Is my homemade fried chicken sandwich better than the most expensive fried chicken sandwich? In the red corner, Winnie, add like a red cool thing in post right here. We have the cheapest chicken sandwich in Los Angeles. At least the cheapest real chicken sandwich. This is the $4 crispy chicken sandwich from the Wendy’s. In the blue corner, Winnie, cool blue light thing in post. We have the $23. Crispy chicken sandwich from the Honor Bar. That’s a Hillstone Restaurant, if it means anything to you folks with culture out there. This is the most expensive chicken sandwich that we could find, but yet to be seen. They say the devil is in the details. Well, my little devil is going right between them sandwiches. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what that means. Sometimes words just evacuate out of my mouth. But I’m going to be making my own fried chicken sandwich right between these. We are going to see if a judge can guess which one is the most expensive, which one’s the cheapest, and which one’s homemade in a blind taste test. And then we’ll see which is their favorite. Like B-Rabbit and 8 Mile. I gotta be on my A game today, cause this is personal. $23, $23 for a fried chicken sandwich. That is too much money. Not only am I going to beat Ding’s crispy chicken sandwich one, who is Ding? Nobody knows. Not only am I going to beat it, I think I’m really going to blow it out of the water today. I don’t think it’s going to be a competition because we’re using some fun little culinary techniques right here. So we’re actually making a skin on fried chicken sandwich. You guys ever heard of it? You guys ever been pointed at with a sharp knife before? Most of the time I would use a boneless, skinless thigh, and then I’d marinate it and do all that, but we’re actually going to take a bone in, skin, skinful thigh. You know? And we’re gonna cut out the bone right here. So thigh’s only got one bone, just kind of sitting in there. You take a knife, you kind of run it along here just to expose that flesh. You sort of like pop it right here. It’s gonna be a little bit of connective tissue that you can just sort of sever. Like, have you ever seen Dexter? I’ve never seen it, but I imagine he was doing stuff like this, right? He was killing people, butchering them, eating them. No, and Dexter was the good guy? Was he sexy? Seem to be split, comment below if you thought Dexter was attractive. Boning knives are really fun. I think you need like, how many knives do you need in the kitchen? What would you all say? Four? Three? Chef’s knife, boning knife, paring knife, butter knife. I agree with that. You got a big, a small, a serrated, and that’s really only used for bread, but it’s the only thing that can cut bread. But I like boning knives. I think they are really good for doing little tasks like this. You can even just use the side of it to scrape along the bone. And then you can kind of feel for where it ends. There is some extra connective tissue in there sometimes. And just pop it out. And then you got a little bone and then you can save that for soup! With all the other odds and ends in your freezer that you’ve saved for soup. It’s a little joke, between us and the kitchen. Anyways, so now, yeah, you have a little skin on, boneless thigh. I might just like, kind of like, give it a little whack out. I want a nice, like, even chicken patty in my sandwich. That’s the thing that I hate. Like, if you would shape a burger patty to completely cover the burger bun, I think you should do the same thing with your chicken. Just hit it with a couple palm heel strikes, fast rooting style, because they fought in a Japanese league where they didn’t allow closed fist strikes. Hell yeah, true story. Boom, got a little flat chicken breast. And now, what we’re gonna do, where I have to itch my nose, but there’s so much salmonella on my hands. I need to wash them. I need to wash them. We have a graphic for this. Normally you would just use salt. What I like to do, we’re wet brining this chicken, we’re adding some buttermilk, some pickle juice, et cetera. I like to salt my meat directly, because you can estimate the saltiness of a brine, but I think you’re never going to know how much is really soaking into the meat. So what I like to do, Tony Chachere’s, it’s, it’s really mainly salt. That’s been any sort of criticism about it. That’s why I like it, because I use it as my standard salt and I can add other things to it. I like to take this, And, right, chefs, you use, your eyesight to estimate how much salt should be on a thing. I am so calibrated to know how much Tony C’s should be on my meat, that I am going to eyeball it like that. It is going to dilute a little bit, so you want to overshoot it a little bit. Now we’re going to go in with spices. I think brining is a great way to get meat. I was going to say something about penetration, but that sounds creepy. I think brining is a great way to get flavors to actually sort of like penetrate deep into the meat. Cause you eat, there’s no word penetration. It’s used in basketball. It’s used in cooking. It’s also used during S-E-K-S-U-A-L A-D-V-E-N-T-U-R-E-S. Like it’s used in all of those things. We got thyme, we got onion, we got garlic. We got a little bit of light pepper in there. I’m also gonna add some MSG. MSG makes chicken taste more like chicken. Despite the fact that MSG was synthesized from seaweed. Seaweed. There she goes. We’re gonna add some pickle juice in here, I’m not gonna add all of that, I’m gonna save it. And then buttermilk. Pickle juice, you’re getting lactobacillus in there. That’s actually adding more umami. That’s the bacteria that actually makes pickles ferment. and then we’re gonna add some buttermilk, because buttermilk has enzymes in it that will actually help tenderize the chicken and then just a little bit, just a dash, just a little bit of hot sauce. Nice, man. That’s enough. And then. I’m not gonna use my hands. Gonna just kind of stir this around. And ideally, we would let this sit. Man, I’ll let it run, dude. I’ll forget about this in the fridge two, three days. Come back. People are like, 12 to 24 hours. Yo, that 25th hour, it’s still good. Trust me. Okay, this has got to set. We’ll, we’ll make some stuff. Hey, it’s spooky season! Even though I don’t celebrate Halloween, because I find it satanic and I follow the hawk, many of you do. And you can buy the Mythical Cookbook to send, do you give gifts for Halloween? Alright, buy this gift for the spooky people in your life. We have a whole chapter on eating things that scare you. Curious. It’s kind of a weird copy. We couldn’t really figure out how to navigate the sub, sub headers if we’re being honest. But we got little fun pork blood tacos in there. We got pumpkin spice pig’s feet. Anyways, we still have a book. It’s not, it’s not completely sold out. It’s banned in seven states. So if that is alluring to you, please buy it. This knife is too small. Chicken, we, we’ve prepared it, and now we need the crunchies. The expensive fried chicken sandwich, it has some sort of slaw, tomatoes, and cheese on it. I think it’s a bit of an old school chicken sandwich that actually came out, I remember, in Los Angeles long before this big chicken sandwich boom that we’ve seen. But mine is somewhat modeled after Howlin’ Ray’s. It’s the Nashville hot chicken sandwich that you see everywhere. It’s really simple. It’s comeback sauce, or a sort of like, you know, creamy, similar to a remoulade sauce, generally from the Carolinas. A little bit of Creole mustard in there, and slaw, and a spicy piece of fried chicken, and a bun. To me, that’s absolutely perfect. So, we’re gonna get to it. We got some cabbage. I love cabbage. I eat about, what? What? I love cabbage. Why is that weird? I eat, I run through like two heads of cabbage a week, dude. I’m telling you man. I am an absolute, you know, Dylan O’Brien was the Maze Runner. Y’all I’m the cabbage runner, bro. Boom, angel hair. Look at that capellini. Well, I call it cabbage-lini. So not, not great yield, but save this for soup. Fresh jalapeños. This is just one of my favorite things. Shout out to Jollibee. They put the fresh jalapeños on their spicy chicken sandwich. I’m going to toss those in there. You get a little bit of grassiness from it. And then we’re going like very thinly shaven red onion. Just going to add a little bit of that bitterness, a little bit of bite. You can get real freaky deaky with this if you want to. You can add some. some pineapple to it, you know? You can add raisins to it, and then everyone’s gonna make fun of you for adding raisins to a slaw, and then you’re just like, I don’t know man, raisins are like a really common, like, North African, Middle Eastern ingredient. They actually really go well with this, and then people just laugh at you, and they call you stupid. Little bit of olive oil going in here. Sizzle. We don’t have drizzle? I’m sorry, sir. We don’t have drizzle? What are we poor? Yes, yes! Cheese and rice, this is fine. You know what? Snoop Dogg could use it. We can. Snoop, come on the show. We can still eat. God damn it. We can still eat. God damn it. Good, add a little bit of olive oil in there. That’s gonna really make all of the flavors sort of carry through. Fresh cracked pepper, I think is really nice. In a slaw. You’re not gonna taste it. You’re not gonna taste it, but you can waste 15 seconds. I can tell you that. Salt. Salt is really important. Some people salt their cabbage ahead of time. I don’t think it’s really necessary. But I like to add a hefty amount of salt, season every single ingredient, then a little bit of red wine vin. You can use any sort of vin. Vin is, of course, a short word. “Vine-gar”, as my Italian roommates used to call it. No matter how many times I said it, it’s vinegar. They said, “vine-gar”, yes. And then, I’m just gonna go ahead, this is really important to me. I like to massage it. I’m gonna wait though, because I don’t want to wash my hands before I go in there. Come back sauce. Slop of mayonnaise. Put mayonnaise from one bowl into another bowl, could’ve started the mayonnaise in that bowl, but now someone else gotta wash a bowl. We’re gonna put a little bit of ketchup in there just for some sweet. We’re putting, I know exactly what hot sauce this is. This is not the Crystal that we were using earlier. This is actually Old Bay hot sauce. Dude, if you haven’t, this is, right? Get out of town, this is Old Bay hot sauce. What is it? This hot sauce is so underrated, you can tell, cause it’s old and grusty and gross because we’ve been using it so often. The Old Bay hot sauce is one of my favorite things. It’s basically if they dump a bunch of Old Bay into Crystal, and it rules. Hell yes. In the Guy Fieri-ism, wash-a-shash-a-sha sauce. And then a little bit of Creole mustard. Zatarain’s Creole mustard, top three mustards in the game. Top three, I’ll tell you what. They’re climbing too. They’re trending up. I’m bullish on Zatarain’s Creole mustard. Grey poopin, grey poopin number one, and then First Street brand, honey musty. That’s right, First Street out of, Smart and Final. Honey musty, number one, but they’re dropping right now. Bearish on First Street honey musty. And then we’re adding a little bit of chili powder, and some garlic powder, and some onion powder. I don’t like, I don’t, I like, I do this with a whisk. You know, cause it’s, you need the whisk to like break up the mayonnaise chunks. Anytime you add water to mayonnaise, which is the thing that I’m doing almost every day, if you really look at it, it’s like it doesn’t emulsify unless you use a wire whisk. Let’s give it a taste. Shoot man, that’s pretty nice. That’s going to be real nice on a chicken sandwich. Tell you what, balance that across like three to five bowls and then now you can massage it. So, as a masser, what I like to do is I like to really go in, relieve tension. I’m one of those massers that talk to you, though. You know, like an Uber driver that you, like, really don’t want to. I almost feel like, wow, you really carry a lot of tension. Where does that come from? Do you give yourself time to really recharge? Yeah? Just doing this? Yeah, well, no, that’s not, everybody needs that. She shouldn’t talk to you like that. She said what? And then I really like get involved in their lives. But I think it’s important to massage the salt in there because that’s how you actually sort of like break down that cabbage. And then you can actually fit more slaw on your sandwich if you salt it. You guys know what I mean by that? Because it like, then it like compresses. When you salt it, it draws out the moisture and you can kind of like mash it into a slaw patty. You know? I feel crazy, man. But that’s my favorite thing to do, except for playing one on one Bananagrams. That’s my real favorite thing to do. If we don’t mess up this chicken, this is an easy win. This is like, South Carolina playing Furman week one. You go, who’s Furman? Exactly. It’s why they scheduled them. This pleases me. Name the movie, anyone? Come on, come on, think. This pleases me. It has one of the original Mighty Ducks members in it. And, what, yes! Heavyweights! And I’ll say, one of the members from Mighty Ducks 2, Kenan Thompson, who joins the cast later. Okay, we got that. Let’s go home. Okay, we’re gonna fry this chicken sandwich. So we have the chicken out of the brine, pounded out, skin on, bone out chicken. We dried this off because because we are going to fry this. I’m gonna do a double dredge. We have flour here. My advice on seasoning your flour. How often have you ever had chicken where you’re like, wow, that was too salty of fried chicken? Almost never. Just like. Dump, dump, dump, dump. Overseason your flour. Lot of, this is Tony Chachere’s, Tony Chachere’s more spice. Now what we’re gonna do, ton of black pepper. How many times have you had fried chicken and said that’s too much black pepper? Almost never, right? You gotta push to the edge to know how much is too much. And I intend to go there. Okay, now that we’re doing this for awhile, turns out Furman has never beaten South Carolina. I did look that up. Instead of responding to emails, I looked that up. But Furman’s mascot is the Paladin, whereas South Carolina is the Gamecock. So who really won? Stir up that flour. Lot of black pepper. Lot of Tony Chachere’s extra spice. Cool. So what we’re gonna do, we have, ooh, gotta whip these up. These are pure egg whites. We found this out in our busting fried chicken myths that when you fry chicken with pure egg white as opposed to a whole egg dredge, you are actually going to get a crispier chicken because the egg whites are effectively pure protein, right? The moisture in that’s gonna cook out, there’s gonna be no fat to sort of be left in there, left to sog anything up. So we’re going to use the pure protein of egg whites. Hell yes, brother. Perfect. Slightly, slightly whipped. This is at 330 degrees. A lot of people might fry chicken at 350, 375. But the fact that this has skin on it, we do want this to render. So we’re going to cook it a little extra slow here. So we’re going to go into that flour. Really pound that flour in there. You know really ask it about its day as you’re massaging it and then it’s gonna go into our egg white and you want to really drip this off. We don’t want a huge coating. We do want a little extra crispy and back in here and again really pound that flour in there. Yeah. I want to see those black specks in the black pepper. Then give it another nice shake. Make sure all that skin has been coated perfect. Don’t get this on your raw ingredients. Then we’re just gonna drop that in there. 330 degrees, we’re gonna fry that for I mean, until it’s done, really. We’re gonna temp check it, try and get it up to 180 degrees internally. But it should take probably 8 to 10 minutes. Yeah, buddy! Ain’t nothin but a peanut! Sorry. Chicken’s done. Hi, welcome. We’ve been frying for about 10 minutes. Got it at about 330, let the oil come up to about 350. That’s looking extra crispy. This should have hopefully rendered that skin because again these are skin on chicky chicky thighs. Pull that out and then while it’s still hot and covered in grease, again we’re not doing Nashville hot chicken. I like Nashville hot chicken, it’s not my favorite. What I do want to do is give it a nice little shower. A little extra Tony C’s on there. A little extra spice, a little extra salt. Again, very rarely have you had chicken that you said this is too salty and has too much spice on it. So we’re gonna pull that. That is, that’s our hero. That’s our hero. I can’t sing it, but I, you know the song. And we do need a hero to save us. Bam! Just like Emeril Lagasse. Okay, little toasted brioche bun. I still like brioche buns. I still think they’re lovely and I just basically want like, I want, you ever, you know how like dudes sleep with tiny pillows? Let’s, let’s reinforce the gender binary here. You know dudes use tiny pillows. They sleep on them. I’m one of those guys. That’s how I feel about my chicken buns as well. I like tiny little buns that hardly hold. the chicken inside there, because then you get to eat little chicken pieces on the outside. Get sauce on both sides. I very strongly believe in this architecture. Like, Frank Lloyd Wright believed in waterfalls where there shouldn’t be waterfalls. I believe in slaw on the bottom. Nice, compacted. Boom. Perfect. And then pickles on the top bun. Pickles go on the top bun, slaw goes on the bottom bun. This way you get heat coming from both sides of the chicken. And I don’t know why I insist on having room temp to warm slaw on a sandwich, but I really do. Big ol’ crispy chicken thigh, right there. And we crown thy who deserve to be king, the chicken sandwich that will take out the most expensive chicken sandwich that like we could find in a reasonable area. Gwynedd Stuart! Yep, that’s my name, kind of. Do you get the, do you get the, it’s a Mo Collins, Mad TV circa 2004. I actually never watched Mad TV. Bummer, really missed out on a cultural icon. Anyways, we’re gonna eat, three chicken sandwiches. One is from the most expensive restaurant in Los Angeles, one is from the least expensive restaurant, and then one is one that I made myself. You’ve been here before, put on the blindfold, let’s eat some chicken. Can you tell me what restaurant it’s from, or do I have to wait till after to find out? You have to wait till after. Do you have any guesses? I don’t know. I can’t think of an expensive fried chicken sandwich restaurant. Is that? That’s where you and I differ. It’s not a place where you, like, dance on the tables. Okay. If that’s giving you any sort of clues. How’s my? Watch those cloches. I’m watching them. Okay, you ready for the first fried chicken sandwich? We have cut all of these in half, just to, just to give you some context for what’s going in your mouth. Ready? All right, that’s a big, big old bite. Okay. Wow, it’s fun. It’s fun to eat. There’s lots of like, crunch in there. Pickles? – Who knows? – Maybe? Definitely pickles. But the sauce is really tangy too. So it all works together beautifully. I love it. Joe Pesci? I don’t. I was just, like, doing myself, but yeah, I have some Joe Pesci vibes and tendencies, I guess. Yeah, some Pesci-ism. What do you think about the seasoning level on the chicken? Pesci-isms. It has, like, a little bit of heat. Okay. But I couldn’t really gauge the seasoning level on the chicken because it’s so saucy, if that makes sense. Oh, okay, okay. My gold tooth. My gold tooth. Gwynedd, what would you rank that chicken sandwich out of ten? I’d give that a nine. It was really good. You ready for chicken sandwich number two? Can I change my score if I decide to? Yeah. Yeah, you can kind of do whatever you want. I love that. All right, chicken sandwich number two. Train coming in. I don’t know. It has a lot less flavor. It has a lot less flavor than the last one that I just tried. But, it’s not bad. It’s not, it’s not my favorite though. What are the main differences? Is it mostly flavor? Is it cook? Is it wetness? I don’t know, there’s something about the flavor of it that’s just not coming to life for me like that last one did. Cool? I’m always so afraid I’m gonna say something insulting about the food you cooked. Oh, you can insult me to my face. I don’t really care. Are you ready to score this out of 10? Yeah, I guess so. 5.5 All right, so we’re coming in with chicken sandwich number three. That’s gross. That’s good. That tastes like, a Wendy’s chicken sandwich to me. Do you like Wendy’s? – Yeah. – All right. Should be happy. I, I haven’t been to a Wendy’s in a long time, have you? No, it’s been a while since I’ve, like, really sat down in one too, especially. Yeah. They used to have the atriums. Do you remember that? Like, there was, like, a style of a Wendy’s building that was very, like, aesthetically pleasing. It was when they were doing the Frescata menu. I loved that. I don’t remember that, but I do remember when they had a salad bar. Yep. I love that. Yeah, then the Baconator came out and was so successful that they were just like, oh, this is what you really want. And then they designed the restaurants to look like the Baconator. There’s just bacon hanging off of everything. You ready to score that one out of ten? Sure. What do you give it? 6.5 You stand by that. Chicken sandwich number 1, you got a 9. Chicken sandwich number 2, 5.5. Chicken sandwich number 3, 6.5. Yeah. Gwynedd, which one do you think was the most expensive in Los Angeles? I think that the first one was. Gwynedd, if you open your eyes. The first one was actually my homemade chicken sandwich. It’s so good and it’s so much better than the other two. I know, I’m really good at cooking. It’s so, so much better than. And it only cost me, like, 6 bucks to make too. Dang! That’s from Wendy’s, that cost four dollars. Is that the last one that I tried? This is the second one that you tried. This is the one that you said lacked flavor and didn’t have the pop and zing of that one. Do you recognize this one? I feel like this is like, L.A. O.G.’s. I actually don’t. What is it? Ding’s Crispy Chicken Sandwich from the Honor Bar. Oh, okay. Yeah. I don’t like it. I don’t like it either. Why? But they do good work. – I am. – They work very hard. I know. Okay. That’s, you wouldn’t want to. 5.5’s not bad. No, we can be like a, you know, give it a B. If you got a 5.5 off like the 9 meter springboard in the Olympics, you’d be pretty happy. That’s such a good way, that’s such a good way of looking at things. Glass half full. So this was Wendy’s though. Definitely Wendy’s, yeah. Wow, that’s a professional food taste tester for ya. Really check out her work at sporked.com. Was it the gush of hot mayonnaise? Because I was surprised. No one has a hot gushy mayonnaise like Wendy’s, I’ll tell you what. Josh, look at how beautiful that is. Thank you. I’m really proud of the work that we do. You should feel so proud. Thank you so much. And thank you so much for stopping by the Mythical Kitchen. We got new episodes coming out all the time. Gwynedd, how often you got new articles coming out on Sporked? Constantly. As, as we speak. Yeah. Check that out too. Thank you again so much. I’m gonna eat this chicken sandwich. Yeah, hell yeah. Bottom bun has sogged through. So craggy. I can’t even do it! Did you? Yes, he can! This Halloween season, check out the Mythical Cookbook, featuring a whole chapter on embracing the foods that scare you. Visit mythicalcookbook.com to order yours today.