Fried Chicken with Potato Galettes

Good ol southern cooking.
Straight up Southern Fried Chicken [TK]
Potato Galettes [PC]
Blanched Green Beans
Buttermilk Biscuits

We made this for our third night in the new house. I'm just now getting around to posting it. The fried chicken was from a Thomas Keller recipe. It was amazing. The potato cakes (cakes is easier to type than galettes) were out of the Professional Chef. Also delicious. We had blanched green beans with some butter, salt, and pepper for the green and Jake made some southern-style biscuits.

Fried Chicken [TK]
A lot of the flavor comes from marinating the chicken in a brine for up to 12 hours prior to cooking.
For the brine:
~ 1 gallon water
5 lemons, halved
few sprigs of thyme
parsley
1 head of garlic, cut through the equator
10 oz. salt (I don't know, about a cup?)
20 bay leaves

It's best to make this the night before. Then you can let it cool completely and put in the chicken first thing in the morning. That way it will be ready for dinner. Put all in a pot and heat it up to boiling. Turn off the heat and allow it to cool for a couple hours and then refrigerate. Let the brine cool completely before placing the chicken in. Allow the chicken to marinate for up to 12 hours before cooking. The brine will impart a lot of flavor to the chicken. Just don't let it sit too long or else it will be really salty.
Take the chicken pieces out of the brine, remove any herbs from the skin, pat dry and allow to come up to room temp, ~1 hr.
Set up your breading station. You can season the flour however you like. AP flour, salt, pepper, granulated garlic, onion powder, maybe some paprika and cayenne pepper. Anything else you like. Mix well and divide the flour into two bowls. Take another bowl and pour in your buttermilk. Set up the station chicken, flour, buttermilk, flour.
While doing all this you should have a large pot with a lot of either peanut, vegetable, or canola oil heating up. If you've got two pots you can do one for dark and the other for white meat. Once again, I don't have a thermometer so I have to troubleshoot it, but you want to do the dark meat first at about 325F and then the white meat at about 340F.
Only bread the amount of chicken you plan to cook immediately. If you bread it and let it sit for a few minutes then the flour tends to blacken and look bad when you fry it. Make sure your oil is up to heat before frying the chicken. Otherwise, the chicken will soak up a bunch of oil and be soggy. If you're not sure, just wait. you could also drop a pinch of flour in. It should immediately sizzle and fry upon hitting the oil. I have to put my stove top just about at six for the right heat.
When your oil is ready, bread the chicken and carefully place the dark meat in the oil so as not to splash and burn the hell out of yourself. Wait at least 1 minute and probably two before turning the chicken and making sure that pieces aren't stuck together. Let it go for 10-12 minutes. You might need to turn once or twice more, depending on your oil level. Drain chicken on a rack or paper towels.
Once you put the chicken in the pot, the temperature of the oil drops significantly. Give it some time to recuperate before adding chicken again. If you're ready for the white meat then turn it up just a bit to get another 20 degrees in there. Cook the white meat for about 7 minutes. You now have some beautiful and delicious homemade straight-up southern fried chicken.

Potato Galettes:
These were damn tasty and just a somewhat different way of having potatoes. Much less involved than the chicken, but still takes some frying time. These are pan fried though, not deep fried.
You need:
Potatoes, peeled
Onions
garlic
parsley
Chives
a little AP flour
1 egg, lightly beaten
s/p
oil for frying

Grate the onions into a bowl and squeeze out the excess liquid. Grate the potatoes into the bowl and add the egg, flour, garlic, parsely, chives, s/p. Mix well.
Heat the oil in a skillet. Add a spoonful of the mixture and mash down to flatten it as much as possible. Fry for a few minutes on each side til golden brown.
Drain on paper towels.

The biscuit recipe I believe you can get from the "biscuit vs. biscuit" post. We prefer the Tom Keller recipe, but the PC is also good, especially if you like 'em sweet.


.....doing research. will finish tonight.