Everyone loves chicken nuggets. This recipe is a more refined approach to a classic item in any parent’s arsenal.
Time to prepare:
Approx. 30 minutes
Difficulty level:
Super easy
Ingredients:
- Chicken breasts and/or chicken breast tenderloins
- Corn starch
- Flour
- Salt
- Black pepper
- White pepper
- Paprika (optional)
- Eggs
- Vegetable oil (or another oil of your choice)
While we prepare the ingredients for this dish, we like to get a deep pot of oil pre-heating since it will take a while to come to temperature. We prefer a sauce pot since it is smaller in size (meaning it will take less oil to fill) and it is nice and deep. Using your oil of choice, heat to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Make sure that you don’t fill the pot over half way up so that you can avoid the oil foaming or splattering all over the place and making a huge mess.
Start with chicken breasts and tenderloins. If you have a whole chicken, you’ll need to part it out to isolate the breast meat and the tenderloins.
Cut the breast meat into small cubes roughly 1.5″ in size.
Prepare an egg wash (using high-quality farm-fresh eggs from Our Way Farms, of course) by thoroughly incorporating the eggs and whites together. Depending on how many chicken nuggets we’re preparing, we will usually mix up 3-4 eggs for this.
Next, you’ll need to prepare your batter. We use a highly seasoned corn-starch and flour blend for our batter so that the nuggets are nice and crispy when fried. In a large mixing bowl, mix your corn starch and flour together at a ratio of 2:1 corn starch to flour (meaning that if you use 1 cup of corn starch, use 1/2 cup of flour). Add in a generous amount of salt, white pepper, and black pepper. From time to time we’ll throw in a bit of paprika as well for a bit of color on the batter.
Coat the chicken cubes in the egg wash, then coat them with your batter. Make sure to get the entire chicken nugget coated nicely with the batter. Afterwards, place on to a plate with paper towels so that they will remain dry. Use paper towels in between each layer if you are piling up the nuggets.
Once you’ve verified that your oil is at 350 degrees with a thermometer, start frying the chicken nuggets. You’ll want to fry the chicken nuggets for 3-4 minutes. We find it handy to set a timer on our cell phone and use that to keep track of the time. When done, remove from the oil and place onto a plate with paper towels to dry. Salt to taste (we put quite a bit).
That’s it, you’re done!