Chicken Fried Steak
There’s more than one way to cook a chicken fried steak, that Texan creation of cube steak pounded out thin and tender, dipped in a buttermilk batter, and fried until it forms a thick, crunchy crust. Our favorite one comes from the Finish Line Café in Paradise, Texas, where they serve it smothered in a thick cream gravy.
2 cups plus 3 tbsp. flour
2 tsp. paprika Freshly ground black pepper and kosher salt, to taste
1 cup buttermilk
1 tsp. Tabasco, plus more to taste
1 egg
4 4-6-oz. cube steaks, pounded to ¼ -inch thickness Canola oil, for frying
3 tbsp. unsalted butter
2 cups milk
Serves 4
1. Heat the oven to 200°F. Put a baking sheet fitted with a rack inside. In a shallow dish, whisk together 2 cups flour, paprika, pepper, and salt. In another dish, whisk together buttermilk, 1 tsp. Tabasco, and egg. Season steaks with salt and pepper. Working with 1 steak at a time, dredge in flour mixture, then in egg mixture, and again in flour; shake off excess. Transfer to a plate.
2. Pour oil into a 12-inch cast-iron skillet to a depth of ½ inch; heat over medium-high heat until a deep-fry thermometer reads 320°F. Working in 2 batches, fry steaks, flipping once, until golden brown, 6-8 minutes. Place steaks on rack in oven to keep warm.
3. Melt butter in a 2-qt. saucepan over medium-high heat. Whisk in remaining flour; cook until golden, 1-2 minutes. Whisk in milk; cook, whisking, until thick. Season with Tabasco and salt and pepper. Serve steaks with gravy.
Texas Classic
The best chicken fried steak in Paradise, Texas, looks like it’s covered in corn flakes and comes with peppery cream gravy. I’m talking about the one served at a place called the Finish Line Café. What brought me to the Finish Line was not just a deep love for CFS (as the dish is often called) but also a strong hunch. Driving around the state researching CFS, I’d begun to suspect that you could get a great version in just about any small-town café west of Dallas and north of Waco—an area of Texas I’d come to dub the Chicken Fried Steak Belt. I decided to test this theory by picking a random town along my planned route. Paradise (population 519) sounded like as good a spot as any, and the Finish Line Café was the most popular place in town.
There are three categories of CFS in Texas—German, Cowboy, and Southern—and each has its proponents who believe it’s the original. According to Jane and Michael Stern’s book Eat Your Way Across the U.S.A., “chicken fried steak was a Depression-era invention of Hill Country German-Texans.” German-style CFS is made of pounded-thin beef cube steak, dredged in bread crumbs or cracker meal and fried like schnitzel. The cowboy version is often called pan-fried steak in West Texas, where it’s the most popular style. It’s said that chuckwagon cooks, who tenderized their steaks by beating them with anything handy, would simply dredge them in flour before frying them to a crisp. Southern-style CFS, has a thick, crunchy buttermilk batter crust that looks like the coating on a piece of fried chicken; this is the style most common in East Texas, and it was the style that I became smitten with at the Finish Line.
The dish, prepared from a family recipe, was cooked by Marie Brown, the matriarch of the three generations who run the café (her daughter, Rayanne Gentry, is pictured). Dredged in seasoned flour, then in a batter of eggs and buttermilk, then in the flour again, Marie’s steak emerged from the kitchen with an awesome, ripply crust that shattered when I bit through to the tender steak. This was the ultimate CFS: I was in paradise, indeed.
.—Robb Walsh
