As far as anyone knows, Colonel Harland Sanders revealed his recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken to just two living souls. One was his wife, Claudia. The other was Jack C. Massey, head of the three-man syndicate that purchased the Kentucky Fried Chicken Corporation from Sanders in 1964.
Apparently, none of the five thousand Kentucky Fried Chicken franchisees has ever been told the full recipe. New restaurant operators attend “KFC University,” a company-owned outlet in Louisville. There they are initiated into the special cooking method. They aren’t told what is in the seasoning mix, however. Franchisees must buy the seasonings premixed from the Kentucky Fried Chicken Corporation. Some outlets buy ten-ounce packets of seasonings that are to be mixed with twenty-five pounds of flour. Others buy a preseasoned coating mix that contains the flour.
Ever since the Kentucky Fried Chicken chain mushroomed in the mid-1960s, the secret recipe has been the object of speculation. Examination of the chicken shows that the coating is a thin, almost soggy layer (in the “original recipe”; there is also a “spicycrispy” version) adhering to the skin. The meat is notably moist, allegedly because of the special pressure-cooking process. There is little popular conviction as to what seasonings figure in the “secret blend of eleven herbs and spices.” The chicken is flavorful, but no herb or spice predominates. The New York Times quoted Sanders as maintaining that the herbs and spices “stand on everybody’s shelf.”
The presumption that the seasonings in Kentucky Fried Chicken are in fact perfectly ordinary ones has long been a bone of contention between franchisees and Kentucky Fried Chicken management. Restaurateurs are charged a steep price for the seasonings—more than any conceivable combination of herbs and spices ought to cost, say franchisees. In a 1976 book on McDonald’s (Big Mac: The Unauthorized Story of McDonald’s by Max Boas and Steven Chain), McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc observed: “Kentucky Fried Chicken licensees claimed that they were paying three to four to five times for the same herbs and for the same chicken, and that they could get it from Durkee’s or Kraft or any big company in the United States. And Kentucky Fried Chicken said, no, you couldn’t because the formula was a secret. You know that was a lot of crap. Any laboratory can tell you what’s in it. There’s no platinum in there. There’s no gold in there.”
That there isn’t platinum or eye of passenger pigeon in the mix is supported by the fact that the colonel occasionally whipped up the seasoning mixture impromptu. In Sanders’ autobiography, Life as I Have Known It Has Been Finger Lickin, Good, he tells of selling his first franchisee, Leon “Pete” Harmon, on the chicken. Sanders concocted a batch of the seasoning mix from the pantry of Harmon’s Salt Lake City restaurant.
Granting that all of the colonel’s seasonings could be found at any well-stocked A&P, the task of identifying them remains formidable. There are approximately forty herbs, spices, and other seasonings available in American supermarkets and gourmet stores. Of these, perhaps twenty or thirty are common enough to “stand on everybody’s shelf,” figuratively speaking, and to have been in use at Sanders’ roadside cafe. The use of eleven different seasonings is not remarkable. The standard “poultry seasoning” of the food industry has ten herbs and spices: pepper, ginger, mace, allspice, cloves, marjoram, nutmeg, thyme, savory, and sage.
In 1974 Esquire magazine asked four food writers to try Kentucky Fried Chicken and offer their analyses. There was little consensus.
James Beard found the chicken “well seasoned with salt”; with less assurance, he thought he detected monosodium glutamate, cayenne pepper, and cinnamon. Roy Andries de Groot was “reasonably sure of minuscule amounts” of rosemary, savory, tarragon, thyme, pepper, turmeric, and cinnamon. He also noted salt, monosodium glutamate, “tiny globules of what might be honey or brown sugar,” and “the faintest touch of both almond and mint.” Waverly Root concluded that the chicken was “dunked in some sort of batter” containing flour, milk, and perhaps egg. Root was certain only of salt and pepper in the seasoning; he guessed that celery salt, caraway, chili powder, and/or horseradish might be present. James Villas doubted that any milk or egg was used in the coating and further doubted that there were eleven herbs and spices. He detected only cinnamon and cloves. Villas argued that the secret of Kentucky Fried Chicken is sugar: “Real fried chicken is not sweet; this is.” The sugar, he suspected, was added to the “very light and very safe and very healthy cooking oil.”
Another analysis comes from Gloria Pitzer, a St. Clair, Michigan, homemaker and newsletter publisher. Pitzer’s Secret Recipe Report attempts to duplicate the recipes of popular processed foods for home use. In the late 1970s, Pitzer devised three recipes for facsimile Kentucky Fried Chicken.
The recipes call for the chicken pieces to be fried in a pan or deep fryer until brown and then transferred to an oven for thirty to thirty-five minutes’ additional cooking. One-fourth to one-half inch of water in the baking pan keeps the chicken moist in the oven. In Pitzer’s first recipe, the chicken is seasoned with a marinade made from commercial Italian salad dressing mix, flour salt, lemon juice, and oil.
Pitzer’s second and third recipes use eleven herbs and spices each. The second, said to simulate spicy-crispy Kentucky Fried Chicken, requires garlic salt, onion powder, paprika, black pepper, allspice, sweet basil, oregano, sage, summer savory (substitution: parsley flakes), ginger, and rosemary. All are mixed with flour and salt. Chicken pieces are dampened with beer or club soda, dredged in the flour/seasoning mix, and fried.
The third recipe uses a modified list of herbs and spices: rosemary, oregano, sage, ginger, marjoram, thyme, parsley, pepper, paprika, garlic salt, and onion salt. Three additional flavorings—brown sugar, powdered chicken bouillon, and Lipton Tomato Cup-a-Soup mix—supplement the herbs and spices. Pitzer’s recipes are the result of her own experimentation; she disavows any special knowledge of Kentucky Fried Chicken’s actual recipe.
As late as June 1967, Business Week magazine could claim that “only Sanders, Massey [then chairman of the board of the corporation], and the company’s food engineer know the recipe.” This was not strictly correct. Sanders’ wife, Claudia, certainly knew the recipe. It may be conjectured that other spouses, children, and business associates were told too.
Claudia Sanders was a former employee at the Sanders Café in Corbin, Kentucky. In 1948 she became Sanders’ second wife. Interstate 75 diverted the tourist traffic from the Sanders motel/restaurant operation, forcing them to sell. The colonel took to the road at age sixty-six to promote his chicken franchise business. He had twenty-five white suits, always traveled with a pressure cooker and a bag of seasonings in the back seat of his Packard, and ate his chicken three to five times a week. Claudia stayed at home, mixed the secret seasonings, and sent them to franchisees. The colonel sold the business—too soon, too cheaply—in 1964, retaining the Canadian operation. He spent his last years praising the Lord and cursing the Heublein Corporation, which purchased the business from Sanders’ buyers. Harland Sanders died in 1980 at the age of ninety. Claudia is proprietor of Claudia Sanders’ Dinner House in Shelbyville, Kentucky.
It is hard to believe that the children weren’t let in on the secret recipe. Sanders had two, both by his first marriage. At least one, Margaret, played a crucial role in the business by coming up with the idea of take-out service. For this Sanders gave her the franchise to the state of Florida. Margaret Sanders now lives in Palm Springs; sister Mildred Ruggles lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
The secret passed out of the family in 1964, when Sanders sold Kentucky Fried Chicken to a three-man syndicate for $2 million. Heading the syndicate was Jack C. Massey, a Nashville financier who had become bored with early retirement in Florida. Massey knew the secret, and so did food engineer Art Pelster. Pelster, originally an aerospace engineer, was in charge of mixing up the seasonings and refining the cooking method. He invented and patented several new types of frying and heating equipment for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Seven years after Massey’s group bought the company, it was sold to Heublein, Inc.—purveyors of Smirnoff vodka, Al steak sauce, Snap-E-Tom tomato cocktail, Beaulieu Vineyard wines, Ortega Mexican food, and Arrow liqueurs—for a reported $287 million.
It is uncertain if Massey’s two partners knew the recipe. One, Utah franchisee Leon “Pete” Harmon, seems to have had little role in day-to-day management. The other partner was attorney John Y. Brown, Jr. Brown helped convince Sanders to sell. After the sale, Massey groomed Brown to succeed him, and it seems a reasonable conjecture that Massey told Brown the secret recipe. Brown replaced Massey as chief executive officer and served as chairman of the board after the Heublein acquisition. (Massey left the company, reportedly after a tiff with Brown.) Profits from the sale to Heublein helped finance Brown’s late, successful entry in the 1979 Kentucky gubernatorial race. Young, bright, and skillful at answering charges that he swindled an old man out of a chicken business, Brown is said to have higher political ambitions. (“Hell, governing Kentucky is easier than running Kentucky Fried Chicken,” he told the press. “There’s no competition.”)
So the chain of initiates grew. If Brown knows the secret recipe, wouldn’t he have told his wife, Phyllis George? Perhaps. A much-touted secret recipe might be more interesting to spouses, relatives, and friends than the average trade secret. A dozen or more people may now know the secret recipe, many of them not directly connected with the Kentucky Fried Chicken Corporation.
If so, they’ve been circumspect. No one has come forward to reveal the secret recipe.
Big Secrets selected a large college near a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. Advertisements asking that Kentucky Fried Chicken employees respond were placed in a student newspaper and on campus bulletin boards. Interviews with respondents revealed how the chicken is prepared. In essence, the descriptions agreed with Sanders’ 1966 patent for a “process of producing fried chicken under pressure” (no. 3,245,800; copies available from the U.S. Patent Office).
The patent, of course, does not tell what seasonings are used. None of the respondents to the ads knew what seasonings are in the coating mix. Nor had they heard any rumors. But one respondent supplied a sample of the coating mix: a pungent-smelling white powder with black and tan flecks.
On the basis of Kroc’s contention that any laboratory could tell what’s in the mix, a food laboratory was consulted. It refused to do an analysis after hearing where the sample had come from. A second laboratory agreed to do an analysis. Approximately one cup of coating mix was sent for testing. The laboratory was asked to do a qualitative analysis—to identify everything in the sample, but not to worry about determining exact proportions. A list of likely herbs and spices compiled from Pitzer’s recipes, the Esquire article, and the ingredients of the standard poultry seasoning was supplied as a starting point.
Based on the interviews, Sanders’ patent, and the lab results, the secret recipe goes roughly like this:
Chickens weighing between 2¼ and 2½ pounds are preferred. They are cut into eight to ten pieces. What makes the Kentucky Fried Chicken recipe different from most others is that the quantity of chicken must be geared to the amount and temperature of the oil. If you try cooking just one piece of chicken in the usual amount of oil at the usual temperature, you get a cinder. This is why Sanders’ method has not been duplicated widely at home.
For the typical five-pound batch cited in the patent, about eight quarts of oil at 400° F is needed. Sanders reasons in the patent description as follows: Chicken cooked by ordinary means tends to lose its natural moisture before the meat is fully done. Chicken tends to be undercooked or dried out. The obvious remedy is to cook the chicken in a watery liquid. Then the chicken looks and tastes “boiled.” Furthermore, if a browned coating is desired, it often requires higher temperatures or longer cooking times than is appropriate for the chicken proper.
Sanders’ solution is to start the cooking process at about 400° F—a high temperature that quickly browns the coating. A pressure cooker supplied with an air hose and pump is used. Continued cooking at 400 ° would incinerate the chicken, but the cold chicken and the generation of steam from the moisture in the coating lower the temperature of the cooking fat to about 250° F in a minute or two. The heating elements are then turned down to maintain a 250° F temperature throughout the remainder of the cooking cycle.
Meanwhile, the moisture boiling out of the chicken builds up the pressure in the closed vessel. If the various quantities have been measured correctly, a pressure of about fifteen pounds per square inch (above atmospheric pressure) is created. This raises the boiling point of water, and thus the actual cooking temperature of the moist chicken meat, to about 250 ° F. Under these conditions, chicken cooks two to ten times faster than in conventional cooking. The steam pressure prevents any further loss of moisture. If for some reason the steam pressure is not quite fifteen pounds per square inch, the air pump attached to the cooker makes up the difference. The total cooking time, including the browning phase, is about ten minutes. Then the pressure is released and the chicken is drained and stored in a warming oven (at about 160 °F) until purchase.
There is no batter as such. The chicken pieces are “immersed in a dip made of skimmed or reconstituted skimmed milk and wholeeggs (approximately eight per gallon of milk),” explains Sanders in his patent. “The dipped pieces are then rolled in flour to which has been added salt and other seasoning ingredients” and fried.
The seasonings, the most carefully guarded part of the Kentucky Fried Chicken recipe, yielded a surprise. The sample of coating mix was found to contain four and only four ingredients: flour, salt, monosodium glutamate, and black pepper. There were no eleven herbs and spices—no herbs at all, in fact. There was no sugar.
All the common herbs and spices can be identified unequivocally by trained personnel. Had there been so much as a goodsized grain or two of basil or nutmeg anywhere in the cup’s worth of mix tested, it should have been detected, according to the director of the laboratory. Nothing was found in the sample that couldn’t be identified.
The Kentucky Fried Chicken employees interviewed denied that anything was added to the chicken at any other stage in the cooking process—the seasonings in the coating mix are the only seasonings. This agrees with Sanders’ own description of the cooking process in his patent. If the sample of coating mix tested was representative (and the company prides itself on the uniformity of its product), there seems to be no escaping the conclusion that there are no eleven herbs and spices. The real secret of Kentucky Fried Chicken, it seems, is simple and aimed dead center at the American palate: pepper and MSG.
It is possible that someone throws a pinch of each of the “missing” herbs and spices into the company seasoning vat every now and then. But if so, it seems that not a grain of anything other than pepper and MSG found its way into the sample tested, nor would it have found its way into any chicken made from the sample. (The sample should have been enough to coat a dozen or more pieces.) It seems presumptuous to claim eleven herbs and spices if the average piece of chicken does not contain a trace of each.
Maybe the colonel’s original recipe had an honest eleven herbs and spices and the recipe was changed after he sold the company. There is certainly precedent for such tinkering. Prior to 1964, the
Kentucky Fried Chicken gravy was pure ambrosia—“so good you can throw the chicken away and eat the gravy,” boasted the colonel. But the new owners decided the gravy recipe was too labor-intensive for a fast-food operation and changed it. The result, charged Sanders, was “wallpaper paste.” Kentucky Fried Chicken gravy remains a mediocre product, while the colonel’s gravy recipe is presumably locked away, unused, in a company vault.
In all fairness, a chicken recipe with eleven seasonings probably has deadwood. If there was much pepper and MSG in the original recipe, they may have drowned out any subtler seasonings anyway.