How To Make The Perfect Fried Chicken

Fried chicken: juicy, tender chicken that's been fried until golden brown and has just the right balance of salt and seasonings. It's perfect, and we're going to show you how to make it.

Before we get started, though, let's get one thing straight. This is not going to be a hand-holding, back-rubbing lecture about why making fried chicken is really not that scary at all (really!), and that frying anything does not have to be intimidating, and that it's OK to be scared because we'll show you how to not be. No, we're not going to waste our words on that.

Click here to see How to Make the Perfect Fried Chicken

Click here to see the Perfect Fried Chicken Recipe

Just trust us — making fried chicken is easy, OK?

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, we're going to tell you how to make some pretty delicious fried chicken. There are a lot of questions that surround making the dish, including whether or not to brine the chicken, what kind of seasonings should be put into the flour, and if the marinade has buttermilk in it or not, and we've decided on our answers for each and every one.

To hone in on a perfect recipe that we were happy with, we consulted a lot of experts in the field, everyone from chefs that have deep ties to Southern cuisine, like Justin Swain, who trained under an Alabamian chef before taking the reins at Philadelphia's Rex 1516, to ninth-generation Southerners like Rebecca Lang, author of several southern cookbooks, including Southern Living's Around the Southern Table.

Not surprisingly, our pros didn't agree on how to make fried chicken and they all had different fried chicken recipes to share. Each one of theirs was delicious, and it was because of their unique and different ways to make fried chicken that we were able to determine how we'd like to make ours. So you see, we didn't just decide that we liked making fried chicken this particular way and told you that it was the best, but we consulted experts in the industry and extracted parts from each of their recipes, making ours a melting pot of theories that, we think, is downright perfect. 

Anne Dolce is the Cook editor at The Daily Meal. Follow her on Twitter @anniecdolce