to Make a Chick-Fil-A Sandwich at Home
Unraveling the mysteries of home cooking through science.
The classic Chick-Fil-A sandwich is a thing of simple beauty. A juicy, salty, crisply fried chicken breast. A soft, sweet, buttered and toasted bun. Two dill pickle chips. That's all there is to it.
What makes it great is the perfection of each of the elements. That crisp golden brown crust spiced just right with a perfect sweet-salty-savory-hot balance. The way it coats that breast underneath; a chicken breast that defies all we know about chicken. This is no dry, stringy, bland chicken bosom, this is a breast of unparalleled juiciness, with a dense, meaty texture and deeply seasoned flavor.
Bring all of the elements together, and you've got a sandwich that is nearly impossible to improve upon.
I began my quest for chicken sandwich perfection with the easiest elements: the bun and the pickles.
BUN AND PICKLES
With some of these reverse engineering project, getting the condiments and sauces just right are as much of a challenge as working on the main ingredient (see my In-N-Out clone recipe, for example). Not so with a Chick-Fil-A.
The bun is your typical hamburger-style bun. Soft and slightly sweet, with a fluffy, Wonderbread-like texture. It measures up at around 4 1/2-inches in diameter, which puts it right in the range of Arnold Hamburger Rolls. Toasted in a skillet in just a bit of melted butter, they're a perfect taste-alike to the real Chick-Fil-A buns.
As for the pickles, I tried out a few different brands of dill crinkle-cut chips. Heinz had the right flavor, the but chips were too small—I could've added a few extras, I suppose, but I feel like the two-pickle-per-Chick-Fil-A-sandwich rule is an unbreakable law. Instead, I turned to Vlasic Ovals Hamburger Dill Chips, which have a larger surface area and the same salty-vinegary-garlicky flavor.
Now, on to the hard part: the chicken.
DON'T FORGET YOUR COAT!
So what exactly goes into that uniquely flavorful Chick-Fil-A coating? It's obviously a standard breading procedure of some form or another—chicken dipped into a thick liquid followed by a dredging in seasoned flour before being deep-fried.
My normal course of action in a situation like this would be to pull off some high-level espionage, playing both sides of the game, perhaps wooing a particularly woo-able employee into a romantic tryst in an attempt to get her (or him!) talking about breading while we're bedding.
But alas, the higher-ups at Chick-Fil-A have obviously foreseen this potentially scandalous scenario and nipped it in the bud by listing their ingredients on their website, making the whole process far less titillating, but far far simpler.
Chicken:
100% natural whole breast filet
seasoning [salt, monosodium glutamate, sugar, spices, paprika]
seasoned coater [enriched bleached flour, sugar, salt, monosodium glutamate, nonfat milk, leavening, spice, soybean oil, color]
milk wash [water, whole powdered egg and nonfat milk solids]
peanut oil [fully refined peanut oil with TBHQ and citric acid added to preserve freshness and dimethylpolysiloxane an anti-foaming agent added])
The ingredients confirm it: they start with a chicken breast, season it, dip it into a milk and egg-based wash, dredge it in a flour-based "seasoned coater," then fry it all in peanut oil
The salt, MSG*, sugar, and paprika in the basic seasoning and seasoned coater are easy. The problem is with that catchall term "spices." We all know that theColonel uses a secret blend of 11 different herbs and spices, but Chick-Fil-A makes no such claim.
I pulled out my spice drawers and got to concocting.
*MSG—monosodium glutamae—gets a bad rap. This is simple fear of the unknown. It's a purified chemical product originally harvested from giant sea kelp and has many analogues that occur naturally in foods we eat. When used in reasonable quantities, it is about as dangerous for you as regular old table salt. It's the chemical that triggers the sense of savoriness (or umami) on our tongues, and as such, is a great flavor enhancer in any sort of meaty dish. I keep a jar of it right next to my salt cellar.
Clearly black pepper forms the bulk of the backbone, and I'm fairly certain there's a touch of cayenne in there as well. Paprika is listed, so in it goes.
Did I detect some garlic in there as well? I wasn't positive, but a quick look at theFDA's labeling rules answered the question for me. According to the FDA, "Poppy seeds, sesame seeds, dried or dehydrated onions and garlic are not considered to be spices. When used as an ingredient in foods they should be declared on the label by common or usual names."
No garlic listed on the label? No garlic in the food.
I tried various combinations of celery seed, dried oregano and basil, mustard powder, even coriander and cumin. In the end, I found the simplest mix was actually closest in flavor to the real deal. Salt, sugar, MSG, black pepper, cayenne, and paprika it is.
I've heard it on good authority that each Chick-Fil-A sandwich uses an entire chicken breast half. I don't know where the heck they're getting those tiny chickens from, but in order to get my massive 8-ounce supermarket chicken breast halves down to the right size, I had to split them in half horizontally. (Perhaps next time I'll go with a Cornish hen breast).
With my spice mix assembled, I fried off my first batch of chicken: I seasoned a chicken breast cutlet with my spice mix, dipped it into a whisked mixture of milk and eggs, dropped it into a bowl of flour to which I'd added some nonfat milk powder, baking powder (the leavening), and a couple tablespoons of my spice mixture, pressed on the breading until it adhered, then carefully lowered it into a wok-ful of hot peanut oil and fried it until it was golden brown and crisp, about 4 minutes total.
What emerged was distinctly... meh.
There were two major problems.
First, the coating lacked major crispness. Thanks to my carefully concocted blend of spices, the flavor was all there, but take a look at a Chick-Fil-A chicken cutlet, and its got big, crisp nuggets of breading with tons of surface area for extra flavor and extra crunch. Mine, on the other hand, had a smoother texture and a sandier look.
The second problem? Welcome to dry-city, population 1: chicken.
SURFACE ISSUES
So why was my breading so wimpy? It could have been a number of factors. My first thought was that the milk dip was simply too loose—it needed more body in order to be able to hold more breading. I tried lowering the ratio of milk to eggs by a few tablespoons at a time until I was basically dipping my chicken in straight up beaten egg before flouring them.
The resulting fried breasts got thicker and thicker coatings, but just plain thick is not what I was after: I wanted extra surface area, and that means more crags and crevices.
My next thought was to go double dipping. That is, dipping my chicken in the milk mixture first, followed by the flour, followed by another trip to the milk and a final trip to the flour before hitting the fryer. This worked marginally better—that second coat definitely developed more crags than the first coat did. It also made for an extremely thick breading that had a tendency to fall off of the breast because of its heft.
That ain't good.
But then I noticed something: the reason that second dip into the flour was giving my chicken so much more surface area was not just because I was doubling up on breading. It's because the second time around, there were already moist little nuggets of breading in the flour mixture.
It's these nuggets that stuck to the outside of the chicken, increasing its crunch factor. The easiest way to get'em?
Simple, just do this:
By adding some of the milk mixture to the flour mixture and working it around with my fingers before I dip the chicken into it, I could create an extra crisp coating that fried up with enough nooks and crannies and make an English muffin hide with embarrassment.*
*A number of readers have pointed out that this technique is not novel and is used at quite a few fried chicken outfits as well as being presented in Cook's Country magazine. True enough!
Check out the difference. Same exact chicken, same exact ingredients, slightly different process, very different results:
This is a technique I plan to use for all of my breading and frying projects.
BRINE TIME
With my flavoring and crust perfected, there was one last issue to address:juiciness.
I know that part of my problem is that I don't own a pressure fryer, the device that Chick-Fil-A (and many other fried chicken restaurants) use to cook their chicken extra fast. But with care and attention, that shouldn't make or break the process in the end. There's something more important at hand here.
Cut a normal cooked chicken breast in half and you expect to see some amount of stringiness—there's a definite grain to chicken meat. Cut a Chick-Fil-A sandwich in half, on the other hand, and you'll be struck by how smooth and grain-free the meat is, with a nearly translucent, pearly white color to it.
Now I wouldn't bet my life on it, but these signs point to one thing: brining.
Brining is the process by which a lean meat (most often chicken, turkey, or pork) is submerged in a salt water solution. As the meat sits, the salt water will slowly dissolve key muscle proteins (most notably myosin, a protein that acts as a sort of glue, holding muscle fibers together). As the myosin dissolves, two things take place.
First, the ability for the meat to hold onto moisture increases. See, you can imagine meat as a series of long, skinny toothpaste tubes tied together. As you cook meat, the tubes of toothpaste get squeezed, pushing out valuable juices. Myosin is one of the key proteins responsible for this squeezing action, so by dissolving it, you prevent a lot of moisture loss from taking place.
Secondly, it alters the texture of the meat by allowing dissolved proteins to cross-link with each other. This is the main principle in sausage making—dissolved proteins can bond with each other, creating a pleasantly bouncy, tender texture. By brining a chicken breast or a pork chop, you're in effect giving it a very light cure—the same process that converts a raw wet ham into a supple prosciutto.
To confirm my suspicions, I spoke with a former Chick-Fil-A employee, who was able to walk me through the process:
We handled a significant amount of the process. The chicken arrived frozen. They had been brined already, but that was it. We defrosted them, ripped the tendons so they would lie flat, and dipped them in the milk wash before dredging them in seasoned flour. The milk wash and the seasoned flour was prepared elsewhere and we just opened the packages.
Unfortunately all that really tells me is that yes, they are brined. The contents of that brine are still up in the air, but it's safe to say that at the very least salt and sugar are part of the mix.
I went through a dozen different iterations of the brine, using both water and milk as my base, as well as using a technique called "dry-brining" (in which the meat is heavily salted, then allowed to sit until the salt dissolves in extracted juices, effectively producing a brine without any added liquid). I tried adding various amounts of spices, changing up the quantity of salt and sugar. (For more on brining, check out this article).
In the end, I found that a milk-based brine offered no real advantages over a water-based brine, and that adding the spices to the briny liquid was largely a waste of time and resources: much better was to just brine the chicken breasts in a salt and sugar solution and to sprinkle them with the spice mixture just before breading them.
My normal brine for chicken breasts lasts for anywhere from half an hour to two hours. In this case, however, a much, much longer brining time was necessary in order to match the saltiness level of a Chick-Fil-A sandwich along with that uniquely smooth, juicy texture.
A full six hours submerged in salt/sugar water produced the beauty below:
Now that, my friends, is positively exuding juiciness. I don't know about you, but I've already had to wipe my computer monitor four times from where I've accidentally found myself licking it. Oops.
So there it is. A thing rA sandwich unparalleled in its chicken-ness. And one worth making any day of the week.
And before the comments devolve into the inevitably political back-and-forth, may I quickly say that this sandwich—the beauty you see right above—is what this is all about. Let's try and see the joy inherent in that concept, alrighty?
GET THE RECIPE!
Homemade Chick-Fil-A Sandwiches »
The Food Lab: Four Secrets to Improving Any Fried Chicken Recipe
[Photographs: J. Kenji López-Alt]
Really great Southern fried chicken needs two things: juicy, flavorful meat and an ultra-crisp and crunchy crust. Here are four quick and easy ways to achieve both. The best part? These tricks will work for any Southern fried chicken recipe you've got, whether it's the old family standard, a fried chicken sandwich, chicken fingers, or even General Tso's. They're 100% guaranteed to make you the King of Crunch.
FRIED CHICKEN SECRET #1: A SALTY MARINADE = JUICIER MEAT
HOW IT WORKS
Most Southern fried chicken recipes start with a bath in a seasoned marinade of some sort, whether it's buttermilk, milk and eggs, or even pickle juice. Adding plenty of salt to this mixture can help your chicken stay moist.
This works in the exact same manner as a brine. A standard brine is a solution of salt dissolved in water (around 6% salt by weight). As chicken sits in a brine, the salt dissolves proteins in the meat's muscle structure, loosening it and allowing it to retain more moisture as it cooks. Brined chickens lose 30 to 40% less moisture than un-brined chickens.
HOW TO DO IT
In order to make a brine with a 6% salt concentration, I add half an ounce of salt for every cup of marinade. This translates to about one and a half tablespoons of Diamond Crystal kosher salt per cup, one tablespoon of Morton's kosher salt per cup, or two teaspoons of regular table salt per cup.
I've gone on record saying that I never brine my chickens or turkeys, as a standard brine can water down the flavor of the meat. For recipes that already have a marinade step built in, on the other hand, you can only benefit from adding the correct amount of salt to that marinade.
FRIED CHICKEN SECRET #2: ADD VODKA TO THE MARINADE
HOW IT WORKS
Adding vodka to your marinade mixture helps create a crust that stays light and crunchy instead of heavy, greasy, or leathery. How does this work?
As chicken fries, liquid evaporates and the breading dehydrates. After that, proteins in the marinade and flour will set and start to brown, giving the crust flavor. The more surface area you have, the crunchier the crust and the more flavorful the bird.
Vodka helps in both of these realms. First, it's much more volatile than water (which is the main component of buttermilk, pickle juice, or pretty much anyother fried chicken marinade you'll be using). As such, it evaporates much more rapidly and violently. This helps drive moisture off the crust of the chicken faster, while also creating bigger vapor bubbles, adding surface area to the crust. Both of these things mean crisper, lighter fried chicken.
Finally, vodka also inhibits gluten formation. Gluten is the protein network that is created when flour and water are combined. This is important for things like bread and pizza crust, where a stretchy, chewy structure is desirable, but for crisp crusts, you want to minimize gluten development.
HOW TO DO IT
For extra-crisp crusts, I add an ounce of vodka (two tablespoons) for every cup of liquid in my marinade. (For the record, any high-proof spirit—try bourbon!—will work.)
FRIED CHICKEN SECRET #3: ADD LIQUID TO YOUR DREDGING MIXTURE
HOW IT WORKS
Have you ever noticed that if you're breading a big batch of chicken, the pieces you bread toward the end come out crisper, crunchier, and with more surface area than the ones you bread at the start? This is because as you work, bits of marinade drip off the chicken and into the dry seasoned flour mixture, forming little clumps that then stick to subsequent pieces of chicken. As the chicken fries, these clumps dehydrate, brown, and crisp, adding extra flavor and crunch.
So why not take advantage of this phenomenon by adding some moisture to your dry seasoned flour mixture to begin with?
HOW TO DO IT
For each cup of dredging flour called for in the recipe, I drizzle about two tablespoons of marinade into it. After drizzling the marinade on top, I then work it into the flour with my fingertips or a whisk before adding the chicken pieces to coat them. Try it—your fried chicken will be crunchier than ever!
FRIED CHICKEN SECRET #4: DOUBLE-FRY IT
HOW IT WORKS
Frying removes moisture from the crust and leaves it crunchy, but you can't fry it any longer than it takes the meat underneath to cook. Leave the chicken in too long, and you'll end up with an extra-crispy crust, but dry, overcooked meat. By frying once, allowing the chicken to chill completely, then frying again a second time, you end up with extra-crunchy crust and meat that's still plenty juicy.
HOW TO DO IT
Fry your chicken as usual, then let it rest at room temperature for at least half an hour before frying it again. You can even chill and refrigerate the chicken overnight and fry it a second time just before eating it. This is a wonderful way to rejuvenate fried chicken leftovers (as if such a thing exists), and your chicken will end up even better on the second day.
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