Not All-Purpose Flour: Fried Chicken Is 10x Crispier With One Italian Ingredient

The average pantry is home to all kinds of everyday ingredients that home cooks use in myriad ways. A pack of Jell-O will make a yummy dessert on its own as well as helping blueberries sing, while vinegar tenderizes meat and keeps your kitchen cabinets clean. At the same time, some specialty items that have a particular purpose can also be put to good use elsewhere. Take 00 flour, for example. It's commonly used to make pizza dough and pasta, but it can also be the secret to fried chicken that is off-the-scale crispy.

Based on an Italian classification system, 00 is the most finely milled of all flours and is called doppio zero in Italy. We'll get to why it's good for some foods in a moment, but as a fried chicken coating, it has two major benefits. First, 00 flour doesn't soak up moisture the way other flours do, so the steam and juices from the chicken are more likely to remain in the meat rather than drying the protein out and turning the coating soggy. Second, the fine texture of 00 flour means you get a lot of surface area for your money. As you coat the chicken, you get plenty of opportunities to create crags and crannies that will turn ultra-crisp after having been fried.

Like other flour-based breadings for fried chicken, you can easily combine 00 flour with the herbs and spices of your choice to really amp up the flavor (we've gone big on jerk seasoning recently) without compromising on that must-have crunch. Curiously, not everyone agrees that 00 flour makes a good coating for fried chicken, with some claiming it falls off or doesn't fry as well as all-purpose flour.

If you've never used 00 flour before on your fried chicken and you're worried about disaster striking, we recommend cutting it with all-purpose flour, cornstarch, or good old cornbread mix. Some home cooks also let their oil come back to the frying temperature (around 325 degrees Fahrenheit) a little more slowly after popping their chicken in. This is said to give the 00 flour in the coating enough time to repel steam and moisture.

Once you've used 00 flour for fried chicken, we expect you'll want to try it out on other foods. It makes a silky batter that's perfect for super-crispy fried fish and can give your weekday chicken cutlets moreish crunch. Alternatively, you can put 00 flour to its traditional use. Its powder-like quality and not-too-high gluten content deliver smooth, elastic dough that doesn't shrink, so it's ideal for pizzas and pasta doughs. It will also help produce lighter bread, such as focaccia, and works in cakes and pastries, too. For a long time, 00 flour was only available in specialty stores, but today you can likely pick it up from your local supermarket.