Harlan Sanders worked for years to get the cooking process right and the patented cooker is far more important to the KFC legacy than the 11 herbs and spices myth.
In a nutshell, the problem with frying chicken is that if you cook it at too high a heat it’s crispy outside and dried out inside. If you cook it at too low a temperature, it’s soggy outside but moist inside.
Sanders’ solution was to cook the chicken at a very high temperature initially and then lower the temperature. In addition, the cooker is under pressure so that water in the chicken can get up well above the usual boiling point of water.
The flour coating is there to dry out the skin of the chicken so that by the time it hits the fryer there’s very little water content in it. The temperature of the oil when the chicken first goes in cooks the skin very fast. After that, the sheer volume of the chicken lowers the fat temperature so that it doesn’t dry out the meat, but the water in the meat, superheated, gives the chicken a texture that doesn’t make it taste boiled.
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