COATING Style 1:
FLOUR DREDGINGSouthern-Style Fried Chicken
I know how passionate people can get about fried chicken,
and I’m not one to tell you who makes the best, but if you
were to ask Ed Levine, the Serious Eats overlord, he’d tell
you that it’s Gus’s, a sixty-seven-year-old institution in
Mason, Tennessee. They serve fried chicken that he
describes as incredibly crunchy, with a crisp, craggy crust,
juicy meat, and a “cosmic oneness” between the breading
and the skin. We’re talking fried chicken so good that you
have to resort to metaphysics to make sense of it.
For me, as a kid growing up in New York, fried chicken
came from one place, and one place only: those grease-
stained cardboard buckets peddled by the Colonel himself.
To my young mind, KFC’s extra-crispy was about as good
as it got. I distinctly remember eating it: picking the coating
off in big, fat chunks; tasting the spicy, salty grease; and
shredding the meat underneath with my fingers and
delivering it to my waiting mouth. It was heavenly.
But times have changed, and as is often the case,
revisiting those fond childhood memories results only in
disappointment and disillusionment. All over the country,
there’s a fried chicken and soul food renaissance going on.
Even the fanciest restaurants in New York are adding it to
their menus. My eyes and my taste buds have been opened
to what fried chicken truly can be. I may still dig the