Chicken: Deschutes Brewery, Portland, Oregon

I just finished the last of last night's fried wings from the Portland branch of Deschutes Brewery.

In writing this post, I imagine  clone of myself drifting through Portland, full of bacon but wistfully wishing for a different form of crispy animal fat.  I recommend these wings to said clone as a fine "fried bone-in" dose of chicken.

I skipped the sauce. My clones and I are not interested in using chicken as a foil for other flavors--I want my chicken to taste like chicken and chicken fat, plus salt. So when the menu promised me "Fresh Squeezed IPA, Thai chiles, togarashi spice, honey, fresh lime" on the Fresh Squeezed wings, I decided that those flavors would want to be the star, and I demoted them. I ordered my wings with no sauce whatsoever, and added my own salt.

They were very good. When a dish remains delicious despite my determination to strip the cook of all of his flavoring tools, I'm impressed.

Big drumettes with nice skin covering. None of the two-bone middle part--what DO you call the three pieces of a wing? I'll need to find out. I miss the middle part, but it means that the ripping and tearing that makes me feel like a chicken-focused sibling of the Cookie Monster is largely eliminated.

And good, crunchy but not excessive, coating. I tend to be a dust-with-flour advocate, since battery coatings often "protect" the chicken skin from frying and rendering, and then why did you fry chicken? But this is a thicker crunchier coating that still allows the skin to fry. It makes me think of rice flour, but the menu doesn't make any gluten-free claims.

In addition to being good hot, they're very good as leftovers; they don't get soggy or drop all their fried coating or develop that old-oil flavor or any of the other failings of leftover fried chicken.

So.

That is all.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Chicken: The Flying Pig, Vancouver, BC

In the interest of getting the vital chicken data into the blog, I will now and then be posting really short posts. This is one of them.

The Flying Pig in Vancouver, British Columbia is a nice place, a little crowded, pleasant staff, just fine on all the setting and service issues.

I post because the parmesan breaded chicken cutlet on the lunch menu is a nice, satisfying, comforting dose of chicken, of the boneless skinless crusty-coating white meat category. I recommend it.

I also see that the online menu mentions "bone marrow cheezy bread." How could we have missed that?

Link: Korean Fried Chicken

It has, once again, been too long since I offered any fried chicken information. So I point you to this article about Korean fried chicken. Sadly, the only sources mentioned are in New York City, but who knows? It almost sounds worth the trip.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Ramble: ChickenFreak's Restaurant Fantasy (Frying chicken for the good of humanity. Or Dalmations.)

I have a fantasy of running a restaurant. But there's a problem with it, caused by the fact that my reality TV niche of choice is British-influenced restaurant shows such as Kitchen Nightmares, with failing restaurant owners begging for rescue from British chef Gordon Ramsay.

This has taught me that running a restaurant is emphatically not something that I could ever dream of doing successfully. Or at least, not successfully and while making a profit. That puts a damper on the restaurant fantasy.

I've solved the problem with some backstory. In the fantasy, my distant (and fictional) Uncle Horace, who feels that a nice girl like me should get away from the compiler and into the kitchen, has left me several million dollars. But I only get the money if I run a restaurant with it. To motivate me to go along with this disastrous plan, Uncle Horace has specified that if I refuse, the money will be donated to some dreadful soul-sucking organization - the Cruella Deville Foundation, let's say.

See how easy? I must open a restaurant.

OK, backstory complete and on to the fantasy.

The restaurant, of course, would be a chicken shack. I'm picturing an old one-story clapboard building in a nice small town somewhere, rescued by ChickenFreak Foods, lovingly re-sided and painted in a variety of bright circus colors. We'd change the circus colors every couple of years. This should convince any chicken-resistant townsfolk to come by once in a while, to see the restaurant transformed from sky blue, butter yellow, and magenta to forest green, fire-engine red, and sunshine yellow. And so on. If that doesn't do the job, maybe we'll try some murals.

The parking lot would be re-paved in red brick; after all, I need to use up Uncle Horace's money before I can get out of the chicken business. There would be box planters of red geraniums, and canvas umbrellas in those same circus colors, shading (of course) brightly painted picnic tables.

The paint explosion would continue inside, where you'd step up to the gleaming painted-wood counter and order your chicken. Fried chicken, American-southern-style pan-fried chicken, the kind that used to require a half-hour wait, back when it was available at restaurants at all. Looking past the counter into the kitchen area, you'd see the three giant cast-iron skillets, dozens of pieces being fried, manned by an always alert world-class fry cook with tongs in hand.

In addition to chicken, the fantasy includes shoestring french fries, fresh-cut and double-fried in pure lard right in the restaurant. And potato salad. And cole slaw. And deviled eggs. And for those who want an occasional nonfat bite, vinegary cucumber salad, and pickles, and peaches in season, and watermelon in season. And the peaches and watermelon would always be served with a tiny packet of salt.

And there'd be soda, in glass bottles. Coke and Dr. Pepper with cane sugar. And RC Cola. And Boylan's. And Cheerwine. And so on. A big old glass-door cooler with a multicolored display of hundreds of gleaming bottles. And outside, one of those old-fashioned Coke machines to serve the cravings of those that arrive after the restaurant's closed.

What else do I need? Got to get some bacon in there somehow. And would Hawaiian-style macaroni salad be off topic? And do you have a restaurant fantasy?

Mmm. Chicken.

Photo: By Andreas Dobler. Wikimedia Commons.

Link: Food: Slow Fried Chicken

You've got to have fried chicken!

But this blog has barely a word on the subject yet, so I wanted to link to the Slow Fried Chicken recipe over at Obsessions.

That is all. Go fry some now.

Photo: By DougsTech. Wikimedia Commons.

Past Posts: Fried Chicken (Link)

Click here to reach all of the fried chicken posts from ChickenFreak's Obsessions.

Illustration: Wikimedia Commons.