We Tried This Reddit Hack For Perfect Crispy Fried Chicken

According to one Redditor, the thread that followed, and a popular culinary theory, baking powder should act as an agent that helps skin on chicken be extra crispy and delicious. It sounds pretty ideal. I mean, basically everyone has baking powder at their house―and if it’s really just that simple to get a good crispy skin on your chicken, then we should all be having at it. 

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So, I tested that theory to see if it really holds up. But in the spirit of science, I took it one step further than what the original Reddit post and tried three different ways of cooking chicken―just salt, baking soda, and baking powder―to see which one really gives you the crispiest skin. 

Control Group

Sometimes you just don’t have the time or patience to fiddle with cooking chicken skin-side down from a cold pan―which many chefs recommend for perfectly crispy skin. So for this baseline in the experiment, I tested cooking the chicken skin-side down in an oiled pan over medium heat for the same amount of time as the other two pieces. Everything was cooked in the same pan with salted and dried skin cooked in oil with the skin side down. The result for this baseline was delicious. It was nothing too fancy. It tasted like home cooking. The skin was nicely rendered, and it tasted great, but it was soggy in place of crispy in a way that I did not expect. It was also the most caramelized in color.

Baking Soda

Baking soda has a high alkalinity and raises the pH of the chicken skin. This allows fat to render more effectively, water to evaporate more quickly, and for the skin to have increased contact with the pan… supposedly. But I’ll be honest. I didn’t really expect it to work, especially not as well as it did. In the end, it was a night and day difference with all conditions being kept the same except from the control, except for the addition of baking soda. The skin was immaculately crispy, and through the entire resting process of the chicken it didn’t sogg up. And if you don’t rest your chicken before you eat it, please, I insist that you level up your chicken game as soon as possible (thank me later). The chicken tastes like I seasoned it more than I did, but the after taste was significantly metallic in flavor. It was actually so metallic in flavor it made it impossible to stomach. So, after I admired the crispiness for as long as I could, it was basically garbage.

Baking Powder

The difference here was kind of what I expected. Baking powder and baking soda are pretty similar. They’re both made of bicarbonate of soda, and the only difference is that baking powder is diluted with cream of tartar and a starch. So, it was my theory from the get-go that the baking powder and baking soda would have the exact same effect on the chicken skin… if there was going to be any effect at all. To my surprise, both were equally crispy and rendered the same. It was just that the baking powdered chicken was actually edible. Since baking powder is more diluted and less intensely alkaline gram-to-gram with baking soda, it did not have any of that intensely metallic aftertaste. Either way, this is a case of less is more―since even a delicious cookie could be ruined by the flavor of baking powder should too much be added.

Verdict

The last thing I expected from this experiment was to actually be changed in the ways that I will be cooking my chicken moving forward. I am a cold-pan chicken skin believer, but now my whole world has flipped upside down and I will once again be left to say: Thank you, Reddit. I hope you’ll join me on my crusade of using baking powder to dry rub my skin-on chicken.