Here's What Makes Popeyes Chicken Taste So Good

It's no secret that Popeyes chicken is some of the best in the game. Slightly more secretive, however, are the exact steps it takes to make its chicken so darn delicious. Like KFC and its 11 herbs and spices, Popeyes keeps the exact recipe for its juicy, flavorful meat close to its chest. After all, if we all knew how to whip up something that tasty for ourselves, what would be the point of traipsing out to the drive-thru or DoorDashing Popeyes chicken wings to our doorstep?

But that doesn't mean Popeyes hasn't let the odd tidbit of information slip about its chicken over the years. While we may not have a step-by-step guide on how to recreate the chicken sandwich so good that it kicked off the chicken sandwich wars, we do know a fair few of the fast food chain's tastiest secrets. Ever wondered what tips and tricks the chain uses to give its chicken that thick, crunchy coating or why Popeyes products taste so distinctive compared to the food of its rivals? From how it sources its chicken to the ins and outs of its marination process, here's what makes Popeyes chicken taste so good.

Your chicken goes through a lengthy process before it hits your plate (or, to be more accurate, your cardboard carryout container). When it comes to flavor, the most important step is, of course, the seasoning. Popeyes has never made its exact recipe public, but it has teased the fact that it's packed with Louisiana herbs and spices.

The internet being the internet, plenty of foodies have done some sleuthing to try and figure this combo out for themselves. Copycat recipes for Popeyes' succulent chicken typically rely on some blend of cayenne pepper, garlic and onion powder, sage, and paprika. Some throw chipotle into the mix, too. It may take some experimentation to come up with a seasoning that's on par with what's used by the chain itself. Popeyes employees, however, don't have to prep this blend in-restaurant. The chain orders its seasoning from Diversified Foods and Seasonings, which was set up in 1984 by the restaurant's founder, Al Copeland, Sr., to ensure consistency across its many restaurants. Today, it provides everything from said seasoning to batters and breading to over 3,000 Popeyes restaurants nationwide.

If you've ever whipped up your own fried chicken at home, odds are you're familiar with the concept of marinating your meat in buttermilk. The acidity of buttermilk is used to tenderize the meat, which in turn improves the texture of the final product. It also helps to boost moisture, giving chicken that extra burst of juiciness. Considering Popeyes' proclivity for juicy chicken, it should come as no surprise that the chain utilizes the ingredient in its chicken prep process.

Back in 2020, Amy Alarcon, Vice President of Culinary Innovation at Popeyes, revealed that using buttermilk is one of her top tips for delicious chicken. The specifics of how Popeyes uses buttermilk are, again, top secret. The Popeyes website rather mysteriously claims that its chicken is "hand battered and breaded in our buttermilk system." What exactly a buttermilk system entails, we're not too sure. Most copycat recipes, however, recommend marinating your chicken in a buttermilk mixture for anywhere between an hour and 24 hours for maximum impact. If you want to give it a whirl for yourself, note that you may not even necessarily need to buy anything extra when you can easily make your own buttermilk at home.

A lengthy marination process is often the key to flavorful chicken, with Popeyes leaving its chicken to soak up flavor for as long as 12 hours at a time. In an effort to prove its dedication, the company even commissioned a long-exposure photography expert to shoot the entire 12-hour process in 2022. As per its former CEO Cheryl Bachelder, going the extra mile with marination is what gives Popeyes chicken its distinct deep flavor. "The first thing you notice about Popeyes is the marinade," she previously told The Advocate. "It's a real reddish, orange color. It sticks to the chicken, you see it all through the chicken, and that's where the flavor is."

If you ever try to replicate Popeyes chicken at home, you don't necessarily need to leave the chicken to marinate for the full 12 hours. Even just 15 minutes of marination in your chosen seasonings can make a difference in the flavor and moisture of chicken. Just try to avoid the temptation of flipping in the opposite direction. Marinating your chicken for too long is a common mistake that can actually ruin your chicken dishes.

Popeyes takes great pride in the level of care that goes into its fried chicken. In the kitchens of its stores nationwide, you can find employees hand-battering and hand-breading its chicken, giving every piece its trademark thick and crunchy exterior.

The chain itself hasn't explicitly broken down this process. Employees, however, have stepped in to share their experiences online, claiming that battering follows a few fairly standard steps. "They put the chicken [on] a huge screen and dip it in the batter and make sure each piece is nice and coated," explained one worker on Reddit. "After straining the chicken, they put them in a big bin of flour." The extra flour is then tapped off the meat, which is put into the fryer, with wings added in last.

A similar process is used for the chicken tenders. As per another Reddit user, the key difference is that the tenders are tossed in flour, then batter, and then flour for a second time. It's a useful technique to incorporate into your own kitchen if you ever attempt your own copycat Popeyes meal. Double dredging is a useful chicken prep step to ensure an indulgently thick outer shell, à la Popeyes itself.

When it comes to fast food, some draw a clear line between the restaurant chains that use frozen meat and those that don't. Popeyes falls into the latter category — for the most part, at least. The vast majority of the chain's meat is fresh, with employees claiming that it arrives at the store raw and un-breaded.

But there are exceptions. Employees have alleged on Reddit that while the bone-in chicken is fresh, its sandwich fillets and chicken tenders are often frozen and pre-breaded. The chain is open about the fact that the same was true of its chicken nuggets. When the chain introduced the nuggets to the menu in 2021, it spent a solid six months stockpiling frozen nuggets to avoid similar pitfalls to the rollout of its chicken sandwich. The latter famously sold out nationwide in less than a month, despite Popeyes theoretically supplying enough product to last from mid-August through to the end of September.

Fast food isn't exactly known for being light on salt. There are plenty of sandwiches out there with eye-watering amounts of sodium. Popeyes is one of them, with a single chicken sandwich containing a whopping 1,440 milligrams. Each individual chicken wing also contains 610 milligrams, while a chicken breast is packed with an astounding 1,230 milligrams.

While that isn't necessarily great from a nutritional perspective, it contributes a lot to the chicken's flavor, with even professional chefs sharing their admiration for Popeyes' proclivity for salt. "Popeyes has great fried chicken," James Beard Award-winning chef Ashley Christensen previously told Vice. "I like the level of salt in the chicken. They push it just enough. It's got a touch of spice to it. The meat is super juicy." Fellow James Beard Award-winner J. Kenji López-Alt was similarly passionate, telling the outlet, "They have the crust down perfect. The right level of craggliness. Very salty."

For some people, it's this saltiness that knocks Popeyes chicken off the top spot in their rankings of fast food chicken. However, there's no denying the role that it plays in boosting its flavor and making it the preferred choice for many fast food fanatics.

KFC crisps up the skin of its chicken in low linolenic soybean oil. Raising Cane's uses a soybean and canola oil blend, Slim Chickens sticks to purely soybean oil, and Chick-fil-A fries its chicken in fully refined peanut oil. In the case of Popeyes, its fried items — from fries to chicken — are cooked in beef tallow. Also known as beef drippings, beef tallow is rendered fat. It's solid at room temperature and is often used to add a meaty depth to fried foods. Some people even use it for skincare, although we're fairly sure that's not why Popeyes uses it to fry its products.

There's been some debate over whether beef tallow is healthier than the go-to oils typically used by fast food joints. Some people claim that cooking with tallow — which is almost entirely saturated fat — is the superior choice, despite many nutritionists suggesting otherwise. Of course, considering the nutritional values of the Popeyes menu, we're fairly sure that finding the healthiest way to fry its offerings wasn't the chain's top priority. Instead, it opted for the solution that enhanced both the flavor and texture of its fried chicken.

Several fast food chains opt to use pressure fryers to cook their chicken nowadays, including the likes of KFC and Chick-fil-A. While pressure frying may be speedier than traditional deep frying, Popeyes still opts to use the latter to perfect its über-crispy chicken wings, legs, thighs, and breasts. Deep frying tends to deliver that crunchy exterior for which Popeyes is so well known, while pressure frying prioritizes juiciness (to see that in action, just compare a piece of Popeyes chicken to KFC).

Once workers in the Popeyes kitchens are done battering the chicken and have patted off the excess coating, it's dropped into the deep fryer in an outward motion. According to an alleged employee detailing the process on Reddit, it takes roughly six minutes for the chicken to cook. If you're in the market for the freshest chicken possible over pieces that have sat out on the line, that same employee recommends requesting a specific number of wings, legs, thighs, or breasts. You may have to wait longer, but the reward is the hottest, crispiest chicken Popeyes has to offer.

When it comes to batter, quantity truly is quality at Popeyes. Each piece of chicken is loaded up with an extra-thick layer, which then crisps up during the frying process to give every bite that satisfying crunch. Former CEO Cheryl Bachelder explained the magic recipe of this batter to The Advocate. "Our chicken is dipped in an egg-and-flour batter before it's fried," she said. "That gives it a really crisp texture. There's more of [the batter] and it's crisper."

As Bachelder pointed out, it's this heavy hand with the batter that really helps Popeyes stand out from the crowd — which says a lot, considering the fact that she was once also the president of KFC and has since become a director for Chick-fil-A, too. "[KFC's] Original Recipe is deep fried in a pressure cooker, so it's got a soft coating on it, and today's customer likes a crisper coating," she noted. It's hard to replicate for yourself at home, but that hasn't stopped many Popeyes enthusiasts from trying, with some claiming that tips such as double-frying and giving the chicken time to sit in its thick layer of breading in the refrigerator can get you pretty close to something similar.

For a long time, monosodium glutamate (aka MSG) was the "bad guy" in the fast food industry. The additive is used primarily to enhance the flavor of various foods but a phenomenon known as "Chinese restaurant syndrome" led some to push for its removal due to a belief that it can induce headaches and other physical symptoms. Today, MSG is generally recognized as safe, with several big names in the industry using it to take everything from chips to chicken sandwiches to the next level — Popeyes included.

At the time of writing, MSG plays an important role in the chain's mouth-watering fried chicken. This is set to change in the near future. In 2022, Popeyes pushed back a self-imposed deadline to eliminate MSG from its products. While it originally planned to rid its products of artificial colors, flavors, or preservatives by the end of 2022, it claimed that this was easier said than done. "We expect to be on track to an all-clean menu nationwide by 2025," Popeyes told Bloomberg. "We had hoped to achieve this earlier, however our process of testing new ingredients and getting extensive guest feedback on recipe changes has been slowed down by a challenging supply-chain environment." In the meantime, it's certainly not the only chain that counts MSG as an ingredient. Chick-fil-A, KFC, and McDonald's all use MSG to some extent in at least one chicken product.