Wine & Food | Professor Bainbridge

The KFC Secret

The LA Times on Kentucky Fried Chicken’s supposed secret:

Colonel Harland Sanders’ handwritten recipe of 11 herbs and spices was removed Tuesday from safekeeping at KFC’s corporate offices for the first time in decades. The temporary relocation is allowing KFC to revamp security around a yellowing sheet of paper that contains one of the country’s most famous corporate secrets. ...

So important is the 68-year-old concoction that coats the chain’s Original Recipe chicken that only two company executives at any time have access to it. The company refuses to release their names or titles, and it uses multiple suppliers who produce and blend the ingredients but know only a part of the entire contents.

KFC executives said they decided to upgrade security after retrieving the recipe amid preparations to add a new line of Original Recipe chicken strips.

The recipe has been stashed at the company headquarters for decades, and for more than 20 years has been tucked away in a filing cabinet equipped with two combination locks. To reach the cabinet, the keepers of the recipe would first open up a vault and unlock three locks on a door that stood in front of the cabinet.

What a load of crap. The KFC secret recipe in fact is one of the worst kept secrets in food. Those 11 herbs and spices? Everybody knows they’re the same herbs and spices as are in Good Seasons’ dry Italian salad dress mix. Indeed, Sanders supposedly used that mix in his original recipe!

Update: Deven Desai has a fun post on the topic, complete with videos.

Posted on Tuesday, September 09 2008 | Permalink

Sure, but Good Seasons keeps their recipe on an completely crumbled sheet of paper that was eaten by a goat and pooped into a sealed bank vault. So that doesn’t help.

Posted by mph on 09/09 at 09:17 PM

I wonder if the recipe also specifies pressure-frying (at too low a temperature) in a mixture of rancid lard and whatever vegetable oil happens to be handy after being carefully “seasoned” with rat droppings and insects? It seems to me that any secret recipe needs to include the whole secret…

Gee, have you figured out that I’m no fan of KFC?

Posted by C.E. Petit on 09/10 at 10:02 AM

I tried the original recipe strips with my brother just the other day. I have to say, while their flavor packs more of a wallop than normal strips, I prefer the normal ones. Pepper was especially dominant in the strips I received and they were unusually more dry than normal strips.

The moral of the story: they could have kept it in the ORIGINAL vault and not let me down with this seasoning cross-over scheme.

Posted by Dylan on 09/10 at 10:27 PM

I love KFC or Kentucky as my friend Clarence likes to call them. I have been eating there for almost 50 years now. I remember when they made there mashed potatoes by hand. I wish those days were back. No to long ago the so called experts where predicting there demise do to their method of cooking, which of course it is fried. But then came along the Asian markets, especially China and the franchise exploded. I am from Miami and now spend quit a bit of time each year in Thailand. I wonder how many people know they adjust the original recipe according to the taste and buying patterns of the particular market they are in. The original receipt in Thailand is not the same you would get in the US nor is the same you receive in China.

Posted by Bill on 09/13 at 08:13 PM

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