How to have flaky chicken breading [duplicate]

Question

How do you get this style of breading? I'm referring to this kind:

I'm doing Flour > egg > flour. but I dont get the results I want. I also don't want to use breadcrumbs for this. Can anyone suggest something?

Answer 1

The texture is little bits of fried dough. The way to reproduce it is to mix some of the wet into the flour and mix with fingers until some bits of dough form among the flour.

From Kenji Lopez-Alt:

Finally, I used a trick that a friend, a former employee of the Chick-fil-A Southern fast-food fried-chicken chain had told me about. He'd mentioned that once the chicken was breaded, the later batches always come out better than the earlier ones as bits of the flour mixture clumped together, making for an extra-craggy coat. Adding a couple tablespoons of buttermilk to the breading mix and working it in with my fingertips before dredging the chicken simulated this effect nicely.

The Food Lab: The Best Southern Fried Chicken

And the result is:

More Flakes

However, if you want it to be more flaky than clumpy, add more wet to the dry to make lots of clumps and then pinch the clumps to flatten them into flakes.

Answer 2

I have seen tons of cooking shows on TV which talk about how to get extra crispy fried chicken. There are a couple of secrets to do this.

Reading through the comments, I agree, that you may wish to look at the other links, and incorporate those techniques.

In addition to these, you may wish to do the following:

Typically, if brining the chicken, before starting the coating pat the chicken dry

Another secret is to add corn starch to the flour mixture. I would look up various recipes that have corn starch in it to see how much you want to add to the mixture, because each recipe has its own amount (or experiment to see how much you need for what you're doing).

A third secret is to make sure that the oil is hot enough and not to overcrowd the skillet that you're frying the chicken in so that the oil temperature doesn't drop too much, or you'll end up with soggy, greasy chicken instead of crispy chicken.