Fried chicken – perfect in a laksa or with coleslaw. Photograph: Felicity Cloake for the GuardianFried chicken is having a moment in Australia. Here’s where you should eat it.There's only so much roasting and stewing you can do in the cold months before you want something that reminds you of summer. Fried chicken is the ultimate crossover food, equally at home topping a spicy winter laksa as it is next to summer coleslaw.
It's also having something of a moment, with new hipster fried chicken joints opening with the same frequency that we saw in 2013 with the Mexican food revolution.
Nearly every culture has its own version of the dirty bird. Malaysians and Indonesians love their chicken marinated in spices like turmeric and fried with pandan leaves, which give it a unique herbal twang.
Americans brine then dredge their chicken in flour or batter, frying it in fat before dousing it liberally with hot sauce, gravy or cayenne pepper (more on that below).
Taiwanese enjoy fried chickens flat and large, while the Japanese take a more delicate hand with punchy karaage, schnitzel-like katsu and tempura styles.
Traditional crisp-skinned chicken from southern China juxtaposes soft tender flesh with a deeply tanned and lacquered visage, making it equally at home in a lunchbox or a lavish wedding feast. Then in Korea, perhaps the only celebrated legacy of the Korean war is its twice-fried Korean fried chicken, everyone's friend after a drunken night.
But it's in the southern United States where fried chicken found its place in popular culture. The idea of frying chicken is said to have really caught on with Scottish immigrants who, as the story goes, consider frying to be almost a national sport. Chicken, like the Mars Bar decades later, worked well when cooked in hot lard, and so it rapidly became a staple in the new colonies where slaves from Africa added their own spin to it with their own seasonings and techniques.
Where the Brits might have boiled or baked their bird, it became the norm to fry it in the US, such that regional styles evolved dictating everything from sauces served alongside to batters, bastes and marinades. Then, in 1930, a former insurance salesman started serving his own version of fried chicken in a rent-free service station in Corbin, Kentucky. Pressure-fried to cook quickly, KFC's 11 secret herb and spice-dusted chicken hit Australian shores in 1968 and is still going strong.
KFC aside, where are the best new places in Australia to buy fried chicken?
Melbourne
Belle's Hot Chicken in Fitzroy has to be the hottest place, literally, for the dirty bird right now. Their brined and flour-dusted chicken is fried in a secret blend of fats then doused with paprika and cayenne pepper at levels which range from mild to "really f**kin' hot" in the style chef Morgan McGlone learned to cook in Nashville, where fried chicken is almost a religion. They're planning another branch in Richmond, which should help ease the queues at mealtimes.
CBD-based Gami Fried Chicken serves up crisp and zingy Korean-style bird. You'll need to order ahead for Collingwood's Rockwell & Sons' slow-brined fried chicken, which gets an extra coating of buttermilk and hot sauce when its served only on Wednesday nights.
Sydney
Sydney's current buzz for fried chicken has been fuelled by the publication of Fried Chicken & Friends, the debut cookbook from chefs Gregeory Llewellyn and Naomi Hart from Newtown's Hartsyard (Murdoch Books, $49.95, Hardback). Here, the bird is brined then dipped in buttermilk " twice " before being fried and served with sausage gravy and lashings of their hot sauce.
A sophisticated take on Korean fried chicken can be found at Redfern's Moon Park, where buttermilk is blended with Malaysian shrimp sauce for a salt and umami-fuelled crunch.
Potts Point's Ms.G's takes their inspiration from Thailand, steeping their bird in curry paste before frying to a golden crunch.
Queues are the norm for Taiwanese-style fried chicken vendor Hot Star, who squish their chicken flat before crumbing, frying and then liberally dousing it with their signature spicy salt that manages to be both sweet and savoury at once. There's eight locations " four in Sydney " with two in Melbourne plus one each in Adelaide and Sunnybank, Brisbane.
