Nashville hot chicken recipe: the cayenne-oil finish

This Nashville hot chicken recipe gets its heat from a paste whisked straight into hot frying oil, brushed onto the chicken only after it leaves the pot.

The dish traces back to Prince's Hot Chicken Shack, opened in Nashville in the 1930s after Thornton Prince's family reportedly spiked his fried chicken with extra cayenne as punishment for a late night out. He liked it enough to put it on the menu. The two techniques that make it work, a buttermilk soak and a hot-oil paste rather than a poured sauce, have barely changed since.

Ingredients

The heat goes on after the fry, whisked into the very oil the chicken cooked in.

• 4 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs
• 500 ml buttermilk
• 1 tbsp hot sauce
• 300 g plain flour
• 2 tbsp cornstarch
• 2 tsp paprika
• 2 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp cayenne pepper, plus 4 tbsp for the paste
• Salt and black pepper
• 1.5 litres neutral oil, for frying
• 2 tbsp brown sugar
• 1 tsp smoked paprika
• 4 slices white bread and sliced pickles, to serve

Method

1. Combine the buttermilk and hot sauce, submerge the chicken and refrigerate for at least 2 hours, ideally overnight. The acid in the buttermilk tenderises the meat and gives the flour dredge something to grip.
2. Mix the flour, cornstarch, paprika, garlic powder, the 1 tsp cayenne, salt and pepper in a wide bowl.
3. Lift the chicken straight from the buttermilk into the flour mix, pressing the coating on firmly, then rest the pieces on a rack for 10 minutes. The pause lets the coating hydrate and fuse to the skin, instead of shattering off in the oil.
4. Heat the oil to 170°C in a deep pot. Fry the chicken in batches of two for 12-14 minutes, turning once, until deep golden and the internal temperature reaches 75°C. Crowding the pot drops the oil temperature and leaves the crust soggy rather than crisp.
5. While the chicken fries, whisk the 4 tbsp cayenne, brown sugar and smoked paprika into 120 ml of the hot frying oil, ladled straight from the pot. Using the oil itself, rather than water or vinegar, blooms the spice and keeps the paste thick enough to cling.
6. Drain the chicken on a rack and brush the hot paste over both sides while the pieces are still warm, so it melts into the crust instead of sitting on top of it.
7. Serve at once on white bread with pickle slices, which cut the heat and soak up the spiced oil that drips through.

How hot to take it

The 4 tbsp of cayenne in the paste sits at a medium heat; Prince's own scale runs up to a version strong enough to need gloves to plate. Halve the cayenne for a milder version, or add a pinch of ground chipotle for smoke without extra heat.

A cold lager or a glass of off-dry Riesling does more to cut the spice than ice water, which only spreads the capsaicin around the mouth. Dave's Hot Chicken has built a UK chain on the same formula, running its own seven-level version of this heat scale.

Can this be made without deep-frying? Oven-baking the dredged chicken at 220°C for about 35 minutes gets close, though the crust stays thinner; the oil-based paste still works the same way, whisked into a few tablespoons of the chicken's own roasting fat.