The Recipe with Kenji and Deb - Crispy Chicken Cutlets

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

Crispy chicken cutlets are endlessly adaptable to taste, so it’s no wonder they are a universal crowd pleaser. From Austrian schnitzel to Japanese katsu to Deb’s mother-in-law’s recipe that leaves out a classic ingredient, there are endless permutations of chicken, flour, egg, breadcrumbs + ??? to satisfy the pickiest eater (and most discerning home cook).Recipes Mentioned: Tonkatsu or Chicken Katsu (Serious Eats) Crispiest Chicken Cutlets (Smitten Kitchen) 5-Ingredient Fried Chicken Sandwiches (Serious Eats) Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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I have made a lot of chicken cutlets this week. I made one set of chicken cutlets last night. Oh, God, are you you gonna hold it up? Late last night, but no, my kids don't eat, my daughter is a pescatarian, so it's difficult to make chicken cutlets for dinner multiple nights in a row the way you did. So you ate it but they didn't eat it? I tasted it last night, yes, because I wanted to have some context for your recipe. Your recipe is a pretty classic one. We're gonna get into all this. We're gonna be talking about chicken cutlets, fried chicken cutlets of various sorts. Crispy chicken cutlets.

Crispy chicken cutlets, yes. Yes, yours are called the crispiest chicken cutlets. I questioned that name. Are we gonna fight? Ooh, everyone loves it when we fight. I understand the SEO value of calling something the crispiest. However, I would say that I have had...

Are you sure you didn't do it wrong? I have had crispier chicken cutlets than we can get into them. Oh, gas. From PRX's Radiotopia, this is the recipe with Kenji and Deb. Where we help you discover your own perfect recipes. Kenji is the author of The Food Lab, and The Walk, and a columnist for The New York Times. And Deb is the creator of Smitten Kitchen.

She's also the author of three best-selling cookbooks. We've been professional recipe developers for nearly two decades, and we've got the same basic goal, to make recipes that work for you and to make you excited to get into the kitchen. But we've got really different approaches, and on this show, we'll cook and talk about each other's recipes, comparing notes

to see what we can learn from each other. This week we're talking about crispy and crispier chicken cutlets. So Deb, when you think of crispy chicken cutlets, what were the crispy chicken cutlets of your youth? What's the image that comes to mind when you think of a chicken cutlet? I actually have no reference to this. I don't remember my mother ever making them growing up.

I don't think my mother would ever have the patience to faff around with frying and three part crunches. Maybe once in a while, but it was definitely not a passion project. My mom was not super into chicken either. What is the formative chicken cutlet for you then? I feel like it was more at like, I don't know, probably more of a deli type thing, like a chicken parm reference or Italian restaurant.

I feel like that's when I'd see it the most. And I always had a kind of mental dispute with it, like working so hard to do this three-part dredge and then you're frying just to like smother it with sauce and for it to come out soggy. And I took this right into the early years of Smitten Kitchen with me, this bias against this of doing all of this work.

To me, it just feels like a terrific amount of work. To get it crispy and then to soak it in marinara sauce, like for chicken parm? Yes. Well, Americans in particular have an obsession with crispy and brown. Whereas if you go to Asia, very frequently you're frying things and then soaking them in sauce or putting them into soup. Like in Japan, a real classic dish is tendons, so it's udon noodles with fried tempura in the broth. And so the tempura kind of gets real soggy.

And so, but the idea I think is that you have this, you're adding richness to the fried coating by adding oil to it. But then because fried coatings have all the moisture driven out of them, when you then soak them in sauce, they become like extra sponges. So you're able to absorb that sauce flavor much better with a fried coating than just with the plain chicken or plain shrimp or whatever it is on its own. So yeah, like fried and then soaked is a not uncommon technique in Asia. But you're right, especially in the US, I think we have this idea that if it's

fried and crispy, we want to eat it fried and crispy. Yeah, what was the point otherwise? That said, I think when you talk about something like with tempura coming into udon, when I've had it and it's really good, it's a timing thing. Like they're going to put it in just before they bring it out to you. So you're going to get a mix of textures. I'm not really picturing it at the end, like with the tempura coating has like just given up.

That's before I'm done with the dish, but it's not like when it arrives. You're saying that's wrong? No, I would say that it's not. No, you can have a mix of textures, but I would say that it is not a feature of the dish to necessarily have a mix of, like crispiness is not a feature of the dish and it's not meant to be a feature of the dish. This reminds me of something I read in Bon Appetit many years ago, but it was called

crispy gansagi. Like the headlining, crispy gansagi is the finest texture food. And it was like a love letter to something that's been fried, baked, roasted, or rendered dry and crunchy, and that has been intentionally had that crunch compromised by a liquid or a sauce or a broth. And this person was saying- Or time, like day old fried chicken. Exactly, they were saying that this is actually

the very best texture. The very best texture, and there's something that happens there. but I feel like it's a point. It's not like, I don't think it's like the soggy an hour later. It's like, I don't know. I have taken it to mind, but I'm not sure I'm completely convinced. Got it. Yeah.

You've expanded a little bit beyond your initial Spittin' Kitchen years to accept some level of sogginess in your. I even have a chicken parm recipe in Smitten Kitchen Keepers, my last cookbook. And I use that same technique that I think you tried, which you are skeptical about, but I use that two part dredge where you skip the flour, but I add a little parm to the bread crumbs. And then what I do is I keep most of the sauce underneath and just a little bit on top, so you keep at least some of it with crisp and then you can always use the sauce in the pan

to soften the rest of the table. But it does come out at least like at least 40% still crisp, which works for me. I can work with that number. Yeah, I actually have a similar recipe in my first in the food lab where yeah, you put the sauce in the stripe down the middle. You put it underneath and it's striped down the middle so that the edges of the chicken are still crispy on the side for people who like that crispiness. I also have a recipe on Serious Eats where instead of doing, so a classic chicken parm

is going to be a breadcrumb situation where you're doing flour, then eggs, then breadcrumbs, and we'll get into the flour bit, but you're doing flour, then eggs, then breadcrumbs, and then frying. Whereas something like a chicken fried steak is going to be a dredging situation where you're going to do a liquid marinade and then you go into flour, and then you fry straight from the flour, there's no breadcrumbs involved. So I have a recipe on Serious Eats where you do a southern style fried chicken, for chicken fried chicken,

but then use it as the base for a chicken parm, which I think comes out real nice also. I've never tried that with chicken parm, but when I picture it, I definitely picture the chicken that you would get on one of those good crispy chicken sandwiches, maybe from fast food. And I think you have a recipe, five ingredient fried chicken sandwiches on CIS Eats that looks similar, where you're going to do that buttermilk brine.

The buttermilk's both going to tenderize, and then you can add flavorings to it. Like classic fried chicken, but you're using boneless, skinless pieces. And then you're going to do that flour coating. I think the five ingredient fried chicken recipe I have is a pickle brine. Like you brine the chicken in pickle juice and then you use self-rising flour. It's real simple. But okay, so for me, the picture when someone, when you think of a chicken cutlet, I think of Japanese.

So I grew up in a Japanese household and katsu was something we had on the menu probably every other week. And it would either be tonkatsu, like pork cutlets, but more frequently it was chicken katsu. And so Japanese, the word katsu is, I don't know what the phrase is. It's how you say, it's short for katsuretsu, which is like the Japanese way to say cutlet.

So it's like literally a Western word and a Western dish in Japanese cooking. However, the difference when you make katsu versus like say a milanese, like a milanese or like something that you put in a chicken parm, you're going to be using Western style breadcrumbs, which are ground up bread and like sort of fine particles that are roughly round in shape compared to something like panko, which is what you're going to be making katsu with. Panko is like Japanese style breadcrumbs, which are shredded as opposed to ground.

So you end up with these sort of bigger, bigger flakier pieces. But yeah, for me, chicken cutlet was the thing that my grandmother and my mother would make. It was chicken breast or chicken thigh that was pounded flat, dredged in flour, seasoned with MSG, salt and pepper, dredged in flour, dipped in eggs, and then coated with panko and shallow

fried until golden brown and crisp and then served with tonkatsu sauce, which is like a thick Worcestershire sauce. I made it. I made your recipe from Serious Eats, I think, on Monday for dinner because in my household where everybody agrees on crispy chicken, it's like a great dinner item because I had fun testing the recipes this week because it was like a dinner that everybody agreed on. But I didn't buy, I think the most common sauce is, I think it's Bulldog brand. Bulldog.

But I didn't get over to HR to look for it. So I did the homemade one, although not the one that's on the website. There's one in the comments that looks like it said the recipe. Anyway, I made it. It was great. We absolutely loved it. When I'm making it homemade, typically I'll do like a mix of Worcestershire, ketchup, a little splash of soy sauce, and that's basically it.

But what was the one you made? So I made one that I think basically there's a recipe for tonkatsu sauce on serious eats. And then the first comment says this recipe was updated and the ratios aren't right anymore. This is the correct one. And so it was a third of a cup of ketchup. It's got two tablespoons of Worcestershire, a tablespoon each of soy sauce, mirin, sugar. I think I skipped the sugar because it was sweet enough with the ketchup. A little bit of Dijon and some garlic powder.

We loved it. We thought it was so good and it had like a really nice taste to it, but I want to compare it to the bottled stuff because I think that's what most people use. But we loved it. It was such a good dinner. And the breading is really... So you mentioned panko and I thought that was really interesting because I actually, I never bought breadcrumbs before, before I started buying panko.

I just didn't like that kind of like canned sawdust stuff. I would probably just make my own from an old roll or old bread if I ever needed breadcrumbs. I wasn't buying that like superfying. I don't know, it was diesel. Yeah, like the stuff that comes in the cardboard tube. Exactly, but I started buying panko probably like 10 years ago. I guess it's much more readily available.

And that's what I use for my go-to breadcrumbs. Like if I'm making milanese or I'm making my crispy chicken cutlets, even if it's not Asian or Japanese in any way, I'm still using panko for it. Because to me, they just taste like bread. They don't have anything else in them. Well, the interesting thing about panko, I don't know if you're familiar with how panko is made. It's grated, right? It's grated, but the bread, yeah, so the bread is shredded,

but the bread is also not baked. It's electroc right? It's grated, but the bread, yeah, so the bread is shredded, but the bread is also not baked. It's electrocuted. Story time! I love that. There's no ovens involved. There's like electric plates, and the bread dough goes in between them, and then like an electric current is passed through them so that it cooks via electricity. It gets electrocuted and that generates heat, which cooks the bread.

So panko doesn't have any crusts at all. Like all the bread is the same texture from edge to center, and that's like also sort cooks the bread. So panko doesn't have any crusts at all. Like all the bread is the same texture from edge to center, and that's like also sort of a unique quality of it. So that's why it's so pale and why there's no crusty bits on it. And it's also a uniform thing. So it gets electrocuted, then it's shredded. Your recipe, you call it the crispiest fried chicken ever,

something like that. And I do something different, which is that I skipped the flour dredge. You skipped the flour. Exactly. Basically, my mother-in-law makes them this way, and I always like her chicken cutlets. So I tried them, and I was like, wait, I don't need to use the flour at all.

I found that they were just so crunchy, so crisp. They didn't have that breading taste at all, like a crunch and not like that. Sometimes that floury gummy layer, there was none of that. And I loved it, and that's what became the crispiest chicken cutlet recipe on Smitten Kitchen. So it's interesting because when I was doing testing for my chicken katsu recipe, the one that's on Serious Eats and the

one that's in my book, The Walk, what I found was that at least in that case, and it could be because I think mine, you dry brine the chicken so there's some amount of moisture on it, was that without the flour layer, the flour layer basically added, it evened out of moisture on it, was that without the flour layer, like the flour layer basically added, it evened out the moisture on the surface of the chicken so that when you add the breadcrumbs,

you get a real even coating and a real even golden brown. Because I found that without the flour layer, at least in my recipe, when you fried it, the chicken would end up a little splotchy as opposed to like an even golden brown. However, doing yours, where yours is just thighs, and it's just like the simplest possible recipe. You season it, you dip it into eggs

and then you put it in breadcrumbs and you fry it and that's it. Yeah, I think maybe it's like because there's no brining involved or there's no like time for surface moisture to really beat up or anything that it doesn't, the flour seems unnecessary in yours because yours came out nice and crispy and even.

Even if they were not the crispiest you've ever had. That's okay. Well, the crispiest I've ever had if they were not the crispiest you've ever had. That's okay. Well, the crispiest I've ever had. Tell me about the crispiest you've ever had. The crispiest fried chicken I've ever had is from a restaurant here in Seattle. I think there's actually a couple locations. It's specifically a katsu place. It's called Okami and Kobuta, which means like the wolf and the baby pig.

Or is it Kobuta and Okami? Something like that. But they, like some of the better katsu restaurants in Japan, they use fresh panko. So the panko that you buy at the supermarket that comes in the bags, that's panko that's been dehydrated and dried out, right? And so it's dry and flaky. The really good places, the really good katsu places, they use freshly shredded bread. And you can get a similar result at home if you take like slices of shokupan, like Japanese shokupan, cut off the crust and then feed them through a food processor with the with like the shredding of the

cheese shredding blade, the disc on there. Do like the large holes of a box grater basically. Does it have to be stale first? It seems like it would just ball up. So you can either really gently feed it through or you can freeze it first. And so when you use those fresh bread crumbs, so what happens with the pankoesos that because they're so dry when you're pushing it onto the chicken some of the larger flakes they crack, right? And so you end up with smaller flakes than what's in the bag. With the fresh breadcrumbs they don't, they stay whole, like they're supple. So when you press them on and you get that breading on there, they don't crack and so the pieces stay really big. And so when

you fry it, it comes out like they you have these like huge shards of fried bread that are attached to the surface of the chicken, so it becomes extraordinarily crunchy. So that to me is the crunchiest, crispiest fried chicken using fresh breadcrumbs. All right, so we've got a few things. I tried your katsu recipe, and then I think one or the other, because we've talked about like this sort of Italian-American, and that usually, I think it's more typical with the canned breadcrumbs,

but I like it with panko too. I just like the texture and the neutrality. Crispy fried chicken cutlets fall into three basic camps. There's the katsu style with the panko. There's milanese with the more finely ground Western style breadcrumbs. I think milanese is Italian, but you also find it like South American fried chicken. If you're getting like a Mexican sandwich with fried chicken, it'll

be like a milanesa style. And then the third style is schnitzel. Schnitzel. I made that too. Although I didn't really make it authentically because authentic Wiener schnitzel is with veal. Veal, yeah. Wiener schnitzel.

Well, schnitzel period is just a breaded cutlet. Wiener schnitzel in particular is made with veal. That's the Austrian classic. So I was not making that, but I wanted to see if I could apply the technique to chicken and get that similar coating. Sorry, back to the katsu thing. Because I use panko-style breadcrumbs

on my sort of Italian-American, French, Italian breadings, for me, there wasn't really much of a difference. I just used chicken breast just to like switch it up. But it really was the same thing, except for, again, it had the flour step, which I don't always do at home. I'm on my like weeknight crispiest chicken cutlets. So you've been making katsu all along, basically? I have been making katsu all along.

I just didn't have that delicious sauce. But now that I know the recipe, I'm set, or I'm going to finally buy a bottle. But I had not made schnitzel before, hadn't made it in years. I used your recipe on the New York Times where you had done a lot of testing and you had found that brushing with vodka, so it was not a four-part dredge, it was a, it wasn't a three-part dredge, it was a four-part dredge. I was like, plus you have the plate on this side where you have the cutlets, and then you have the plate

on this side where you have the breaded ones. Then you have another plate where you have to put the drain. I have a small kitchen, this is why I actually hate it so much. I love the outcome, but I find the process of doing it so, it's more counter space than I have with these dishes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you got that New York kitchen. Yeah, it's, yeah, I feel like. Where you cook fearlessly.

I cook fearlessly, but a little bit grumpily when there's six, six trays and they're like falling off and then there's always like a kid walking by trying to stick their fingers in the raw chicken. Yeah. Well, yeah, let's talk about schnitzel. Cause you know, I think the main difference between a schnitzel and like a breaded chicken cutlet, I mean, schnitzel can be made with, it's usually made veal, pork, sometimesel can be made with, it's usually made veal, pork,

sometimes turkey can be made with chicken. The real difference is that with schnitzel, the goal is to have a crust that actually puffs away from the meat. And so you end up with this kind of, I think it looks like the folds on a, on a Shar-Pei. Rump-Bald, you look Rump-Bald, like a sleeping dog. Exactly.

So the coating kind of puffs away from the meat and you end up with this like real tender, sort of steamed piece of meat inside a crispy, steamy, ruffled crust. And this was one of those recipes where I spent a ton of it. Like my daughter would wake up in the morning, she's like, Papa, were you frying chicken again last night? Because I wait until my kids go to sleep and then I would fry chicken from like 11 p.m. till 2 a.m. It's not uncommon to brush the cutlets with water before you do the dredging steps, with the idea that the water is going to evaporate when you fry it, and that evaporation

is going to cause the crust to puff out. And so the idea is like, yeah, well, if water evaporates and causes the crust to puff out, something that's a little more volatile, that evaporates more easily, like vodka or any kind of hard liquor, is going to make it extra puffy. And it does. So yeah, you do a little more volatile that evaporates more easily, like vodka or any kind of hard liquor is going to make it extra puffy. And it does. So you do a little brush of vodka or whatever you want, bourbon, any kind of hard liquor you want,

a little brush of it on the chicken before you do the standard breading steps and then the crust puffs away. The other important part in the schnitzel, and this one I discovered, so I have a restaurant called Worst Hall in San Mateo. It's a German beer hall and we do a chicken schnitzel there. And when we were developing that recipe, there's a couple things we found. We tested all kinds of breading. And what I found was the most consistent and the easiest is to take panko and just grind

it in the food processor. That's what I did. Because you're looking for a very fine breadcrumb. That's the biggest difference is you're not looking for real texture from it. And in fact, in your New York Times recipe, you have a sifted a couple of times. I did not do that, but, and I'm not going to, but with the food processor and the panko, I got to a fine powder very quickly. And I felt like it really has that hallmark texture.

That sort of even browning and that kind of puffiness without like a ton of jagged edges that you get from katsu or something else. But yeah, finely ground panko, I find is easy, which is great because then you don't have to have multiple types of breadcrumbs at home and you can make multiple types of fried chicken. And then the other important element was making sure that you go basically straight from the breadcrumbs into the fryer. We experimented with like, because in a restaurant, oftentimes what you're trying to do is prep as much in advance as you can so that when someone orders something, you do as little work as possible without sacrificing quality. And so we're like, okay, well we can pre-bread our chicken

and then all we have to do is pick it up and drop it in the pan or drop it in the fryer. But as it turns out, with that particular style of breadcrumb, it works okay if you're doing something like panko. So I know your recipe, you say you can bread it in advance and then fry the next day and that works well with panko. With the really finely ground breadcrumbs, they end up absorbing too much moisture. And so you get really spotty browning if you don't. So instead of getting them fresh from the breadcrumbs

straight into the hot oil, I think is a real key step if you want that puffiness and that evenness also. That makes sense because with mine, I'm trying to get all the moisture off the chicken. I want to, so you can rest it from. In fact, most of the time you're trying to get breading that isn't going to fall off the chicken. That would not be like a good Italian American or Milanese if the crust was flaking off. But with the

schnitzel you actually want that bubbly. So it makes sense that if you waited too long you would lose that different texture, which is a little soft underneath, creamy inside, and then the full crisp on the outside. I wouldn't say I got great ripples, but how important for schnitzel is the depth of the oil? Because we can talk about, like, there's pan-frying and then there's shallow-frying and then there's deep-frying. And for different things, it really matters. I've read that for the schnitzel, the deep-frying really matters.

I also should make clear that I used neither lard nor... SIMON LARSON Clarified butter? KATE BALLARD Clarified butter. I was like, this is a Tuesday. We're not doing this. However, I have seen, like, Austrian chefs Austrian chefs on like TikTok and whatever where they'll just take regular cooking oil, something neutral that goes to high heat and we'll add a couple tablespoons of butter to it for flavor. How deep was your oil?

I was probably just doing half an inch. Yeah. So with schnitzel, you want to go a little bit more because you basically you don't want the weight of the cutlet to be pushing the breadcrumb coating down into the bottom of the pan. So you want it like basically enough oil that it can float and with schnitzel really the one of the key steps to it is to is you as it's cooking and especially after you flip it that you shake the pan back and forth and you're trying to get like waves of hot fat to go over the top of it and that also helps with the puffing. If you've ever if you've ever made pommes soufflées or if you've ever made, let's see, arepa de huevo, like a puffy,

any kind of food that puffs up, the more you can move it and agitate it and like encourage it to pull away from itself, the puffier it's going to become. So schnitzel, like yeah, like there's this idea that you want like golden waves of fat going across the top surface of it so that it can puff away. Have you seen Mancci's chicken katsu recipe? Or maybe it's a pork katsu recipe. So this is the opposite end of the spectrum as far as puffiness of the coating goes. What she does is she puts her cutlets down on the cutting board and then she

whacks them with the back of a knife, a bunch to scruff up the surface, mangle the surface essentially of the cutlet before she does the standard breading with the idea that by mangling the surface you're getting more nooks and crannies for the bread to adhere to. So you get a breading that is really strongly adhered to, like it becomes what Ed Levine calls the cosmic oneness you get between the coating and the chicken. We should have gotten Ed on today.

I bet he would have had a lot of opinions on this. Well, Ed has lots of opinions about everything. Yeah, I'm sure he has opinions on chicken cutlets, particularly chicken cutlets sandwiches, I'm sure. I just want to hear him say cosmic oneness as often as possible. So, Deb, you and I will talk more about crispy chicken cutlets after the break

on The Recipe with Kenji and Dan. When I think of people making fried chicken cutlets at home, I think the biggest hurdle is always the frying. And it's not just the whatever health component of it. I think it's that we're all just stressed out about oil and like what to do, like how much to buy, what kind to buy. You're not supposed to dump it down the sink, how to get rid of it. It's like a lot of headaches. But before we get into the disposal, we've got shallow frying,

which I think of as just like not shallow, we have pan frying. You know, I put a puddle of olive oil in a pan, I heat it up, I fry an egg. That's pan frying. So like a puddle of olive oil in a pan, I heat it up, I fry an egg. That's pan-frying. So like a couple tablespoons of oil most. Exactly. Anywhere from like a teaspoon to a couple tablespoons of oil. Exactly. Just to keep it from sticking, basically.

Then you've got shallow-frying, which you would call maybe like half an inch. Yeah, which is I think what you would do for say meatballs or for most of the time when you're doing chicken cutlets. Yeah, I would do shallow frying, where it looks, it's like enough that you can like tilt the pan back and forth and it sloshes around. And then when you, and when you lay the food in it,

you have to carefully lay it away from you so that the oil doesn't splash up. And then by the time all the food is in the pan, it's deep enough that it comes all, like more than halfway up the sides of the food. And some of it even probably spills over the top of it. That's usually what I'm looking for when I'm frying at home. I, but deep frying, it's going to be fully submerged.

I'm picturing like a deep fryer, like for French fries or something like that. Like it's going to be completely not touching the bottom or the top of the oil. Right. Which really is the ideal way to fry virtually any, like anytime you're shallow frying, I feel like you're doing it because you don't want to deep fry. Because yeah, with the, with the deep fryer, you're frying evenly from all sides. And you don't also, you also don't have to worry about the food touching the bottom of the pan, which gives it an even heat.

Picking up old crumbs. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So deep, like deep frying is the ideal way to fry most foods that are going to be shallow fried. However, we shallow fry because it's convenient. It's where home comes. It's more convenient.

Yeah. Yeah. Also, I know people who have deep fryers, but it's generally like not something most people have at home unless you're really passionate about fried chicken or something like that. I also don't find the machines to be that great, like a skillet. Well, the advantage of a deep fryer, whether you're at a restaurant or at home, is that the heating doesn't come from the very bottom, right? Like the heating element in a deep fryer is elevated off the bottom of the fryer. So if you're deep frying in a Dutch oven or you're deep frying in a wok or a skillet, as bread crumbs or flour falls off, it sinks to the bottom and it gets to the hottest part of the pan where it then burns,

because it comes into contact with the bottom. But a fryer later or one of those countertop deep fryers, because the heating element is elevated from the bottom, when bread crumbs and stuff fall off, they sink to the bottom, but they don't burn and they stay down there. And so a deep fryer will just keep your oil fresher longer and it'll also prevent that whole issue of getting burned flavors or getting burnt crumbs onto your finished food. At least to some degree, it's not perfect, but...

People always ask me about reusing frying oil. It's the number one most, like, what do you do with the oil? What do you do with the leftover oil? Like, this is it, these are the hurdles people have at home. Like, I just used an entire bottle of, like, Western canola oil or whatever, like, what am I going to do with the leftover oil? Like, this is it, these are the hurdles people have at home. Like, I just used an entire bottle of, like, Wesson canola oil or whatever. Like, what am I gonna do with the rest of it?

I, if I'm making, like, french fries, I will actually reuse it over and over again. I will keep it in a bottle in the fridge or the freezer, and I feel like it has no smell, no taste, nothing. I'm not cooking them with garlic or onion. Something that fries real clean, yeah, like french fries. Real clean, I have no problem. I'll use it if I'm making, but then if I was making like a Spanish tortilla or something

like that, I might use the oil, but I'm not going to use it again because it's going to have onions in it. For the chicken, I should have reused the oil between Monday and Tuesday because I wasn't thinking ahead because I'm using it too. But in general, I don't like saving that oil as much. I feel like it has that chickeny smell. It's not my favorite. What I typically would do is I would line a fine mesh

strainer with some paper towels, and I'd pour it through that. Like that to me, that's the easiest way to clean oil, to get all the fine debris out of it so you can reuse it. And you can reuse it a few times. Honestly, what I typically do is I have a real fine mesh strainer that's handheld that I use to fish out burnt bread crumbs or whatever so that the oil is relatively clean. And then I go on to like frying bend where, so like right now I have my

spit in kitchen, Staub four court brazier on my stove top, which is a perfect vessel for frying, which is a perfect vessel for frying. And it's on my, it's on my stove top with like two inches of oil in it right now. And I've used that oil to fry various things and I'm going to continue using, it's going to stay there. I'm going to strain it with my, with a fine mesh strainer and it's going to stay on there until I'm going to continue using it. It's going to stay there. I'm going to strain it with my with a fine mesh strainer and it's going to stay on there until I'm ready to throw it out. So it'll be on there for like a few weeks.

You're using this at room temperature. You're not concerned about it going rancid or anything. By the time it goes rancid, I will yeah I will be done with my frying bender and I'll move on to other foods. But it's like yeah it's like I'll plan menus around saying like okay for the next few weeks we're just going to have like a bunch of fried stuff Kenji, have you ever used this product Fry Away? No, what is that? I thought it was a Japanese product, but now I'm not sure.

Maybe it's a shark tank? I have no idea. Okay, I do not know the origin of the product, but I've been hearing about it for a few years. And basically what it is, you take your pan of oil and you put this packet of powder in and it solidifies it so you can just throw it in the regular garbage can. And it's supposed to be really ingenious for people frying at home, stressing over how they're going to get rid of the oil.

Like, because again, it's a major hurdle. Want to use this much oil and then the debate over whether you're going to reuse it. As I said, I reuse it for some things. I don't always reuse it for chicken unless I was doing a whole weekend chicken test. But yeah, it's supposed to make it really easy for people to just throw away. Well, what I mean, what I do is I have a funnel and I stick it back into it. You know, I keep one of the big oil bottles

and I just pour it into there when it's done. And I do always feel bad because it's like, now I can't recycle that bottle. It's like, it's just like going into a landfill somewhere, the bottle and the oil. But yeah, that sounds like an interesting product. The other technique I've seen for cleaning oil is to add gelatin.

You use unflavored gelatin and water, and then you pour that mixture into the oil and stir it around, and then you let it solidify in the fridge. What happens is that the gelatin captures all of the particles, so it'll capture all the breadcrumbs or the flour or whatever, and then solidify in the fridge, and then you can just pour the oil off the top. This is for when you're reusing the oil, by the way, not for disposing of it.

You can pour it off the top and it acts as like a real fine filter. I'm now thinking of, I feel like with classic French cooking, if you make a broth and you want to make it, if you want to make a stock and you want to claret or make it very clear, you add the egg white to it. To make a constamé, you would add egg white and yeah, you typically add egg white and a bunch of other sort of aromatics, sometimes ground meat, and you whisk that in and then let it form a solid raft on top. And yeah, what happens there is that the broth inside it kind of bubbles,

pops a little hole in it and it bubbles over the top and you end up with a sort of natural, real fine filter. But yeah, it's the same idea. It's like you're using a organic filter of some like a protein web that's catching fine particles. So we've talked about how much oil to use and we've talked about how to get rid of it. What about the temperature of the oil? And so do you use a thermometer when you're frying chicken cutlets, Deb? Or do you use some other,

like stick the end of the chopstick in there or drops from panko in there? What do you do? It depends on what, like when I'm making my crispy chicken cutlets on a weeknight, I will just flick it, look for a nice hiss. But I've also deep fried enough and shallow fried enough

that I have a pretty good sense of what 350 looks like when I throw a drop of oil or breadcrumb in. Not a drop of oil, a drop of water, which by the way is very dangerous and you're not supposed to do that, so I'm not advocating for this. It is truly the worst though when you're cooking because our stove is right next to the sink

and inevitably a drop of water is going to get in there and it's just, it's not good, this whole oil water thing. I don't know, maybe there's some signs to it that Kenji can explain to us. Well, let's talk about why temperature is important. Certainly for the schnitzel, and this week when I did the katsu too, I decided to check the temperature

to be more of like a professional cook. I also have this really cool thing somebody gave me is a temperature gun. Like an infrared gun. And it's clipping on a deep fry thermometer. It specifically says like not for human beings, but it's pretty accurate in terms of getting like the surface temperature.

Yeah, so the way those infrared thermometers, they can be accurate. They do have a problem where they also measure reflected heat, so it'll measure differently whether you're, they're basically calibrated to work on a matte black surface, something that is radiating but not reflecting. And so if you're doing it on, if you have like a real shiny surface

or you have like a real shiny oil or whatever, like it'll actually be a little bit inaccurate because it measures reflected heat as well. You want like a probe thermometer if you want ultimate accuracy. Temperature guns are great for, especially for like testing the temperature of a pizza stone, something like that, or the surface temperature of a dark pan. I usually will use it on the surface and I remember I have like a thermapen and I just like it in, which is like, I just don't like clipping things on. It just feels like so

fussy so I'll just like run it through and check it that way. I use my instant read. Yeah, I use my instant read. But well, for cutlets I generally don't even bother with a thermometer. I just see, use the same I drop a few breadcrumbs in there see how like see if it bubbles vigorously or not and that's it Yeah, how much does it matter that it's 350 or 375 degrees? So the goal with frying right? It's like you want the exterior to get crispy and brown by the time the middle is cooked through, right? And so you don't want it to brown too fast Which can happen if it's too hot and it gets burnt and you also don't want to right? And so you don't want it to brown too fast, which can happen if it's too hot and then it gets burnt.

And you also don't want it to go too slow because you don't want your, well, there's a couple things that can happen if it goes too slow. If it goes too slow, first of all, like you can overcook the meat inside so it becomes a dry and stringy before the outside is set. And if you're really too low,

it'll be real difficult to brown your breadcrumbs. And when breadcrumbs don't brown properly, they taste soggy. Like if your oil temperature is too low, when by the time it's done frying, it ends up tasting soggy. The interesting thing to me though, is that there, I had always heard that it tastes soggy because cold oil gets absorbed more easily into the crust. Or like I heard this theory that like there's this like outward pressure of gases pushing the oil out so that it doesn't get absorbed into the meat or

get absorbed into the breading. The, if you actually look at the, the science behind it and the research behind this, that's actually not the case. Things that fry at higher temperatures will absorb more oil. But there's actually not a correlation between the amount of oil that is absorbed and the sensation of greasiness. And so the reason things absorb more oil is because at higher temperature, more of the free moisture inside the breading will get expelled out,

and that leaves interstitial spaces, it leaves gaps in the coating for oil to then seep into. And so when we eat something and it tastes soggy, like something that has been fried at oil that isn't quite hot enough, and it tastes soggy, the feeling that we're getting is not actually the sense of more oil, it's the combination of oil and moisture that's left over inside there that gives us that greasy feeling. So like a bread, yeah, a chicken cutlet that's been fried at a higher temperature, technically will have more oil in it than a chicken cutlet that tastes soggy and greasy and has been fried at a lower temperature. Which is not to say that you should fry at a lower temperature for health reasons, but yeah, I always found it interesting that.

I actually didn't know that either. I always thought it was like gonna get soggy because the oil wasn't like hot enough to just sizzle it but I the nice thing with chicken cutlets is like if they're pretty forgiving if you've pounded them thin you really only need to fry them for about a minute and a half per side to get them good and if they're like if they're like the thigh cutlets I use it might just be two or three minutes per side but it's not really really. In general, if the oil is at about the right temperature, Once the breadcrumbs are a nice golden brown,

the chickens probably cook through. And I understand that might be a little scary the first time you're making it, but I've made them like a hundred times, so I just, I know it's cooked. I have a harder time, and this is not the topic of this episode, but when I'm making like bone-in, like southern fried chicken, that's the one where the temperature regulation is everything because it's just so, because it's just so often that like the outside will get so brown before the inside has those pieces of chicken fully cooked.

Yeah. Well, those cases where you can also like, you can start in the fryer and then if you, yeah, finish in the oven if you're worried about things like that. But yeah, no, you're right that with cutlets, there's not much risk that they're going to come out undercooked by the time the bread crumbs are done. And especially if you brine your chicken or you dry brine it, you salt it and let it rest, even if you overcook it, it's still going to be plenty juicy. So yeah, cutlets are a relatively forgiving form of frying.

So I often dry brine. I'll dry brine steak, I'll dry brine chicken, which is basically just adding salt to the surface and letting it sit for a while. Usually it's in an open fridge, like if you're trying to get some sort of edge to it or trying to dry out the surface. If I dry brine a chicken for like, I don't know, roast chicken, I'm usually leaving it in the surface. You're leaving it uncovered in the fridge. I'm leaving it uncovered in the fridge.

I'm trying to get the surface to dry out while keeping the meat moist. Well, actually, first, real quick, can you explain, like, chemically or waterwise, what's happening when you dry brine a piece of meat? I feel like we've talked about it in an earlier episode, but we should just refresh everyone. Sure. Yeah. So dry brining. So you're essentially salting a steak or a chicken cutlet or whatever it is. You're salting it. And initially, the salt is going to draw moisture from the meat through osmosis and so that, and you're going to see that moisture kind of beat up on the surface of the meat and as

the moisture gets drawn out, the salt will dissolve in it and so you end up basically with like a really concentrated brine that's sitting on the surface of the meat and at that point it starts to act the same way as a regular liquid brine does, which is that the salt will dissolve some of the muscle proteins in their myosin. And so, and as those proteins dissolve, the muscles loosen up. And so they can reabsorb the brine. So that brine will then migrate. Some of it will evaporate. Some of it will migrate back into the chicken or the steak or

whatever it is, or the pork chop. And as you let it sit like overnight in the fridge, it'll slowly work itself into the meat. And so you end up with meat that's seasoned a little more evenly, seasoning that goes beyond just the very surface of it. And more importantly, when food is brined, when meat is brined or dry brined, when it cooks, the muscle fibers don't tighten up as much.

And so they don't push out as much moisture and so they stay juicier. I don't use it for chicken thigh cutlets because they're a little bit fattier and the darker meat just always tastes more moist. I don't feel like it's as much of a concern that they dry out. It hasn't happened to me. But with chicken breasts, especially like the size that they come in, they are often,

I feel like they're much more at a risk for drying out. So usually when I dry brine, as I said, I'll put it, I'll salt it and I'll leave it out in the fridge, try to get the surface dry. This was the first time that I actually just tossed them back in the bag, as you recommend in your, I think in your katsu and in your schnitzel recipe. And I think you recommend that you do it for a bunch of hours, but I was totally doing this prep just like an hour or two before dinner. It came out great.

I was so happy to see, like it was so easy. Yeah, with something like a cutlet where you're going to be adding a breading to it It came out great. I was so happy to see, like it was so easy. Yeah, with something like a cutlet where you're gonna be adding a breading to it and you don't need to get that real dry surface for browning the way you would with like a steak or a pork chop or a roast chicken. Yeah, but doing it in a bag or in a bowl or whatever

and just letting it sit there in its own juices works just fine. Works better, I think, actually. I thought it was great and I feel like I'm gonna, it just made it so much easier. Should we talk briefly about air fryers and convection ovens and how you and whether you can get a crispy chicken cutlet out of one of these devices? Yes.

Do you have an air fryer? I don't have an air fryer. I've got like a countertop convection oven that has a sort of air fryer setting. The main difference between an air fryer, a dedicated air fryer and just a countertop oven or a regular oven with an air fryer setting is that an air fryer and just a countertop oven or a regular oven with an air fry setting is that an air fryer has a fan that kind of sucks up from the top and it'll try and specifically aim to pull moisture away from the environment.

And an air fry is typically a smaller volume also of air so that you get more convection currents going. The problems I have with an air fryer, particularly for something like fried chicken, is that an air fryer doesn't add fat, right? And a lot of the Christmas and the flavor of fried chicken comes from fat. Like part of it is pushing the moisture out of the breadcrumbs, but in order for the breadcrumbs to sort of brown and crisp evenly,

you need fat to move into them to take place with the moisture. Because otherwise you end up just, it ends up with like a sort of dry, almost stale bread texture. Dry toast versus butter toast? Yeah. The way around it is to add fat. You can spray with nonstick spray and do it a couple times during the cooking process, and that'll help. But to be honest, you're never going to get,

at least in my experience, you're never going to get something out of the air fryer. As far as a breaded cutlet or breaded food of any kind goes that really compares to actually shallow or deep frying. I don't know. What are your experiences there? Very similar. I actually do have an air fryer, but it's not really big enough to hold food to cook for the family, but I also have a stovetop.

I have a countertop oven with an air fryer setting. Is it just an air fryer setting or is it just a air fryer setting, or is it just a convection oven? But it has a fan setting, so you can do convection with fans. So it's similar, but I just, it depends on what I'm trying to get. If you're just looking for, like I always feel like the air fryer's really good

at like reheating, I don't know, frozen chicken tenders. Things that have already been fried. Yeah, exactly, that dry high heat, like fan heat is great. But if you're trying to get that flavor, I don't get it from the air fryer. This does not mean that if you are using your air fryer to air fry chicken cutlets and you're happy with them,

you should change what you're doing. I'm just saying that for me, I'm not getting out of it what I want from it. If I just wanted the taste of dry breadcrumbs, I wouldn't go through all that trouble to do it. You could just eat something with dried breadcrumbs on it. That brings us to our wrap-up questions, Kenji. Can you waffle a chicken, a fried chicken cutlet? I'm sure you can.

I've never tried it, but it seems I've tried other fried things and waffle irons are real good at re-crisping fried things in general. So I imagine that you can very easily. And I would think that if you really like put some pressure on that waffle iron, squash it down and so the chicken coating gets into the actual waffle wells. I think you could come up with something that would probably go real well in a sandwich. I would eat it for sure. Yeah, it sounds like it feels like it's probably the kind of thing that you could serve in like a...

You could come up with a dish that you would serve at a, at like a hipster restaurant in Brooklyn. People would think that. I feel like instead of doing like fried chicken on a waffle, you'd be just waffling the fried chicken. But yeah, I see we're going somewhere with this. It's going to be on the menu. So instead of chicken and waffles,

it's just chicken is waffles. Chicken as a waffle. Chicken as a waffle. Does it taco? I feel like you could definitely use chicken like this in a taco. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. In fact, I would even have it fried chicken cutlet cut into strips and served in a taco

with like shredders and like mayo. Have it almost like a McDonald's McChicken style, but in a taco. Yep. I would eat that. I think that would be real good. With some shredded yellow cheese unmelted. I was going to say shreddous, but okay. Shreddous too, yeah.

Back to the rapid questions. Can you take your fried chicken cutlet and fry it in butter in a pan? Certainly you can. I don't know that it would improve upon it, but you could. It's not the way I would reheat it. Does it leftover? I obviously can attest to that. I think the leftover is great. I love having leftover chicken cutlets. Does it come out of kids' clothes easily?

No. It's also like, fried chicken cutlets are one of those things where when I'm gonna make them, like, I... It's one of the few times when I will put on an apron. Because I have, like, historically, I have many, like, sweaters and pairs of jeans and stuff that just have, like, oil stains in them that don't come out. And they're almost always from shallow frying something and having the oil leap out onto me. For me it's the smell though more so like the sweaters. So for me I actually wear black 99% of the time like a proper New Yorker but I will miss the oil stains like I'll be in daylight one

day and I'll be oh look at my oil splattered black clothes that I didn't notice because I thought black hides everything so yeah your, your method, that apron thing, sounds much smarter. That's it for today's episode about crispy chicken cutlets. But we want to hear from you guys. Tell us how you make them. You can leave your questions and comments for us at TheRecipePodcast.com or tag us at Kenji and Deb on Instagram. Or you can call us and leave us a message at 202-709-7607. The recipe is created and co-hosted by Deb Perlman and Kenji Lopez-Alt. Our

producers are Jocelyn Gonzalez, Perry Gregory, and Pedro Rafael Rosado of PRX Productions. The executive producer for Radiotopia is Audrey Martavich and Yuri Lasordo is director of network operations. Apu Gotay, Emmanuel Johnson and Mike Russo handle our social media. Thanks for listening. RadioTopia, from PRX.