Oatmeal Fried Chicken Strips

Last week Deb wanted to try fried chicken strips again, so I used it as an opportunity to attempt to quantify it into a recipe.

The thing is, it’s highly customizable and this can easily be used as a guideline and methodology, more than a strict recipe.  You could make it more strongly spiced, for instance, as what I describe below is flavored but not that strongly.  I also didn’t get the amounts perfect, so I will note where I could have increaed the coating ingredients, and the spices could, probably should, be increased to match.

Ingredients:

The chicken:
3 smallish boneless chicken breasts

The precoat:
2 cups flour (a little will be left but this was good call)

The liquid bath:
2 eggs
1/2 cup milk
dash to 1/4 teaspoon cayenne (red) pepper
dash to 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder

The oatmeal spice coating:
1.5 cups oatmeal (needed more like 2 cups)
1/2 cup Bisquick (needed more like 1 cup)
1/8 teaspoon celery salt
1/4 teaspoon ginger
1/4 teaspoon onion powder
1/8 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon cayenne (red) pepper
1/4 teaspoon chili powder

The oil:
Enough vegetable oil, lard or whatever to do the job.  For this batch I used about 8 ounces of store brand liquid vegetable oil and it stretched just far enough to fry all the chicken in three passes.
Butter melted in with the oil, in this case about 3/4 stick.

The oil is another possible spicing vector and can get a dash or more of whatever you’d like to spice with.  As is the precoat, so if you want to be different you don’t have to stick to flavoring the liquid and the outer coating.

Okay, the chicken gets cut into something resembling thin strips:

I put the oatmeal on a plate and smooshed it by hand to make it finer in tecture, but not completely rid it of flakes.  I suspect a food processor or possibly mortar and pestle could be handy.  Then I added the bisquick and mixed it in.  Ditto the spices.  Again, those could have been heavier.  Originally the concept was spicy chicken strips.  These were merely flavorful and definitely not plain.  Well, except the last few when ran low on oat mix, threw some of the leftover flour on the oat plate, gave a liberal sprinkle of red pepper, and came out with a few spicy ones.  Here are pictures of the coating in process:

The flour goes on a plate, flattened out for convenience.

Beat the eggs and milk, with any spices you might put in, in my case some of the red pepper and garlic powder, in a bowl of the appropriate size for dipping the floured chicken strips.

Coat the raw chicken in the flour.

Dip the floured chicken in the egg mix.  I let it soak rather well, flipping and submerging as needed.  Here’s that part of it:

Then roll it in the coating until thoroughly covered:

It got harder to be thorough when I was running out:

I tend to get “finger gloves” of sticky coating as I do this, and balls of sticky coating on the plate.  There is probably a new recipe idea in there somewhere, given that a fried ball of the coating with no chicken in it can be quite yummy.

While the first of the chicken is being dipped and coated, have a frying pan heating up on roughly medium heat with the oil and butter mix.  Here’s a couple shots of the strips actually cooking:

Cook until done to your satisfaction.  The nice thing about the strips is they’ll cook fast.  I probably leave them in longer than they need, but hey, the result works for me:

The recipe is entirely my invention, apart from seeing the technique of coating, dipping, coating, and possibly the use of oatmeal, in recipes Googled for ideas once upon a time.  This was my third try making something along these lines.  It’s hard not to come up with something edible, and easy enough to make it tasty enough to enjoy to your preferences.

When I started putting the first pan full of strips in the oil, I caught a whiff that smelled like the fried smelts my grandmother used to make.  Probably just the basic smell of the coating hitting the hot oil was about the same.  I haven’t had smelts in outrageously long.  Yum.

1. I deep fried a bunch of soft-cooked pinto beans once for about 10 seconds. They came out lookin’ like a bunch of cockroaches and were really crunchy, but had a really exquisite nutty flavor. It was a one time lark. Most of my other experiments haven’t been as successful or even come close to bein’ a truly tasteful subject ‘bout which to talk.

   Posted by Tig  on  11/20  at  07:30 PM

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