Ditch The Salt Shaker: Make Fried Chicken 10x More Flavorful With One Packet Of Seasoning

There are lots of ways to turn out a perfect plate of fried chicken. A little vodka will ensure it's crispy, while the retro trick of adding just a touch of food coloring can gussy up the color. But when it comes to flavor, there's a seasoning that will give you 10 times the taste — and it's not simply a pinch of salt. Sazón is known and loved by millions of Latin American home cooks, and it's the secret ingredient your marinade needs for amazing-tasting fried chicken. Traditionally, sazón is a blend of warming spices (often annatto, cumin, coriander, garlic powder, and Mexican oregano) with salt, and it's used to flavor a host of dishes.

When sazón is added to the marinade for fried chicken and left for around an hour, the meat takes on all that spice, brightness, and umami-forward flavor. You can team sazón with just about any other herbs and spices that you use for your fried chicken, too. Although it's flavorful, a well-crafted sazón blend complements rather than overwhelms other ingredients, so when the chicken is breaded and cooked, each bite serves up layer after delicious layer of complex flavor.

It's tempting to take one look at a box of sazón and use it in the same way as adobo or another spicy kind of dry rub, but this would be a big mistake. Yes, sazón will bring a flash of gorgeous yellow color to a dish, thanks to the annatto, but its best role in cooking is to add depth of flavor to dishes, not simply to coat the outside of meat.

Generations of home cooks across Latin America and beyond have reached for packets of sazón to add flavor to their food. One of the most common brands is Goya, with its distinctive yellow box, but the annatto (also called achiote) in it has been popular among indigenous people in South America and the Caribbean for centuries. Today, there are many different types of sazón available from a range of brands, but check the label for the presence of artificial colors, preservatives, or MSG. Perhaps none of those bother you — in fact, we like a dash of MSG in chocolate chip cookies — but some people feel that these doesn't need to be in sazón.

There are lots of other foods that benefit from a dash of sazón besides fried chicken. It's great in sauces, soups, and stews, while it's often found in the marinade for Puerto Rican slow-cooked pork dish pernil, gives a boost to a weeknight pan of habichuelas guisadas (stewed beans), and is the flavor pillar upon which many plates of yellow-hued arroz con gandules are built. Sazón pairs amazingly with fish too, and you can add a little to a sofrito or mirepoix to lock in flavor on the ground floor of a recipe.