KFC
KFC Original Recipe Fried Chicken Copycat
Buttermilk brine, a double dredge with a rest, and controlled shallow frying. Honest about the one thing a home kitch…
How to Make KFC 11 Herbs and Spices Seasoning at Home
The Eleven Herbs and Spices, Weighed Out and Explained
The blend, not a guess at it - and an honest account of which ingredients are doing the work.
AI-generated illustration created for food.fast. It is not photographic evidence of a prepared batch.
In 2016 a reporter visiting Harland Sanders' nephew was shown a handwritten list on the back of a family will, naming eleven spices with quantities. The company has never confirmed it and has never quite denied it either. What can be said is that cooks have been making it for a decade now and it produces something extremely close to the thing in the bucket.
This is that list, adjusted in two places after making it repeatedly. The published version calls for a quantity of white pepper that overwhelms everything else when scaled to a domestic batch, and it omits the monosodium glutamate that is unambiguously in the commercial product - it is on the ingredient label in every market that publishes one.
Both of those changes are argued for below rather than slipped in. What is not adjusted is the basic shape: this is a blend dominated by white pepper and paprika, with salt, and everything else playing a supporting role.
How this page shows its working
The method gives quantities, timings and observable cues rather than asking you to guess. The 4 cases in If it goes wrong explain likely causes and corrective action; 2 ingredient notes explain choices that materially affect the result.
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White pepper is the note you cannot place, and there is no substitute
If you have ever eaten fried chicken from this chain and been unable to name what makes it taste like that, it is white pepper. Not black - white.
They come from the same plant and they are not the same spice. Black pepper is the whole unripe berry dried with its skin on, which brings the bright, piney top notes. White pepper is the ripe berry with the outer layer removed by soaking, which ferments it slightly. The result is musty, earthy, faintly barnyard, and completely distinctive.
Swap in black pepper and you get seasoned fried chicken that tastes good and does not taste like this. It is the single most important ingredient in the blend and it is the one most often substituted, because a lot of kitchens do not keep it.
Buy it ground rather than whole unless you have a spice grinder that can handle a small quantity - white peppercorns are hard and a pestle and mortar makes heavy work of them.
The MSG question, answered plainly
Monosodium glutamate is in the commercial product. It appears on KFC's published ingredient lists. A recipe that leaves it out and does not mention it is the reason a lot of home versions taste correct but hollow - all the aromatics are present and the savoury backbone is not.
It is an ordinary ingredient. It is sold as Accent in the US, as Aji-no-moto in most Asian supermarkets, and simply as MSG or "flavour enhancer" elsewhere, and it costs very little. The health concerns that attached to it in the 1970s have not held up in controlled testing, and the same glutamates occur naturally in parmesan, tomatoes, mushrooms and soy sauce.
If you would rather not use it, replace the two teaspoons with two teaspoons of nutritional yeast plus an extra half teaspoon of salt. That gets you roughly seventy per cent of the way and the blend is still worth making. It is not the same and this page is not going to pretend it is.
Why the proportions here differ from the list in the newspaper photograph
The handwritten list, taken literally, gives three tablespoons of white pepper against two tablespoons of paprika in a blend of about two-thirds of a cup. At that ratio white pepper is not a background note, it is the entire experience, and the chicken is genuinely unpleasant to eat.
The most likely explanation is that the quantities were written for a commercial batch where the blend is cut into a much larger volume of flour than a home cook would use - the original note specifies mixing it into two cups of flour, which is a far higher seasoning-to-flour ratio than the restaurant actually runs.
So this version pulls the white pepper back to two tablespoons and raises the paprika to two and a half. The result is a blend where the white pepper is unmistakably the lead and is not the only thing you can taste. Everything else is proportionally as written.
Celery salt and garlic salt are salts, and that is why there is less plain salt than you expect
Between the celery salt, the garlic salt and the three tablespoons of fine salt, this blend is about a third salt by volume. That is correct - it is designed to season two kilos of flour, most of which ends up in the fryer rather than on the chicken. Do not taste the blend neat and conclude it is too salty; taste it in the flour.
Buy the herbs fresh, and this is where a home blend beats the commercial one
Dried thyme, basil and oregano lose most of their volatile oils within a year of opening. A commercial blend has been mixed, shipped and stored; yours was mixed this morning. If your jars have been open since last summer, replace them - it costs a few pounds and it is the difference between a good blend and a dusty one.
How to make it, step by step
Blend it
-
Crush the dried herbs between your palms as they go in
Thyme, basil and oregano come in leaf pieces that will sit separately in the jar and end up unevenly distributed. Rubbing them between your hands as you add them breaks them down and releases the oils - you will smell the difference immediately.
About 2 min -
Add everything else and whisk, do not shake
Salt is heavy, paprika is light, and dried herbs are lighter still. Shaking a jar sorts them by density rather than mixing them. Whisk in a bowl for a full thirty seconds until the colour is completely uniform.
TipIf you can still see distinct specks of white pepper against the paprika, keep going.About 2 min -
Jar it and label it with the date
Airtight, out of direct light. The date matters because this is noticeably better in its first three months and merely fine after six.
About 1 min
How much of this goes into how much flour
This is the question the blend is actually for, and getting it wrong in either direction is the most common way people are disappointed by an otherwise correct spice mix.
The working ratio is 3 tablespoons of blend to 2 cups (250 g) of plain flour. That is the dredge for roughly one whole chicken cut into eight pieces.
A full batch of this recipe - about 95 g - seasons around 2 kg of flour, which is eight chickens' worth. That sounds excessive until you remember the blend keeps for six months and the flour dredge does not, so you make the blend once and the dredge each time.
Two further notes on the dredge itself, which are covered fully on the fried chicken recipe:
- Add 1 teaspoon of baking powder per 2 cups of flour. It is not part of the spice blend but it is part of the crust, and it is what gives the craggy texture.
- The dredge is used once and thrown away. Flour that has had raw chicken in it is not reusable.
Everything else this blend is good on
It was designed for chicken and it is not limited to it:
- Roast potatoes, tossed in a tablespoon with the oil before they go in.
- Popcorn, which sounds odd and is excellent - a teaspoon while it is still warm and greasy.
- Chips and wedges, in place of salt.
- Halloumi or firm tofu, dredged in seasoned flour and shallow fried, which is the vegetarian route to the same flavour.
- Roast chicken, rubbed under the skin with softened butter.
What it is not good on is anything delicate. The white pepper flattens fish and fights with anything sweet.
The blend by weight, for anyone scaling it properly
| Ingredient | Spoons | Grams | % of blend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fine salt | 3 tbsp | 54 g | 28% |
| Sweet paprika | 2½ tbsp | 17 g | 9% |
| White pepper | 2 tbsp | 15 g | 8% |
| Celery salt | 1 tbsp | 15 g | 8% |
| Garlic salt | 1 tbsp | 14 g | 7% |
| Ground ginger | 1 tbsp | 5.5 g | 3% |
| Mustard powder | 1 tbsp | 6 g | 3% |
| Dried thyme | 1 tbsp | 2.6 g | 1.4% |
| Dried basil | 1 tbsp | 2.6 g | 1.4% |
| Black pepper | 2 tsp | 5 g | 2.6% |
| MSG | 2 tsp | 9 g | 4.7% |
| Dried oregano | 1 tsp | 1 g | 0.5% |
Dredge quantities at each batch size
| Batch | Blend made | Flour it seasons | Chickens | Keeps |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1X | 95 g | 2 kg | 8 | 6 months |
| 2X | 190 g | 4 kg | 16 | 6 months |
| 4X | 380 g | 8 kg | 32 | 6 months, two jars |
| 8X | 760 g | 16 kg | 64 | only if you are catering |
Ways to change it once you have made it once
Hot and spicy
Add 2 tsp of cayenne and 1 tsp of chilli powder to the batch. This is roughly the shape of the chain's hot version, though theirs carries the heat in a separate coating.
Lower salt
Drop the fine salt to 1½ tbsp and use celery seed rather than celery salt, and garlic powder rather than garlic salt. The blend loses about 40 per cent of its sodium and you season the chicken directly instead.
Grinder-fresh
Toast whole white and black peppercorns and coriander seed in a dry pan for 90 seconds, cool, then grind. This is a genuinely better blend than anything commercial and takes ten extra minutes.
What went wrong, and how to fix it
Each entry names a likely cause as well as a correction, so the advice remains useful when equipment, ingredients or batch size differ.
The chicken tastes overwhelmingly of pepper
- Why it happened
- Either black pepper used in place of white, or too much blend in the flour.
- What to do
- Check the ratio - 3 tablespoons to 2 cups of flour, not more. And check the jar: black pepper in place of white is the most common swap and it dominates.
It tastes flat, like something is missing
- Why it happened
- Almost certainly the MSG, or old dried herbs.
- What to do
- Add the MSG, or replace the thyme and basil if they have been open more than a year.
The spices separated in the jar
- Why it happened
- Shaken rather than whisked, or stored somewhere with vibration.
- What to do
- Tip it into a bowl and whisk again. Shaking will not fix it - shaking is what caused it.
It is much too salty on its own
- Why it happened
- Nothing. It is supposed to be.
- What to do
- This blend is a flour seasoning, not a table seasoning. Taste it in the dredge, not neat.
Questions people actually ask about this recipe
Is this the real KFC recipe?
It is based on the handwritten list published in 2016, adjusted where making it repeatedly showed the proportions did not work at domestic scale. KFC has never confirmed that list. What we can say is that this blend produces chicken that tastes like the thing in the bucket.
Do I have to use MSG?
No, but it is in the commercial product and leaving it out is the main reason home versions taste hollow. The substitute is 2 tsp nutritional yeast plus ½ tsp extra salt.
Can I use black pepper instead of white?
You can make good fried chicken that way. You cannot make this. White pepper is the defining note.
How long does the blend keep?
Six months sealed and out of light, and it is noticeably better in the first three.
How much do I use per chicken?
Three tablespoons of blend to two cups of plain flour, which dredges one chicken in eight pieces.
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