What Even Is Chicken and Waffles??
The whole is greater than its chicken parts
New here? Scroll down for the video link and all the way to the bottom for the recipe!
I love fried chicken, and I love waffles, but if I’m being honest, I am but a hatchling when it comes to chicken and waffles.
There is no good reason for my low C&W count. The dish is iconic. Legendary. Widely recognized as a southern delicacy and a soul food classic, my readings on this topic also indicate that the combo of chicken and waffles (in gravy) originated in North America with the Pennsylvania Dutch. Going way back!
History aside, I treat chicken and waffles as a restaurant order. From a restaurant that knows what it’s doing. Even then, I’m likely to encourage someone else to order it and then make sure I get in there for a couple of perfect bites. Let’s get one for the table!
But why, Carla, why have you limited yourself this way??? Well. I know my morning palate, and my breakfast brain is always looking for something sour, vegetal, or fresh in the mix. It’s the same reason why you’ll almost never see me plating up Eggs Hollandaise or Quiche Lorraine. Capers on my bagels, salt in my smoothies, chili crisp on my avocado toast, et cetera.
The good news is, the body is always changing, and when I had the chance to take chicken and waffles onto the domestic scene, I was hyped. Because Cosmo and I have done the meat vs. veggie thing before, we thought it would be fun to tandem fry chicken for him, and oyster mushrooms for me. He was pumped, I was psyched, and I strutted right into development.
Ha. Even though my first pass at the dredge and an initial waffle were promising, I immediately found myself in Stage Two of my patented recipe development process, and it’s not the fun bit: Frustration; confusion; ambivalence. Cut to me, walking around my house muttering “what even IS chicken and waffles????”
My struggle came down to this: waffles are brown, tender, slightly crisp. Fried chicken is brown, juicy, crunchy. Waffles are sweet. Chicken is savory. On paper, the flavors complement each other, but the texture was tripping me up. Even the juiciest fried chicken, when paired with a waffle, will eat a little dry. If I were designing a fried chicken sandwich, for example, there would be a nice acidic crisp slaw in the mix, plus a tangy creamy sauce to balance the sweetness of a potato roll, let’s say. Butter and syrup don’t help with that. Plus, visually, it was a lot of brown; in test photos all the shapes morphed into a random blob. My online image search revealed that people usually throw a strawberry on the plate to help with this, and I refused to sink so low.
Should it be a sandwich? Should the waffle be the bread? Can you tell I was spiraling? I acknowledged by inexperience and started asking everyone I knew to “explain” chicken and waffles to me.
“Sweet and savory.” That answer sure came up a lot.
“You take a bite of waffle and then a bite of chicken.”
“The syrup ties it together.”
Still lost, I did what anyone in my position would do.
I watched chicken and waffle mukbang videos.
Sometimes, you have to see someone experience the joy of eating in order to feel the joy yourself. When I watched the syrup drip off the chicken, the butter pooling in the waffle divots, saw the juices mingle, heard the crunches—it finally clicked. You can see happen to me at 9:47 on the video—the face of a woman transported. When it hits, it really hits. I’m so glad I stuck around for Stage Four: Breakthrough; clarity; bliss.
Because there are a few steps to this recipe, I’ve included lots of do-aheads and other advice for the best flow in the recipe. And if the thought of getting up to fry chicken first thing in the day still feels like too much, make this for supper!