Alton Brown's All-Time Favorite Food Is A Southern Staple

Food Network star and all-around culinary guru Alton Brown has helped make cooking more accessible — and more entertaining — for the layperson over the course of his decades-long career. Brown is known for some unconventional approaches when it comes to food. He similarly breaks with the typical food celebrity norm when it comes to his personal eating, preferring some down-to-earth tastes like his favorite fast-food chain, In-N-Out Burger, and his all-time favorite food, fried chicken (Spoon University).

The food celeb has showcased the Southern dish at various times both on the air on off, teaching fans how to prepare fried chicken Alton style. He also seems to just plain like talking about the classic dish, from sharing fried chicken anecdotes when he's being interviewed to making wings on-air for Stephen Colbert using a massive homemade device he dubbed the "Jet-Fry Jr." What can we say — Alton Brown loves his fried chicken!

The chef has shared that he especially reveres Korean fried chicken. The best fried chicken he ever ate, however, was in Mississippi, when he and his film crew visited an out-of-the-way spot to grab food. When Brown reached the buffet table, he was crestfallen to find that all of the fried chicken was gone, meaning he wouldn't get a taste of his favorite food, though the odor lingered in the air. As he was leaving the restaurant, the chef brought out a fresh batch prepared just for him, which turned out to be the very best fried chicken Brown ever had.

It comes as no surprise that Alton Brown has his own personal style for preparing his favorite dish, ensuring a fried chicken that's golden, crispy, juicy, and delicious. The years have changed the way he approaches preparing classic fried chicken, though.

In his early TV days in 2001, Brown demonstrated his go-to fried chicken recipe on his show "Good Eats," taking a classic approach of an overnight soak in buttermilk, a dredge in flour, simple seasonings consisting of kosher salt, garlic powder, Hungarian paprika, and cayenne pepper, and frying the bird pieces in shortening using a cast iron skillet. Many years later, an older and more seasoned Alton Brown revisited the recipe on "Good Eats: Reloaded," adding in some new ingredients like ground sumac and bourbon, bringing cornstarch and an egg into the mix, and frying his chicken in a Dutch oven using peanut oil.

The incorporation of cornstarch is one technique that has become a signature Alton Brown fried chicken move over the years, as adding cornstarch into his dredge makes the coating crunchier. Another quintessential Alton Brown chicken prep tactic is putting baking powder on chicken wings before frying them in order to carbonate the liquid beneath the skin and make it puff up more. No matter how the cooking star approaches a deep-fried bird, we would definitely never turn down an opportunity to sample fried chicken à la Alton!