The Chronicle Herald
Chicken Fried Steak at Fid Resto
by Bill Spurr
For Halifax chef Dennis Johnston, who made his reputation as one of Halifax’s finest chefs with dishes like cider braised rabbit and roasted monkfish, the addition of chicken fried steak to his menu at Fid Resto might seem incongruous.
But the most important word in Johnston’s vocabulary is local, and as long as he can buy his ingredients nearby, no food is too fancy or too plain. Besides, when he tried chicken fried steak for the first time while on a trip to Texas last year, he knew his customers would love it.
“It’s not very good for you, but it’s very good,” Johnston said. “I love the simplicity and the stick to your ribs appeal. The origins are interesting. It came from the German immigrants that moved to Texas, who arrived with their weiner schnitzel, and this is sort of, over time, a derivative of that.”
In Corpus Christi, Texas, being known for the best chicken fried steak is like serving the best poutine in Montreal or the top sushi in Vancouver; you can stake a reputation on it. Bubba’s Icehouse has won the city’s chicken fried steak contest the last eight years in a row.
“It’s a piece of meat that has been tenderized, breaded, battered, deep fried and served with cream gravy,” said Olivia Morgan, owner of Bubba’s, which goes through 400 orders a week, each one bigger than a dinner plate.
“It’s a beef cutlet, but what we think separates ours from everybody else is ours is not a frozen product. Everyone in Texas can get their hands on a frozen product that’s already pre-breaded. Ours come in fresh, twice a week, that’s how many we go through, and we batter and bread them ourselves.”
Down the road at Blackbeard’s on the Beach, cook John Novier explains that all chicken fried steak is pounded thin to prevent it from burning on the outside before the inside is cooked. That’s true whether the meat in question is ground chuck formed into a cutlet, or something higher in quality.
“We use a hand-cut rib-eye we cut from a rib roll, dip it in flour, buttermilk, more flour — a little seasoning on the steak before you flour it — then fry it,” said Novier. “Some chicken fried steaks are made from ground meat so you have to cook those all the way through. With the rib-eyes, technically you don’t have to but we usually cook them all the way. I don’t know if rib-eye is necessarily the best cut; it’s meant more for something cheap that you can batter and fry, but people like the rib-eyes, it has good appeal so that’s why we do it.”
Back in Halifax, Johnston knew most of his customers would be tasting chicken fried steak for the first time, so he never considered using any sort of cutlet or ground meat.
