| American-style streamed chicken relies on a thick, | | | | streamed chicken, or fricassee, from Vietnam's |
| well-seasoned crust, often made even thicker by | | | | Gà Xaò to Italy's pollo fritto. It is thought |
| soaking the chicken pieces beforehand in buttermilk. | | | | that the Scottish people who settled the early South |
| When that crust is nubbly and evenly browned, and | | | | introduced the method here in the United States. They |
| the chicken meat is cooked through, the chicken is | | | | preferred to fry their chickens, rather than baking or |
| sublime. But too often, the flesh is still raw when the | | | | boiling them as the English did. It wasn't until the early |
| crust is cooked, or the skin never cooks all the way | | | | 1900s that recipes for fried chicken began appearing in |
| through, leaving a flabby layer of skin between the | | | | popular "northern" cookbooks. |
| meat and the crust. | | | | Very simply, the chickens are cut up, dredged in flour, |
| Korean-style streamed chicken is radically different, | | | | sprinkled with a little salt, put in a skillet with hot fat, and |
| reflecting an Asian frying technique that renders out | | | | fried until golden brown. Through the years there have |
| the fat in the skin, transforming it into a thin, crackly and | | | | been hundreds of attempts to improve upon her |
| almost transparent crust. (Chinese cooks call this | | | | recipe, and plenty of tricks and special touches, but |
| “paper fried chicken.”) The chicken is | | | | they are all simply minor variations on the original. Mary |
| unseasoned, barely dredged in very fine flour and then | | | | Randolph mentions making a gravy with the |
| dipped into a thin batter before going into the fryer. | | | | "leavings", but the cream sauce so often |
| The oil temperature is a relatively low 350 degrees, | | | | served with streamed chicken seems to have |
| and the chicken is cooked in two separate stages. | | | | originated with the dish "Maryland fried |
| Southerners weren't the first people in the world to fry | | | | chicken". |
| their chickens. Almost every country has a version of | | | | |