Friday, December 28, 2007

Various Chicken Fried


At the time I thought these two birds were hawks--I didn't have my binoculars. In flight, they looked like hawks, in this picture, they look like they could be turkey vultures.

Today we drove to Roanoke, a town of less than 5000 people just west and south of Flower Mound (on the other side of Grapevine Lake) to eat fried chicken at Babe's Chicken Dinner House. Although Babe's is a bit of a Texas chain, the Roanoke location was the first. Roanoke was a nice little place. I liked the fact that it is right on the Missouri Pacific rail line. Trains are soothing.

Babe's in Roanoke only serves fried chicken and chicken-fried steak. My sister Sarah was disappointed that they didn't have chicken-fried chicken.

Chicken-fried steak is like a Texas version of wiener schnitzel, except that it's made with a fairly cheap cut of steak instead of veal. It's usually pan fried, where as fried chicken is frequently deep-fried (but it can also be pan fried). Chicken fried chicken has the same preparation as chicken-fried steak but with chicken.

I don't really understand the differences between chicken-fried chicken and fried chicken. It's very confusing. Can anyone offer insight?

5 comments:

K. Lorraine Graham said...

It occurs to me, obviously, that the coating must be different.

mark wallace said...

Tom just made an excellent point to me about this, but it's a point that may be incorrect.

He said that he'd always thought that chicken-friend steak was simply steak that was fried like fried chicken.

Of course, if that was true, there'd be no such thing as chicken-fried chicken, since chicken-fried chicken and fried chicken would be the same thing.

A point of clarification though: do you have proof that such a thing as chicken-friend chicken exists? If Babe's didn't have it, who would?

These are very deep waters.

mark wallace said...

But I see now that your post may already have answered my question about the different types of frying that make up fried and chicken-fried. Who knew?

md said...

Chicken fried chicken is a boneless piece of chicken that has been tenderized like a piece of flank steak and then pan fried. It is usually topped with some type of white gravy.

I am vegetarian, but I lived in Texas for five years.

tmorange said...

let me also recommend a dish we have in nashville (and probably elsewhere) called hot chicken. it's basically fried chicken whose coating has serious doses of cayenne pepper in it, flash-fried so that the coating turns a dark dark reddish brown. served with two slices of wonder bread and pickle chips unless you want additional sides. these links will give you the idea.