Carla Hall's Tip For Soaking Up Fried Food Grease
Fried chicken is one of life's greatest and most celebratory foods. Right up there with big birthday cakes, seafood towers, and cherries jubilee — fried chicken is a little easier to whip up at home. But it still isn't totally without its challenges and avoidable mistakes, even for Carla Hall, "Top Chef: All Stars" contestant and erstwhile eponymous restaurant owner.
After all the work of prepping and then actually frying the chicken, keeping its wonderful crunch is yet another task. The trick is not letting the chicken's remaining surface oil gather and actually undo your labor by rendering your lovely finished product a soggy letdown. Hall shared her technique for avoiding that damp fate at Food & Wine's "Southern Food Favorites" cooking demonstration in 2019. All it takes, mastery of fried chicken aside, is crumpled paper towels.
It turns out, Hall's tip to plate the perfect fried chicken is to simply to place the cooling pieces of chicken atop the crumpled paper towels. This creates a more dynamic surface for the chicken to rest on than a flat plane. The paper's peaks and valleys expose more of the bird's beautiful surface to the air, allowing it to breathe, and thus keep its crunch.
How Carla Hall uses paper towels to keep fried chicken crispy
In Carla Hall's demonstration video — where she prepares not only Nashville-style fried chicken, but also cornbread, chow chow, and buttermilk biscuits — she fries the chicken in bubbling canola oil to a deep golden hue before drenching it in spiced oil for that signature kick, then she plates it on the tousled towels.
"You see how my towels are bunched up?" she asks in the video. "When I have fried foods, I bunch up my towels, because when the food sits on a bunched up towel, it's not sitting in the fat. It's sitting up on those crevices. Whatever this is, be it french fries, nothing has to sit in the oil," Hall says.
The celebrity chef reiterates the seemingly small but critical step in her book, "Carla's Comfort Foods: Favorite Dishes from Around the World." After all the time and work spent achieving the crunchiest, juiciest possible bird, the sixth and final instruction is, by far, the easiest to achieve.