Bacon got REALLY expensive the year before I left the chef life for the wide world of food sales. I ended up running this as a special on the bars but it’s become a staple for me whenever I get the craving.
Sourdough, dukes mayo, good tomato, lettuce, battered and fried chicken skins. You get that crunch and savory you want from a BLT at a WAY better price.
Can you share the process for making the fried skin?
My process…place chicken skin in frying pan flat over medium heat. They release their own oil to fry them. They’ll release from the pan when they are ready to flip, but they will almost fry completely crispy by that point. Drain on paper towel, season with salt immediately out of the pan. You don’t need to do anything fancy to get nice crispy chicken cracklings. And you get smaltz out of the deal too.
Of course! We tried it two ways, but the most effective was this
-Dry your chicken skins
-Hold them in a brine of buttermilk, hot sauce, egg mix (purely for ease of use on line, I’d only leave them 15-20 minutes if you’re doing it at the house)
-Toss them in a flour dredge
-Once coated deep fry, you could probably get away with a pan fry with shallow oil but I was blessed with a deep fryer.
Drying the skins and then frying without the wet/dry mix did not yield the crisp you would want (just a warning).
How to keep them from curling up into a tube?
It was a crap shoot but I used the old two fry baskets together trick. Keeps them reasonably flat. You’ll still have a couple that get through… for home anything metal that you can hold something down with?