Ad Hoc's Fried Chicken

A couple of months ago, my mom bought the Thomas Keller Ad Hoc Fried Chicken mix from William Sonoma. It comes with two sets of brine and two sets of coating. Ad Hoc's fried chicken is famed to be among the best, yet possibly most complicated with dozens of different spices/ingredients, fried chicken in America. So it's great that William Sonoma came out with Thomas Keller's fried chicken mix for those who want to try it without going through the hassle of buying so many ingredients nor going to Ad Hoc.

Since we couldn't find packaged non-frozen chicken with different parts, we went with just 4 pounds of drumsticks. We brined all the chicken overnight, literally for about 22 hours (recommended 8-12hrs). When we were ready to cook the chicken the following day, we first coated each drumstick in the coating, then dipped it in the buttermilk, then coated again. The actual frying part was rather messy as you can imagine. We made a mistake with the first batch of 5 drumsticks by making the fire too high that the coating got kind of burnt. For the rest of the chicken, we fried them at almost the lowest heat, which ended up being perfect.

Overall, the fried chicken ended up being quite awesome, albeit guilt-inducing in all of its fried crispy goodness. The chicken was perfectly juicy, tender, and flavored inside, and the coating had the perfect amount of spice without actually being spicy. Being the Filipino I am, back at my Filipino household, I did admittedly eat my Ad Hoc fried chicken with white rice, and I have no regrets about that. I suppose I could have made biscuits or something, but I'm perfectly happy with some moist jasmine rice.

Unfortunately, William Sonoma no longer carries the Ad Hoc fried chicken mix, so I can't actually recommend this product anymore, which is too bad because it was awesome and well worth it. I'm not sure I'd really go out of my way to make his fried chicken brine and coating from scratch. It sounds like it would just be too much work for fried chicken.

Overall, awesome well-flavored fried chicken. Who doesn't like fried chicken?