The Best Ways To Salvage Overcooked Fried Chicken

Even for the most experienced home cooks, it's easy to mess up fried chicken. For safety reasons, chicken has to be fully cooked to 165 degrees Fahrenheit, but because it's such a lean meat with relatively little fat as a buffer, overcooking can happen fast — and then you're left with rubbery, dry pieces that no one wants to eat. It's tempting to tip them into the trash and start over, but you shouldn't have to waste all your hard work coating, dredging, and frying. Food media personality Frankie Gaw, founder of Little Fat Boy and author of "First Generation: Recipes from My Taiwanese-American Home," shared a delicious solution with Food Republic. 

"I love using leftover fried chicken or overcooked chicken scraps in fried rice," Gaw told us. "You can easily shred it off the bone and toss right into the pan." This is better than the popular method of simmering overcooked chicken in broth to introduce moisture back in –with fried chicken, the breading will get soggy. Shredding makes the crisp chicken pieces easier to consume when they're a little tough, and the fried rice's sauce and seasonings and any added vegetables easily conceal a texture that might be off. For more of Gaw's cooking tips, check out his "Saving Singapore" content series in partnership with the Singapore Tourism Board and Klook.

There are also so many ways you can spice up homemade fried rice, so the dish is a fully customizable solution for overdone fried chicken. It isn't the only one, though. We have a few more ideas for turning your chicken into something delectable and reducing food waste.

The problem you face with overcooked chicken is its dryness, so a solution can often be found by pairing it with more liquid-based or fatty ingredients. These contain the moisture the meat is missing, so a quality sauce or gravy will cover a lot of your woes. In particular, a sauce that's more sweet and bright will go well, because overcooking meat tends to bring out the salty flavors — sugar and acid help tone down that quality. It can also be useful to chop up the fried chicken before you add the sauce, to allow the dressing to reach all those drier areas. Try a creamy white wine pan sauce, a gravy brightened with lemon juice, or even a 3-ingredient tartar sauce.

If you really want a sauce or other liquid ingredients to permeate some overly dry chicken, it might be time to turn to the food processor. Although you probably wouldn't want to eat ground-up fried chicken alone, all you need to do is add a little oil, stock, or another cooking liquid and it becomes a delectable filling. Add that chicken mixture into a pot pie, pasta, or dumplings (or really, any other dough-based delicacy). The added liquid and surrounding pastry will take away any texture worries.

The food processor method can be taken a step further with the help of some stock and lard. Rillettes are a type of French forcemeat, wherein you slowly cook meat in its own fat and then shred it to make a delicious spread. You can take the easy route by mixing chicken stock and lard with your overcooked fried chicken and combining them in the food processor until they form a scoopable texture. Pâté, which is different from rillettes and has a smoother texture, can use the same ingredients, but will require more time processing and straining to get the correct consistency.

One of the keys to fixing overcooked fried chicken is to break up the large chunks of chicken breast or thigh into more manageable parts, so you're not biting into a dry, dense block of meat. But if you don't want to puree it, you can stick to shredding. Shredded chicken tastes great on a salad or sandwich, and even if it's overcooked, a delicious dressing and fresh greens will make up for those shortcomings.

While a traditional chicken sandwich may not be the best call for an overcooked bird, you can try a recipe that doesn't put the chicken alone in the spotlight. Both chicken salad and barbecue chicken sandwiches cover the protein in sauce or mix it with other ingredients that can distract from a dry texture.

Now, overcooked chicken (especially fried chicken) won't work perfectly in every kind of soup. Although any recipe will have plenty of liquid to moisten the meat, a soup that's too light and delicate won't cover up that overdone quality. You could shred your chicken and add it to any simple chicken soup towards the end of the cooking process, but something richer, heartier, and creamier would pair better. Try making a fried chicken chowder, or even some chicken chili with extra deep-fried goodness to pair with your tortilla chips.