How Ludovic Lefebvre's insanely delicious Fried Chicken LudoBird Style turned me into a fry queen

I have a confession to make: Until last week, I had never made fried chicken.

Yes, I know, it’s weird. I’ve always been an otherwise fearless cook. Partly it’s that deep-frying thing: I’ve never made frites, either, and by extension I’ve never made French fries. But there was also a lack of motivation: Why attempt something so challenging and messy when the pros do it so well?

I’d gotten it into my head a month or so ago that at long last I’d dip my proverbial toes in the hot oil. Fabulous looking recipes in two cookbooks-of-the-moment had caught my eye: one in Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking and another in Sean Brock’s South: Essential Recipes and New Explorations. The books are each nominated for both a James Beard Award and an IACP Cookbook Award this season. I’d read a heap of background material about frying chicken, and deep-frying in general, so I had sense of the landscape. A deep-frying thermometer was ordered and on the way. Time to stop being such a fry-baby.

Wylie was rarin’ to go. Every afternoon, he’d say, “Tonight — fried chicken?” I kept coming up with excuses. We were missing an ingredient. We didn’t have the right sides. Not enough oil. Deep-fry thermometer hadn’t arrived. Couldn’t decide which of the two recipes to try. Mercury in retrograde.

Then, the day the deep-fry thermometer showed up, I saw a post on Ludovic Lefebvre’s Instagram feed: The Los Angeles chef would be making fried chicken on his IGTV series, “Ludo à la Maison.” I’m a Ludo fan from way back, and had been wanting to check out the French chef’s live cooking show. In this episode, he’d be preparing the “buttermilk Provençal” fried chicken served at his two LudoBird restaurants.

No more excuses. We’d watch the live show on Saturday afternoon, and maybe even cook along. Friday night I brined the chicken according to Lefebvre’s advance instructions.

You might be saying, why on earth would you look to a French chef as a guide to an iconic dish of the American South?

I suppose because I suspected Lefebvre would make it comfortable and relatable.

Which he did: So entertaining and instructive watching him butcher the chicken, as Krissy videotaped, provided commentary and read real-time questions from viewers. At some point their young daughter Rêve wandered into the kitchen, wanting a piece of chicken; she then hid in the pantry.

Ludo set up three stations for consecutive pre-fry dipping and dredging: first flour, then buttermilk, and finally seasoned flour. For the third, Ludo poured in a few spoonfuls of buttermilk, rubbing it into the flour to make it lumpy. So each piece got a dip in the plain flour, then the buttermilk and finally the lumpy flour mixture — which Ludo smushed into each piece of chicken, pressing hard to create a super shaggy coating that would form that gorgeous craggy crust. (Surprisingly, he had removed the chicken’s skin.)

The seasoning itself was pretty interesting: Most notably and unconventionally, it included a generous scoop of herbes de Provence.

He poured the oil into a Dutch oven, explaining that it shouldn’t go higher than halfway up the sides of the pot. Good, important knowledge. He talked about the importance of having the oil at precisely the right temperature: between 325 and 350 degrees F. And not frying more than two pieces at a time, as introducing chicken into the oil immediately lowers the temperature, and three pieces would lower it too much.

Watching him tend the chicken once it was in, checking its progress every couple of minutes and pulling it out when it was gorgeously golden-brown: All this was completely confidence building.

An hour later, Wylie and I were excitedly setting up our own dredging stations, heating the oil, fitting a sheet pan with a rack to received each fried piece.

We set the table. Poured ourselves glasses of wine. Checked the temperature of the oil. Dredged the first two pieces, and started frying.

How liberating! And how utterly, crunchily, juicily delicious the result. Honesly, this was some of the greatest fried chicken any of us had ever eaten; we couldn’t believe how fabulousness of the result. I felt like constant monitoring of the oil temperature was key.

Thank you, Chef, for showing us the way in.

And thank you all for reading. If you happen to fear deep frying — even just a tiny bit — I hope you’ll dive in, too. Come on in; the oil’s fine! Here’s the LudoBird Style recipe:

If you’re not entirely comfortable, watch the video first, then fry. Please post a comment and let us know how it goes. Oh, and by the way, if you clean your oil carefully after frying, you can re-use the oil at least several times. The headnote in our recipe gives the details.

Next deep-frying deep-dive: pommes frites.

RECIPE: Fried Chicken Ludobird Style

Winner, winner chicken dinner: A crazy-good, winter-into-spring one-pan wonder

As Sam Sifton wrote in a delicious story today in The New York Times Magazine, we're in that frustrating shoulder season when cooks are tired of winter and longing for spring.  Like Sifton, I'm finding inspiration these days – when it's too early for asparagus and English peas – in cabbage. In my case it's gorgeous, crinkly savoy cabbage, which, in my neck of the woods, has been turning up recently with lovely regularity in supermarkets. 

In the past, I've always had trouble figuring out how to treat savoy cabbage right. Usually I braise it, and that's good. Lately I've been roasting it – even better!

Also lately, I've been wanting to create one of those sheet-pan recipes that are so trendy right now. The reality has proved less miraculous than I'd hoped. Though I love the idea of tossing everything onto a pan, shoving it in the oven and forgetting about it for an hour, the truth is that things have different cooking times. Roast chicken thighs with turnips until the chicken is done, and the turnips won't be as tender, golden-brown and caramelized as you'd want them.

Adding the three main components of this dish – chicken thighs, turnips and savoy cabbage – one at a time to the pan solves the problem, deliciously. In fact, I think this one-pan dinner is one of the best things to come out of my kitchen in some time! Chicken thighs are great because they're chicken thighs. The turnips cook longer than everything else, so they get soft and caramelized almost to the point of sweetness, with really concentrated flavor. And the cabbage, which gets an umami boost from shiitake mushroom powder and soy sauce, roasts till it has all kinds of wonderful texture, from soft and silky to crunchy on the edges. The flavors and textures of the three meld together gorgeously. 

It's a dish so simple you can toss it together for glorious weeknight dinner, but it's impressive enough that you could serve it at as a main course for a dinner party. Here's a bonus: It's super-healthy, even for someone watching their carbs. (Turnips have way fewer carbs than, say, potatoes.) 

Here's the way it goes. Toss the turnips in a little olive oil, salt and pepper, throw 'em in the pan and roast 15 minutes. Push them to the side of the pan and add the chicken thighs skin-side down. These you've tossed with a little fennel seed, garlic, salt, pepper and olive oil. 

Next whisk together a little more olive oil and fennel seed with shiitake powder and soy sauce – for that blast of umami. Toss the Savoy cabbage leaves in that mixture to coat, then add them to the roasting pan. Thirty-five minutes later, dinner is ready.

Oh – unless you want a little sauce to pass with it. Either way, with or without, it's pretty great. If you do want sauce, arrange everything on a warm platter, deglaze the roasting pan with white wine or water (the recipe tells you how), and strain it into a pitcher to pass with the chicken.

Want the recipe? You got it: 

Bon app – and happy almost-spring!