Name: How NYC’s Best Fried Chicken Sandwich is Made | Made to Order | Bon Appétit
Uploaded: 2026-02-18T21:31:53.000Z
Duration: 9 min 30 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I'm the chef of Pecking House here in Chinatown.

And today we're going to make my perfect fried chicken sandwich.

I started working at Michelin starred restaurants in 2010 after a long, somewhat illustrious career in fine dining.

A perfect fried chicken sandwich has hot, crispy, juicy chicken, nice soft bread, kewpie mayonnaise, chili oil and bread and butter pickles.

When making a fried chicken sandwich, I think thighs or breast meat are the way to go.

We use thighs because I think it has a lot better of a texture.

I'm going to look through these chicken thighs.

I'm cool with all these little extra bits here.

They're just going to be more interesting fried textures later.

Obviously, Western culture kind of puts a preference on white meat.

If you cook dark meat past 185, that is the temperature after which collagen, gelatin, all those things break down, it's going to be really tender.

The buttermilk marinade is going to increase that perception.

We want to remove it for like a boneless eating experience and a sandwich.

So when you're poking through the grocery store aisle for chicken thighs, look for ones that are big and uniform and you'll be able to make really nice chicken sandwich.

All right, let's buttermilk marinate, brine, season our chicken here.

So we're going to obviously start off with some buttermilk.

This is kind of a weak acid that helps with improving the texture of what we're marinating.

And it's going to add a little bit of fat and serve as sort of a binder.

For the other things we're adding, we call it the marinade step, but

We're marinating, we're seasoning, and we're brining all at the same time.

Brining basically means that you're adding salt to your product and that will help it retain moisture and water.

Three parts salt, one part msg, one part sugar.

That for us is the perfect balance to bring moisture retention, savoriness, and

just like a hint of sweetness to balance the salt out and Whenever you're seasoning meat, you're using more than you think because meat just really takes a lot of salt to get seasoned all the way through.

I've been on my soapbox here many times talking about MSG and why it has been wrongly maligned throughout history.

Anyone trying to tell you that MSG in crystalline form is different from from MSG and tomatoes is fear mongering and giving you bad science.

And now I'm going to add some Dijon mustard here.

When you cook mustard, the pungency dies down a lot.

So really what it adds is all the savory, mellow notes that are behind the spiciness.

I'm going to add garlic powder, huge prevalent ingredient in Southern fried chicken.

Five spice is primarily the anise flavor from the star anise pods.

Such a prevalent flavor in all Chinese cooking.

And then this is kind of our secret little trick.

So the flour is going to absorb the moisture from the buttermilk and the chicken overnight.

That's going to cause the starch granules to swell with water.

And that's what gives gluten its strength.

And giving the hydration, giving the gluten some strength is going to improve the crust later.

We're going to marinate this at least for 12 hours.

Our dredge is a mix of flour, potato starch.

Cornstarch marries a lot of crunchy and crispy textures.

Cornstarch, potato starch, definitely on the crispy side.

We're going to let it sit in the dredge for a little bit because it's a thigh and there's a lot of uneven surfaces.

As you see, there's a lot of craggly textures to be over here.

If you don't literally press the flour into it, it won't stick too shake it off a little bit.

Then we use Evercrisp, a modified starch.

It's basically Benefiber modified weed dextrin.

We use about 10% by weight of the dredge.

And what that does is slows the movement of water so it traps water and that makes for some super crispy chicken.

I think the biggest mistakes that home cooks make is they don't get the dredge timing quite right.

And then they get this, like, patchy fried chicken where the crust kind of falls apart, or they let it sit too long and it over hydrates and it becomes like a really thick shell that doesn't have, like, a lot of nice crispy textures to it.

It's kind of right in the middle, and it's kind of a visual cue.

You can kind of see it where there's all these little small bits.

So I, as a time reference, use for about a minute or two to sit in the dredge, making sure it's really evenly coated, and

Probably don't have one of these in your home.

That's kind of the goldilocks zone, where the starches and the protein are going to brown and the water is still going to evaporate.

If you go too cool with your oil, you're not creating enough steam.

The steam that's escaping the chicken is repelling the oil, which is going to going to prevent your crust from being too greasy.

If it's too hot, obviously it's going to burn and it's too dark.

This is going to be frying for about eight minutes.

But that's just a guideline for true precision.