/ck/ - Food & Cooking

I haven't been able to get my fried chicken to taste as spicy as I want. I don't like putting dried cayenne in the breading because if you add enough to make it spicy it burns and makes the chicken bitter. I don't like adding it afterwards because it doesn't really taste like it's part of the chicken.

I have had good luck using a fried chicken batter mix but I need to increase the number of peppers. The brand I use calls for mixing part of the mix with water to make a batter then dipping it into the remaining dry mix. I've tried blending whole habanero peppers with the water used for the batter and it came out mildly spicy but the texture was perfect. There was no bitter flavor though.

Another idea I had was to grind the habanero with a brine and inject that straight into the meat down to the bone. It seems like a pain to do that so I'm looking for other ideas.