Chicken Fried Steak at Home

There are things you just shouldn't do. You shouldn't make fun of crazy people. You shouldn't be deliberately mean. You shouldn't rob liquor stores or mini-marts. And you definitely shouldn't order chicken-fried steak in the average restaurant or diner. Some things are just always a bad idea, definitely won't agree with your gall-bladder, and might even harm your immortal soul.

Chicken fried steak in a restaurant—unless you happen to be driving across Texas—doesn't actually even resemble food, usually. Even driving across Texas, I'd stick with the truckstop diner version, honestly.

Here's the thing about chicken-fried steak: The commercial versions are pretty much always terrible—sort of like a worn-out loafer, breaded, deep-fried, and topped with salty library paste. But when you make it at home? An entirely different story. There's hardly anything you'll ever cook that's yummier.

Every recipe you find is going to tell you to coat the meat in an egg/milk (or possibly buttermilk) mixture, then dredge your steak in seasoned flour. They're all wrong.

So here's what you do:

Buy some cheap round steak, take it home, trim all the fat off, and cut it into serving-sized pieces. Pound the living daylights out of it with a steak hammer (or the side of a saucer, if you don't own a steak hammer.)

In a shallow dish, dump a couple of cups of all-purpose flour, and season it with a healthy pinch of white pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, seasoned salt, and a smidgen each of celery salt and paprika. Mix it all up well.

If you like heavier breading, then by all means drag your pieces of steak through some buttermilk before dredging them in the flour. Otherwise, just coat 'em well with your seasoned flour.

In a heavy cast-iron skillet, heat between 1/4 and 1/2 inch of vegetable oil to the point where the dry seasoned flour shaken from your fingertips sizzles appealingly—a purist would use lard for this part, of course, but I'm all in favor of at least making a token nod to 21st century health-conscious sensibilities.

You want your oil to be hot enough to immediately sizzle and foam around the pieces of steak as you gently place them into the pan. Your oil shouldn't be smoking. Especially if you only keep olive oil in the house, like me. Smoking olive oil smells bad and tastes worse. Cooking chicken-fried steak in olive oil can be done, and tastes marvelous . . . but it's definitely not for amateurs.

Give your steak time to brown well (you can lift one edge with a fork and peek, if you'd like) but don't turn 'em over before they're thoroughly browned and crisp, or the breading will get soggy. It should take between 3 and 5 minutes per side. Once both sides are cooked, crisp, brown, and lovely, take the steaks up onto a couple of paper towels to blot the excess oil.

At this point in the process, I usually forgo the traditional cream gravy, and go straight for a steak sandwich with lots of mustard. If you make extra, you'll have sandwiches tomorrow, too. Either way, once you've got the hang of it, you'll never be willing to eat that heavily-breaded mystery-meat they pass off as commercial "chicken fried steak" again. And you won't let your friends eat that stuff, either.