Cookbook Survivor: Reverse-Engineering the Popeye's Chicken Sandwich
Saturday's Child Works Hard for a Living
Keeping it simple this week because there’s travel going on again tomorrow for some household members and everybody’s in a low-key mood as a result.
I’ve never eaten the media-frenzied Popeye’s chicken sandwich but I’ve made it a bunch of times. E.g., once you’d read about four or five reviewers going nuts about how great it was and how they were all out for a while, you had a pretty clear idea of what the sandwich was all about. If you do a quick search online you’ll find a bunch of recipes for it, and they’re more or less the same.
I don’t doubt that the sandwich is good, relative to the usual in fast food. What likely makes it good is also what likely made it hard in the initial run to keep up with the demand: to be good it has to be made with real ingredients rather than just being a pre-packaged, pre-made item that the on-site workers stuff in a microwave.
What I came up with (along with hundreds of other home chefs, a lot of them with recipe blogs) is:
Use boneless breasts. Thighs have more flavor but breast meat I think works better with this particular sandwich because it picks up the dredge and the sauce better.
Marinate the breasts in buttermilk for an hour at least.
Dredge in flour mixed with garlic powder, paprika, thyme, salt, pepper and maybe a pinch of aleppo pepper or other hot ground pepper.
Deep fry in a deep fryer if you have one; if not, get an oil that has a high smoke point (peanut or grapeseed) and use a saute pan with high sides. Don’t overcrowd the pan if you’re making more than one or two of these.
Yes, these are bad for you.
The restaurant version has fresh tomatoes, pickles, and a spicy mayo. Here I think you can likely improve on the restaurant in a bunch of ways. One way might be to make a tomato-chili jam if there aren’t good summer tomatoes around. Another might be do something like a harissa-preserved lemon mayo. If you’re going to do pickles, do really good ones. I’ve also put good fresh greens on it—arugula, microgreens, mache, baby romaine.
The restaurant version uses brioche rolls. So should you if you’re going to make this.
So that’s tonight’s meal: the marinating is underway as I write.
Image credit: "Little boy dressed up in Popeye sailor costume" by simpleinsomnia is marked with CC BY 2.0.