Skip to main content
Main

Fried Chicken Spanish

Fried Chicken Spanish is a dish of battered and fried chicken pieces served with a tomato and onion sauce thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Fried Chicken Spanish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Cut the chickens into small pieces.

  2. Boil the pieces in salted water until tender.

  3. Reserve the broth for gravy.

Batter and fry

  1. Beat the eggs, separating the whites and yolks.

  2. Add salt, pepper, and 1 tablespoon of Gluten A-l flour.

  3. Roll each piece of chicken in the batter.

  4. Fry in hot lard until golden brown.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In a separate pan, fry the chopped onion, garlic, and tomatoes in lard or oil.

  2. Add a little Gluten A-l flour and the reserved broth.

  3. Boil until thick.

  4. Pour the thickened sauce over the fried chicken.

  5. Serve.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Garlic + tomatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Chicken + garlictop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,850 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-ethyl-2,5-dimethylpyrazine (roasted, nutty).

  5. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main protein; boiling first makes it tender before frying.
Eggs
Coat the chicken in a batter that sets and browns when fried.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it becomes a gravy that clings to the chicken.
Onion, garlic, and tomatoes
Build the aromatic base and acidity for the sauce.

The step that matters

Frying the battered chicken in hot lard. If the fat is not hot enough, the batter absorbs oil and turns greasy instead of setting into a crisp golden coating. Hot fat seals the batter quickly.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, egg, pepper, flour, onion, garlic, tomato):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, egg, pepper, flour, onion, garlic, tomato. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesChicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipes