Copycat Tex's Chicken v2

As I had mentioned before, it would not be long until you see the second version of Justin's attempt to copy the Tex's chicken powder. And sure enough, the very next time he's cooking dinner (which is today, obviously) he made the second version. In fact, he has "threatened" to keep on making copies until I say that it tastes better than Tex's chicken. Just why would he want to do this? Well, he says it makes it easier for him to decide what to cook - and will help him in his plans to take over the world. Well, not really. He's planning to sell the chicken goreng powder he's currently developing and become rich. Seriously. Right. So, here we go!

What you need:
3 pieces chicken (ours were small, so we used 2 pieces each instead)

Coating:
7 heaped tablespoons flour
1/2 tablespoon bicarbonate of soda
1 tablespoon white pepper
1/2 tablespoon black pepper
1 tablespoon cayenne pepper
1/2 tablespoon nutmeg
1/2 tablespoon sage
1 tablespoon ginger powder
1/2 tablespoon chicken stock
1/4 tablespoon salt

What you do:

1. Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large bowl (or a resealable plastic bag).
2. Dip the chicken pieces in the milk and toss in the bowl to coat with the flour mixture (or add into bag and shake around until properly coated).
3. Bake in a 180 C oven for about 40 minutes or until cooked through.

As you hopefully noticed, he's missing a lot less ingredients now. Just the MSG, celery seed, onion powder and rusk is left. I'm not sure if he's going to try and source them. He's probably going to just go ahead with the current ingredients and find the golden ratio.

To help him with this, he instructed me to write down the exact amounts of the stuff he was using - so that making a version 3 would be much easier. I did that, but I know for a fact that his tablespoons are ... well, less than standard, shall we say. But the approximate amounts are more than good enough for this, I guess.

So did this second version manage to at least improve on the first one (which was rather bland, if you still remember)? Well, surprise surprise (!) but this was actually much much more tasteless than the first one! Probably because he put in too much flour. His 7 tablespoons were very very heaped tablespoons, probably about 2 cups of flour, if not more.

Also, the chicken, as you can see, remained quite powdery and didn't turn a nice golden-brown, like the others. It wasn't even all that crispy, even though it was in the oven close to an hour. Either our oven's not working properly anymore, or Justin coated it with too much flour (because of the large excess he had...). Actually, he didn't preheat the oven earlier either, so it was probably in there for shorter than we thought. Although he says that he never preheats ovens. Oh well, never mind. I'll try to intercede next time, and get him to preheat it. Easier to estimate cooking time, heh.

So anyway, for his next version, I guess he will be cutting down the amount of flour, and possibly increasing the seasonings. Stay tuned~! ;)

Quote of the day: Bad cooks -- and the utter lack of reason in the kitchen -- have delayed human development longest and impaired it most.

PS Hadi and Justin have a Tae Kwon Do competition in Birmingham tomorrow. They would never read this in a million years, but good luck guys~! (Yeah, I know, why can't I just tell them face to face? :P) Haha. Just thought the world (and Ibu) would like to know. ;)