Have you ever bitten into a perfectly golden brown and crispy piece of fried chicken only to find that the inside is still not quite cooked through?
We’ve all experienced that at one time or another, especially if you love fried chicken. This happens more often at home.
When frying food on the stovetop, whether it be fried chicken, pork chops, or even just fries, there is that danger of overcooking it when deep frying. You can overcook the outside when your heat is too high, and you can burn it before the inside is cooked through. You can time it wrong or be too impatient and remove it from the hot oil before it’s cooked through.
This is where many home cooks err on the side of safety.
As a home cook, you may not have the experience just yet to know when the chicken is thoroughly cooked through all the way to the inside despite what it looks like on the outside. You need to fry at a hot enough temperature that it cooks through all the way inside without the outside burning. Don’t let that golden brown and crispy skin fool you!
If you don’t have a deep-fry thermometer, there’s a quick trick to knowing if your chicken is thoroughly cooked through without needing one. You can check the doneness by lifting each piece of chicken out of the oil and checking if its weight has become significantly lighter. It should be much lighter now than it was when it was still raw. (You can also check the juices by piercing the flesh and checking if it runs clear.) While this trick isn’t the most accurate way to determine if your bone-in fried chicken pieces are cooked through, it’s a pretty indicative method without having to cut into the chicken piece and seeing yourself that it is cooked through.
If you still end up with chicken that’s pink on the inside, you don’t have to wait to heat up the oil again nor do you have to turn on the oven or even use the microwave where it’s in danger of becoming soggy.
Instead, there’s an appliance that can not only successfully wick the excess oil from your fried chicken, it can also make sure that your fried chicken is thoroughly cooked through without overcooking it.
The secret is that trendy kitchen appliance: the air fryer.
If you have an air fryer at home, you know that this space-age looking appliance can do more than just “fry” food. The most common food you probably cooked in the air fryer is the food that you normally would fry, including pork chops, frozen food such as fries and nuggets, and of course, fried chicken.
The air fryer is a fast cooking appliance. That’s the beauty of it! Plus, the hot air will heat up, not just the chicken, but the oil, too, that’s trapped in the chicken itself and let it drip off. You will not only get perfectly cooked chicken that’s no longer pink on the inside, it’s got less oil, too.
To ensure that every piece of fried chicken you cook from now on is perfectly cooked and isn’t oily, here’s what you do:
- 1. Place freshly pan-fried chicken in the air fryer basket.
- 2. Turn the temperature dial to 180 degrees C.
- 3. Turn the timer to 5 minutes.
- 4. Let it cook the fried chicken.
Perfectly fried chicken that has less oil with crunchy skin that remains golden brown and crispy without firing up the stove!
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