From ice cream to beer: why everything is being flavoured with fried chicken

The fast food favourite has emerged as an oddball food trend over the last few years, much to the delight of enthusiastic chicken heads.

The world of fried chicken has included bizarre flavour combinations ever since poultry was first hoisted on to a waffle and doused with syrup. But, in general, even the most outré lover of deep-fried fowl has not been keen on it lurking inside their beer or nestling greasily inside their dessert.

That appears to have changed. Last month, two craft beer companies – New York’s Evil Twin and Virginia’s Veil Brewing Co – unveiled a collaborative beer called “Fried Fried Chicken Chicken” whose delicate flavour stems from trays of takeaway chicken added during the brewing process. Despite not tasting like fried poultry – the amount of meat added to the beer is less than 4% of the total contents – it nonetheless garnered enthusiastic worldwide press coverage, with excited chicken heads buying it in such quantity that it sold out in two days.

Eateries have also started using fried chicken as a dessert ingredient. This month, London-based fried chicken restaurant Ma’ Plucker introduced an afternoon tea featuring a trio of “fried chicken doughnuts” – one of which teams bacon, peanut butter and “Elvis fried chicken” with a jam-filled mini doughnut. Washington DC’s Bantam King restaurant has also tried pushing chicken’s boundaries by creating a “Fried Chicken Skin Ice Cream Sandwich”. The combination of fried chicken skin atop two scoops of vanilla ice-cream and a cinnamon-sugar mixture prompted praise from the Washington Post, which called it “the creamiest cream of chicken soup, but in semisolid form”. Which is meant to be a compliment, even if it doesn’t exactly scream: “Mmm, dessert!”