KFC vs. Local & Organic: An Epic Tale

It's been a long, hot, sultry summer. Have you noticed our absence?

In true Parisian style, we've blown off just about everything for the summer: A couple of weeks in the States, entertaining (and sometimes getting busy in the kitchen with) friends from abroad, and generally doing anything to avoid being in our steampit of an apartment. Generally, this has meant hanging out on the various terrasses of Paris and getting slurry. And frankly, if there's anything we like better than cooking, taking photos, and writing about it, it's actually being out and about in Paris. Drinking.

But with the weather cooling down in time for la rentrée, we've ventured back into the kitchen more often, greasing the pans and flouring the crevices of passion. I've been compiling a sort of "Greatest Hits" of the summer for anyone interested, but in the meantime, something else has brought us out of our summer stupor: The KFC Double-Down.

Of course, I loathe KFC for their animal husbandry practices (or lack thereof) and the fact that their food, in general, sucks. But I have this morbid curiosity about various manufactured foods, and the last one to enchant me with its siren song was KFC's disgusting Famous Bowl. From first sight, I had to know what a sandwich using two pieces of fried chicken breast in lieu of bread was all about.

Fortunately for my stomach, intestines, and any other orifices affected by potential food poisoning, KFC in France has an extremely limited menu. No Famous/Toilet Bowl. And most certainly no Double Down. So after numerous comments back and forth on Facebook and Twitter – and some egging on from Alannah – I vowed I would make a "premium" version of the Double Down so we can try for ourselves.


Behold, the TKFC Double Down.

Two fried chicken breasts done in the style of Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc fried chicken (from scratch, cribbing the recipe from the spooge-worthy Inuyaki.com), and in between it some slices of cheese and bacon.

Of course, these aren't just any ingredients. In order to really one-up KFC, we went as from-scratch as possible.

The chicken is farm-raised, just slaughtered, and lovingly prepared by our local butcher. Yesterday morning, it still had a head, feet, and feathers.

The bacon is one of the same butcher's specialties: Poitrine fumée (smoked pork belly), sliced to order. The butcher's from the Auvergne region – famous for its hogs – so he does not mess around when it comes to his cured meats, most of which are the product of his mad in-house charcuterie skills.

The cheese is Gruyère from the fromagerie up the street: One of the many master cheesemongers who ages and then selects cheeses for you on-site based on when you'll consume it (an appreciated art in France); One of the few who is a woman.

We even went a little crazy sourcing the ingredients for the fried chicken coating.

Buttermilk is hard to come by in France, so Alannah has devised a trick where she mixes fromage blanc ("white cheese," but it's actually just a denser yogurt) with milk. Naturally, we go with the organic stuff that's micro-filtered as opposed to heat pasteurized, but sometimes we go raw if we know we're going to use a litre within a few days.

For the dry part of the coating, we went as "from scratch" as we could, as well. While we don't mill our own flour, I did mill our own garlic powder (half a dried clove in a pestel and mortar), and the seasonings were as locally sourced as possible. (Impossible for the cayenne pepper, but hell...) Even the herbs and lemon for the brine were purchased at the local green market.

Having gone so far as to skip KFC and the supermarket, we decided to go a bit upmarket with classic KFC sides, as well.


Mashed potatoes became Alannah's spectacularly creamy, thick mashed red potatoes, topped with bacon gravy. Corn on the cob became corn charred on the cob, then shucked and tossed with butter and parsley. And - making a pitstop at Shakey's - Mojo potatoes became our Belgian-style double fried Mojo potatoes with grated parmesean and olive oil.

And the end result of all this?

It tasted like upscale fast food. Really good, really upscale fast food. As in I'd do body shots of the gravy off of Alannah. And she's already told me the only thing she'd forsake me for is Ad Hoc – and by golly, that's Ad Hoc fried chicken in front of her.

But I didn't cream my jeans over the concept.

In fact, I'm not sure what the big deal with KFC's Double Down is. The marketing ploy is that it's a bacon-cheese sandwich using fried chicken breasts for a bun. In reality, the combo you're looking at is a rebranded chicken Cordon Bleu. Think about it: A Cordon Bleu is a fried chicken breast stuffed with ham and cheese, often served at banquets and school cafeterias. The Double Down just doubles the amount of chicken.

So really, we made chicken Cordon Bleu with excellent ingredients tonight. Ho freakin' hum.

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But wait, there's more!

When we were assembling the ingredient list yesterday (we started a day before, because of the overnight brining process for the chicken), Alannah was a bit bummed by the bill of materials. She was under the impression that the Double Down was a burger. As in chicken-burger patty-chicken with some bacon and cheese in there.

So when we were at the butcher shop, we had our man in the bloody apron grind up some of his finest beef for us.

And like every good mad science project, we created a backup in case the first one failed... "Screw the Double Down," she said. "I wanna go All-In."

Mixed gambling metaphors aside, it was a perfect name.


Two TKFC chicken breasts, a 250 gram (over half pound) burger patty cooked medium, bacon, gruyère cheese, caramelized onions, deep fried hash browns, and bacon/burger-dripping gravy.

The heart-topped picks not only keep this monstrosity together, but remind you exactly what you risk damaging while you eat it.

I suggested topping it with a fried egg, but Alannah told me to stay realistic. There's only so much one can fit in his/her mouth in one go, after all.

And while I can't say I will ever make or eat such a thing again, it is now quite evident that I married the perfect woman. One who is still shapely, but can concoct a "sandwich" that puts the McGangBang to shame.

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Unfortunately, we were too busy deep frying, frying, and roasting to concoct a KFC-style dessert. And to be frank, I don't care to make a fancy version of the Colonel's Parfait.

Instead, we rolled down to the gelato shop in our neighborhood, named in 2007 as Maître Glacier (Master Ice Cream Maker) of Europe, for some of their fabulous on-site creations. I was very happy with my cup of lemon-basil gelato, and Alannah with her green tea gelato, all made and sold on the very same street as the butcher, green market, and cheesemonger.

How's that for supporting independent, local merchants who source their goods from as near as possible?

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Unfortunately, in bending the Colonel over and making his redneck ass our bitch like this, we spent a lot of time and money, and didn't exactly stroll to the gelateria all light as a feather.

The ingredient cost for one "Double Down," one "All-In," three sides, a bottle of wine, and dessert for two nearly came out to 30€ ($43). The time to prepare it from beginning to end: 17 hours. NOTE: There's a substantial amount of leftovers. Except the wine.

A Double Down combo meal at KFC costs around $7 (plus tax) and probably takes around six minutes.

Neither is particularly good for you.

But our version contained no hormones, came from animals raised in open-air farms (and we don't accept farms that are big dirt lots as open-air, there's a whole rating system for it), had as few industrial ingredients as we could get away with (no luck on the peppercorns, salt, and milk, I'm sure) and nothing genetically modified.

We got the pleasure of talking to our local purveyors, who are always more friendly than anyone at a supermarket or fast food restaurant.

We enjoyed beer and wine while waiting for the brine to cool.

We enjoyed each other's company while the chicken was brining overnight.

In every way, despite the much higher amount of time and money required, our "Double Down" (and "All In") were infinitely more pleasurable than the experience you get from KFC.

And what point is it going after foods on the extreme ends of the spectrum – be they the biggest, the fattiest, the greasiest, or whatever – if there is no pleasure?

Egg. Salad.

Not egg salad. But salad. With eggs as the centerpiece.

Thanks to the whole dealie with frying my finger, literally, last week, I've been shying away from any heavy-duty cooking. First off because I'm now terrified by the sound of searing flesh. Secondly because almost any wet kitchen activity - from cleaning fish to doing the dishes - would require re-dressing my finger over and over again.

While Paris is a fantastic place to eat out, though, it can get old... Not to mention expensive. And with all the awesome ingredients available, it's maddening not to be able to cook. The solution? Cold dishes. Or those with easy, minimal cooking/prep. Or salade composée, as they like to say here.

Wanna Root?


Root vegetables may be more of an autumn thing in most people's minds, but French markets – like those in most places – are stocked with beets, carrots, and potatoes year round. The colors, though, are varied enough to shout "SPRING!" And chives seem to be on market shelves and fancy menus in amounts unseen since the Sour Cream n' Chives mania of the 1980s. Non-veg components include a gently poached egg and a walnut oil and strawberry syrup vinaigrette.

Egg on Egg on Egg Action


This one's pretty simple... Lumpfish caviar over diced egg whites on toasted baguettes with butter. We decided separating the yolk out and turning it into decor was the best way to go – not only for aesthetics, but to have the option of picking off some yolk to put on top of the canapé: Some folks find the yolk to compete too much with the caviar. This being cheap lumpfish, it's not a big deal either way... Oh, and look, somehow some chives snuck in. (Gotta use up the giant bunch from the market somehow!)

Brown Town
Salade de lentilles et son oeuf poché (er, lentil salad with poached egg) is a lunchtime staple around town, especially at the new upmarket "fast food" joints that try to push healthy meals (i.e. small portions) at non-fine-dining prices (i.e. cheaping out by serving mostly cold dishes). This is actually fine, because as is often the case with French cuisine, the simpler the better. And sometimes, we do actually crave something this stupidly simple.


I figured any moron could make a lentil salad, but I decided to look at recipes for inspiration anyway. Among the first I stumbled upon seemed one of the simplest, and by virtue of it being by Alice Waters, it must be among the best. I got as far as her first ingredient – she recommends French green lentils, and those happen to be the cheapest and most plentiful around these parts – and scanned over to the onion-type component and saw shallots. At that point, I nodded and threw the rest out the door. A new inspiration struck me.

The Persian dish addassi is a lentil dish that somewhat resembles Mexican refried beans in consistency. It's often eaten as a belly-warming breakfast with a pat of butter and nana-dagh, which is essentially fried mint. And you know, nothing goes better with lentils than melted butter. (Alannah agrees, and pleasing the wife comes first and foremost.)

Taking inspiration from that, I scrapped Ms. Waters' recipe (which I'm sure is fantastic) and started making an addassi-style salad.

The cooked lentils were combined with some chopped scallions (whites only) softened in butter. They were then stirred with a dressing based on melted butter, a bit of olive oil, cumin, pepper, and dried mint that I'd ground down into a fine powder with a pestel and mortar. While all that chilled, it was on to poaching the eggs and slicing up – you guessed it – chives to finish.

It's all criminally simple, and above all, mouthgasmically good.

It also keeps quite well, so you can make a huge batch, throw it into a Weck jar (or other fancy-pants brand of canning jar) and take it to work for lunch, where all your coworkers will think you scored a promotion and are now getting your take-out from Fauchon/Neiman-Marcus/Harrod's/(enter-your-local-overpriced-food-hall-here).

A Whole Lotta Wiener

Sometimes you just need some wiener.

And it's really hard to say no when it's only 1€80 a 10-pack at the local convenience store.

The humble hot dog sees a lot of abuse. It gets slathered in ketchup. It gets served with cheap canned chili. In Paris, it gets baked into the bun forming some sort of disgusting 4-day old bagel dog sold alongside pre-made crêpes near tourist traps.

We have nothing against cheap convenience foods. And this week, with both of us having had a lot of work, going to the butcher or fishmonger or green market wasn't an option.

Cheap and Trashy
One thing you really appreciate after leaving the US is good ol' WT food. Especially on a hot day (by local standards, to which we've become acclimated, anyway) where you just want to grill some hot dogs or factory-produced burger patties and have a tub of potato salad from Safeway or Costco or some other place a foodie would look down his nose.

Of course, living in a 300+ year-old building with no back yard means no barbecue. (The French don't take kindly to having their historical neighborhoods burnt down by Americans longing for a good ol' cookout.) So Alannah improvised with our ridiculously effective broiler, roasting some wieners that I could swear tasted like they came off a Weber kettle. Look, she even made grill marks!


Alongside it, a gigantic mound of potato salad. Here's where we went back to our usual selves... I've never really cared much for mayonnaise. Unless it's homemade or Kewpie brand mayo from Japan. In this case, we went for making our own Japanese-style mayo. It's a bit lighter and sweeter than regular mayo, and unlike French mayo, isn't infused with mustard. It's pretty simple - egg yolks + rice vinegar + cider vinegar + salad oil + a pinch of sugar. Then work it like crazy with a whisk, 'til you've got a gooey, creamy sauce ready to be slathered over potatoes.

Japanese Wieners
Not letting anything go to waste, we once again leaned on the hot dog crutch the next night, this time to make Japanese food. This isn't out of the ordinary - when we had relatives visiting from Japan last fall, they taught us a bunch of their favorite dishes. My aunt kept adding at the end of each dish, "Oh, and it's really good with hot dogs!" Being an old divorcée with adult kids who've long left home, I suppose she was all about finding new ways to enjoy wieners.


In that spirit, we put together a hot dog donburi. A donburi is a big bowl of rice topped with meat, often with a softly scrambled egg surrounding it. For instance, you often see it with tonkatsu, which is a fried and breaded pork loin. We substituted a hot dog.

Unfortunately, beaten egg and panko bread crumbs don't really stick to the slick, smooth surface of hot dogs too well, so there was a gloppy mess of wiener to be dealt with. But in the end, it worked out... and was surprisingly tasty.

And Some Balls, Too...
When our Japanese contingent was visiting, they'd brought us a takoyaki pan - a cast iron pan with golf ball-sized wells to make the eponymous Osaka snack. The batter is similar to okonomiyaki, based on the slimy, white, viscous nagaimo (or yamaimo if you can dig some up), only without the cabbage. This time around, I'd made some tenkasu (little fritters of tempura batter) to bolster the dough, lest you want the takoyaki balls to come out flaccid and not hold their shape.

Naturally, instead of cubes of boiled octopus, I loaded up each ball with a piece of hot dog.


Sadly, cast iron takoyaki pans and typical French vitroceramic electric ranges are not a marriage made in heaven, so a half dozen of our balls were essentially culinary abortions. The other ten, however, came out perfectly spherical, brown, and delectable.


I put them into pyramids topped with the customary aonori, katsuoboshi, mayo, and a sweet soy/vinegar sauce. A little yakisoba on the side (with sliced hot dog, of course), and some potato salad, and this was almost an authentic Japanese meal.

Next time, we'll preheat the takoyaki pan in the oven and perhaps put it over the ninja stove (sadly our only way to cook over gas) and see if we can get a full set of balls to bite down on.

Stripped Down to the Bone

Back in the States, Easter dinner usually consists of ham. Baked, spiral-cut, glazed... Regardless of the kind, it either came out of a large can or, if your family's fancy, was picked up at your local Honeybaked outlet.

Fuck. That. Shit.

In much of Europe, Easter dinner is often focused on lamb. This is probably because of the large population of Jews and Muslims.

(Hang on. Wait. Let that sink in. Then groan.)

We'd planned to go the European way, but once we went to our butcher and saw the osso buco on display, we thought, "Screw it! It's not like we're religious anyway." (Though Alannah seems to cry out to god quite a bit...)

The green market had some nice (if small) fava beans on offer, and from that moment our Easter dinner was conceived.

The veal shank was floured and fried for three minutes on each side in our cast iron pot (you can use any braising pan/dutch oven), then set to braise with sautéed diced aromatics and just enough red wine and rosé to reach the top of the meat, all for about 3 hours in a medium-hot oven.

Alannah fricasseed the fava beans (pre-steamed from the long shelling process) with diced onion in a sauce of egg yolk beaten with cream and a touch of lemon juice.

This all sits on a bed of olive oil mashed potatoes... Skin-on because that's how we like it.

Topped off with chopped mint, because you need to keep your breath fresh after wolfing down meat and creamy sauce.

The result was a series of oohing and aahing unheard since... Okay, not very long ago. The veal flaked apart at the lightest touch, with any trace of fat or connective tissue disintegrating on the tongue. The fava beans showed their freshness by staying firm, a perfect accompaniment to the richness of the meat, and the creamy fricassee sauce acting like a gravy over the potatoes. The best part of a bone-in piece of meat: The marrow. Gooey, greasy, and glistening, ready to be slurped up.

Suffice it to say, every bone in this house gets sucked clean.

The Ugly Ones Need Some Lovin' Too: Monkfish

I'm not sure exactly what she does, but Alannah gets a lot of freebies from the guys at the markets.

Case in point: When she went to buy some cod fillet yesterday, the fishmonger threw in some monkfish.

Monkfish is like a drunk hook-up: Hideous but still satisfying. However – unless you procure some bad fish – there aren't any consequences in the morning. It may look like a bit like that beast you took home after 8 straight hours of beer pong in your fraternity days, only its flesh is firm and its liver beautifully intact.

Tonight was all about the flesh. Firm but supple. Moist and sweet.

And the fish was pretty good, too.

Roasted in the oven (15 min. at high temperature, 5 min. under the broiler), atop crisp potato pancakes, topped with a tomato-saffron coulis (with a touch of rosé), and garnished with wilted radish greens and red radish.

It made for something radically different - and more seasonal - than the usual filet de lotte served around Paris. Which is good in its own way - just that you don't need to eat stuff smothered in white cream sauce every day.

Or do you?

Smells Like Fish...

A little Good Friday fun...

Alannah picked up some gorgeous dos de cabillaud (cod loin) from our neighborhood fishmonger.

I baked it, covered, absolutely dripping with wine, lemon juice, olive oil and butter... Then roasted it with white asparagus from the local outdoor market, and made some Easter Egg potatoes, dyed in food coloring.

Because sometimes you can't help but play with your food.

We Did It All for the Gnocchi

There's nothing quite as warming on a winter night as when Alannah works a big, hard piece of meat until it gives out and goes totally soft, left to swim in its juices until sopped up...

We're talking of course, about tough stewing beef - combined with aromatics and wine and cooked for hours and hours in a cast-iron pot. The anticipation for such a dish can be maddening... What's a couple to do while they're waiting seemingly forever for their daube de boeuf to be ready?

Make gnocchi, of course.

As expected for anyone's first time, it was pretty messy... but surprisingly not very painful. A little mashing, a lot of kneading, and about a thousand attempts to roll the "little pillows" off the back of a fork to get it just so.

At the end, a beautiful, chocolate brown daube over tender, handmade gnocchi.

Behind the Scenes
Making a beef daube is easy. Take hunks of the cheapest stewing meat you can find, and sautée it in a Dutch oven or cast iron pot with diced aromatics like onion, carrots and celery. Once they've got a good sheen to them and the meat is browned on the outside, dump in a bottle of dry red wine. You can go cheap here, too, but as a rule, don't go any cheaper than what you'd take to one of your Craigslist casual encounters dates. (i.e. nothing less than $4 or €3 a bottle) The secret: Throw in a square or two of dark chocolate. But no more, unless you want your meat to taste like Chocolate Salty Balls. Then slide the pot into a medium-high oven and let it stew for hours - don't pull out!

Gnocchi - like an Italian woman -is a bit more involved and needs a lot of attention. Boil and mash some potatoes. Prepare a large mixing bowl with some flour and an egg. Add your mashed potatoes and work into a dough. Keep working it until its consistent and has a pasta dough-like consistency. If necessary, sprinkle in more flour as you go along. Once you think you're done (you're probably not!), take balls of the dough and roll them out into long rods, no more than 3/4" or 2cm in diameter. With a sharp knife, slice off little cylinders - about the size of gnocchi. If you ask a guy, they should be about 6" in length. A girl will tell you more accurately that it's less than an inch. Roll the little cylinders along the tines of the back of a fork to get the little ridges that gnocchi - for some reason - is supposed to have. (Told you it's complicated!) Then lay on a dish or tray with lots of flour sprinkled around so they don't stick together, until it's time to give them a very quick boil, just before serving.