Carbonation Is Your Secret Weapon For Perfectly Crispy Fried Chicken

In our endeavor to achieve perfectly crunchy chicken, we've presented the idea of using an ice water bath, proposed self-rising flour, and even suggested a baking soda hack. These are all effective methods in their own right, but we've barely scratched the surface — not without exploring the myriad of other techniques that exist, and certainly not without putting the power of carbonation on the map.

In the case of fried chicken, carbonation involves adding a carbonated drink to your batter to lighten its texture. Examples of carbonated beverages that work are club soda, soda water, and seltzer water. Although also carbonated, not many fried chicken recipes use heavily flavored soft drinks in the batter or soda beverages that contain lots of sugar, like Coke or Sprite. We think perhaps the flavors would overpower those of the fried chicken, and even leave a dark char since heat reacts with sugar to cause browning.

Beer, on the other hand, is perfectly fine, but there's only one rule to follow: the fizzier, the better. You'll need that army of bubbles to lift the batter as it cooks and give your fried chicken a delightfully puffy texture. Keep in mind that colder drinks are more fizzy. Thus, a cold club soda works double time as it also shocks the frying oil. The impact of cold batter and hot oil lets out more steam, meaning more water escapes, and in a matter of mere seconds, you'll earn yourself the crispiest coating on your fried chicken.

Perhaps the most crucial part about carbonation is to use a beverage with plenty of bubbles, so avoid sparkling mineral waters, which are naturally carbonated — in other words, they earn their bubbles via absorbing gas from the ground. The result is a less fizzy beverage compared to soft drinks like root beer or Coke, which are carbonated via man-made processes that involve forcing carbon dioxide gas into the can or bottle at a high pressure and trapping the gas in by sealing the can. This control over the process often produces beverages with a superior bubbly punch that gives you a crispier fried chicken.

Beer is also a product of carbonation, both natural and forced. However, most beers you'll buy at your grocery store nowadays are a product of forced carbonation, so they'll work just fine. Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier is one beer you can use in your chicken batter that will make the final product airy and ridiculously crispy. Another option is to use sparkling wines, otherwise known as bubbly. All wines, in fact, contain carbon dioxide as a result of fermentation, but still wines contain significantly lower levels due to the gas being removed from them. This leaves you with the option of using sparkling wines like Champagne, which go through a second round of fermentation to produce more carbon dioxide, more fizz, and a perfectly crispy fried chicken.