The Word of Mouth KFC challenge

Woody Allen once opined that sex is like pizza - even when it's rubbish it's pretty damn good. I feel the same way about fried chicken. The truth is, it would take effort and skill to screw up succulent chicken meat, dredged in seasoned flour and cooked in boiling fat. Like many other foodies I have a problem with the moral implications of KFC's chicken meat but I can't, with my hand on my (rapidly congesting) heart, say it doesn't taste pretty good when fresh from the bucket.

But I'm lucky enough to also have sampled the real thing. I lived for several years in rural North Carolina and married a local girl. The reception was held on a hot summer evening, on the banks of a sleepy river on the family farm and was a pot-luck affair. In the course of the evening a couple of hundred people turned up, most carrying trays covered in a cloth and containing a personal variation on fried chicken.

Your personal 'secret recipe' for fried chicken is a pretty serious business in the South, and a newbie outsider like me could be forgiven for believing that all those family reunions, church picnics, barbecues and tailgate parties were just a front for a bitterly fought and endless competition to produce better and better fried chicken. I personally reckon the world would be a much better place if we all got together every now and again in a 'healthy' competition over fried chicken. It sublimates family tensions, draws communities together and generally makes it socially acceptable to eat like a starved weasel in the name of politeness. An online competitive chicken fry-off, then? Bring it on.

Thanks to a huge response from WoM posters we were able, once again, to revisit the endlessly fascinating moral arguments surrounding the eating of animals. We were also able work out a sensible method of home cooking fried chicken, and devise a convincingly British spicing mix.

Lacking KFC's mighty pressure fryers and mindful of the need to cook the chicken right through, we were happy to follow the suggestions of double cooking. Most recommended some time in the oven after frying, but we thought we'd experiment with poaching beforehand and, as many of our posters suggested an overnight marinade in milk, we decided to use the marinade as the poaching liquid. It's worth noting for future recipes that chicken marinaded and poached in milk has an unbelievably suave flavour and texture, and that the poaching liquid thickens to create the most soothing cream of chicken soup I've ever achieved.

We made up two batches of seasoned flour, using Ron Douglas's 'KFC' mix and our own Guardian crowdsourced version - let's call it 'GFC' - and fried sample pieces of the poached chicken dredged in each.

'KFC' mix

1 teaspoon ground oregano
1 teaspoon chilli powder
1 teaspoon ground sage
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon dried marjoram
1 teaspoon pepper
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon onion salt
1 teaspoon garlic powder
2 tablespoons Accent (MSG)

GFC mix

1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp mustard powder
1 tsp sage
1 tsp celery seeds
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp dried onion flakes
2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground black pepper
1 tsp ground white pepper

I'm not going to lie to you. If your paper gives you moral carte blanche to wolf it down in the name of research, and when it's hot and fresh from the bucket, KFC is gorgeous. I haven't eaten chain fast food for a long time and the combined hit of chicken, fat and flavour was disorientatingly powerful. It's the sort of comprehensive sensory seeing-to that's both best and worst about drink, drugs and sex. So very good and so very bad. No wonder teenagers live on this stuff. But trying to apply any kind of critical approach to the flavour was surprisingly hard. I can't tell you what that famous mixture of 11 secret herbs and spices actually tastes of, because I couldn't distinguish any particular flavours amid the assault.

Cooking from scratch enables us to do two things that the Colonel can't: use great chicken and drain the grease more efficiently. This gave us a real head start, and the results were stunning. A single bite of the homemade KFC is enough. It's like biting into a dew-fresh ripe peach after eating a canned one. It's obviously the same thing but an order of magnitude better. As before, none of the flavours predominated enough to be identifiable but, having made up the mix from scratch, we now know the secret. Herbs and spices be damned, that staggering, mouthfilling, umami facepunch of a flavour is down to the two tablespoonfuls of MSG.

GFC, our own mix, was very, very good. Nice flavours, well chosen and matched. It's refined, elegant and I'd proudly serve it at a family picnic. An elegant Southern church lady would gladly remove a cotton glove to pick up an MSG-free GFC drumstick. She would compliment us on our British reserve, our eccentric quirkiness and our general pluck, but as far as stimulating the senses goes, she'd politely opine, "why, it's like comparing iced tea and crystal meth".