Oven Fried Chicken Tenders

Here's the thing and there's really no way of getting around it:  if you want honest-to-god, Southern-style, crispy fried chicken, you're going to have to deep fry it. Period.  Not in an airfryer; not in an oven or in a convection oven; but in a cast iron skillet, a Dutch oven or a deep fryer appliance with about three inches of 375°F vegetable oil.  There is no other way.

But you can get close.  Very close.  Lord knows, I've been trying and have some pretty good recipes for a reasonable facsimile of fried chicken, including:

• Low Carb Oven Pan Fried Chicken
• The Ultimate Oven Fried Chicken Wings
• Low Carb Airfryer Fried Chicken
• Airfried Boneless Chicken Thighs
  

On this occasion, I gave up the low carb approach and with an oven fried method, I came even closer to that delicious crispy fried chicken texture and flavor, using flour, bread crumbs and a product I hadn't thought of in a very long time.

Kellogg's Corn Flakes, of course, has been around since the late nineteenth century having been invented in 1894.  Sometime in the 1920s, probably as a means to harness and sell the remnants of flake manufacturing, Kellogg's introduced Corn Flake Crumbs to a U.S. market that wasn't quite sure what to do with them.  So, sometime in the 1950s, Kellogg's produced a paperback cookbook to educate the public, called Kay Kellogg's Corn Flake Crumbs Cookery.  It most likely would have been sold in grocery stores close to the shelves where boxes of the corn flake crumbs were displayed and sold for a nominal price. No one really knew who Kay was, but it was someone '50s homemakers were willing to trust.

Sometime thereafter, Kellogg's began producing print media promoting the most obvious Kay Kellogg's recipe: fried chicken.  They took the convenience angle to entice busy moms of the late '50s and early '60s to use their crumby product (pun intended) to make an easier, oven-baked version of the Southern fried chicken classic, called Corn-Crisped Chicken.

Because I grew up with an allergy to wheat, my mom was always looking for alternatives to using flour in her recipes.  I recall that we had corn-crisped chicken many times growing up, and always drumsticks.  But there was one recipe in particular made with Kellogg's Corn Flakes Crumbs that I remember with some emotion because it may well have been the first meal that I made with my own hands: Hot Doggities!

In 1962, TV and print ads featuring co-op advertising of two very different products from two different companies saturated the airwaves and magazines of the day.  Heinz Ketchup and Kellogg's Corn Flake Crumbs heavily promoted a simple recipe that kids would not only love, but could actually get involved in the preparation:  a hot dog, slathered in ketchup and rolled in Kellogg's Corn Flake Crumbs, then baked in a 350°F oven for fifteen minutes: "Steamy on the inside, crunchy on the outside." Plus, the name was cool and kid-friendly: Hot Doggities.  

This was shear 1960s marketing genius.  And it worked, too.  I finally got to where I could make them without supervision.  I never could get those grill marks like I saw in the ads, though, nor did anyone at Kellogg's explain in their ad copy how those came about if the hot dogs were baked in an oven.

But I digress.

The point to this post was to share a recipe I created after some Internet research for making crispy chicken tenders using Kellogg's Corn Flake Crumbs in an oven and also because I happened to have a quart of buttermilk on hand that I needed to use up. I've read many times about marinating chicken in buttermilk as a means to allegedly get more tender, juicier chicken, particularly white meat which has a tendency to dry out quickly in a hot oven.  I'm happy to report buttermilk definitely makes a positive difference.

By the way, read your labels at the grocery store carefully. Not all chicken tenders are actually tenders, i.e., the tenderloin, and most people are unaware of any difference between true chicken tenders and what is far more common: sliced-down chicken breasts, sometimes called chicken strips or chicken fingers.

The tenderloins are long cuts of meat that connect the chicken breast to the keel bone. Chicken tenders have a thinner, more irregular shape than chicken strips, longest in the middle and tapered on both ends. True chicken tenders are just that: more tender than the the breast meat and there is less of it, which makes them generally harder to find and more expensive. Either will work for this recipe, however, true chicken tenders are preferred.

Ingredients
1 to 1-1/2 lbs chicken strips or chicken tenders
1 quart buttermilk
2 tbsp poultry seasoning (like, Spice Islands)
1 tbsp celery salt
1 cup corn flake crumbs (like, Kellogg's)
1 cup Italian seasoned bread crumbs (like, Progresso)
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 large eggs
salt & pepper to taste
non-stick cooking spray (like, Butter Flavored Pam)

The Recipe
Pour the buttermilk into a large container with a lid, and whisk in the poultry seasoning and celery salt. Submerge the chicken tenders in the buttermilk, cover and refrigerate six hours to overnight.

Prepare two sheet pans lined with aluminum foil with wire racks.  Treat both sheet pans and the wire racks with non-stick cooking spray.

Remove the chicken from the buttermilk and allow to drain on one of the sheet pans while you prepare the coating station.  Season each tender liberally with salt and pepper.

Put the flour in one mixing bowl; whisk the two eggs together in a second bowl; and in the third bowl, combine the bread crumbs and the corn flake crumbs with a whisk to ensure both ingredients are evenly distributed.

Put your oven on its convection setting if you have it, and pre-heat to 375°F. If you do not have a convection oven, pre-heat to 400°F.

Use paper towels if necessary to pat dry the chicken tenders.  It's okay if they are still moist.  

One at a time, roll each tender in the flour to fully coat it; then dip it into the eggs to coat; and finally, roll it in the bread and corn crumb mixture until thoroughly coated.  Lay each tender on the second wire rack to rest while you work through the batch.

Spray each tender with a little butter flavored non-cooking spray, then place the sheet pan into the pre-heated oven in the upper third.  Cook 8 minutes.  

Remove the tenders, turn them over with a pair of tongs and spray each with a little more butter flavored non-cooking spray.  Cook an additional 8 minutes.