Paula Patton Finally Responded to the Internet’s Uproar Over Her Family’s Fried Chicken Recipe

Paula Patton caused quite a stir this week when a cooking demonstration she shared online in March went viral. In the video, the actress very sweetly and enthusiastically shared her mother’s recipe for fried chicken.

All seemed well at first as Patton began displaying her ingredients: pre-cleaned chicken wings, avocado oil, Lawry’s seasoning salt, organic pepper, organic paprika, and Frank’s Red Hot Sauce “for later.” She then proceeded to show off her cleaning technique and after that step, many of her followers were left mouths agape at what came next.

Her next step was to place a large amount of flour in her ziptop bags, then proceed to drop the pieces of chicken into the flour to coat them. She repeated that process several times, sharing that she was cooking 138 chicken wings for her son’s school. The main cause of the online chatter was that, as you may have noticed, there’s been no mention of any seasoning thus far in the recipe.

It wasn’t until after heating her oil and adding the first batch of wings that Patton proceeded to add her seasoning salt, pepper, and paprika, making sure to season each piece of chicken on one side.

While the actress’ tutorial video garnered over 12,000 likes and more than 260,000 views, the internet has track and field Olympian Ashley Spencer to thank for bringing what Paula said is her mother’s “world famous” fried chicken to the masses. Spencer re-shared the video to her TikTok feed, adding her own comedic commentary along the way. “In the grease?” she exclaimed in the remixed clip. “Your mama did this? You’re seasoning grease. The spices fell off in the grease! Look at the grease!”

On Wednesday, a day after Ashley shared her quizzical post, which has since garnered over a million plays, Patton returned online to respond to the criticism. And she did so just as sweetly and genuinely as she had shared her family recipe.

“I just wanted to respond and say listen, I get it, it might look crazy, it is the way we do it. My mom taught me it, it’s my mom’s recipe,” she said after telling fans that she’d found out about the commotion after waking up on vacation in Mexico with her son. “It’s all good because everybody’s got their own way of making things.”

“And I’ll take suggestions, I’ll make a new kind of fried chicken,” Paula added. “But I’m gonna always make my mom’s chicken the way she did it. We put the seasoning in the oil and all that. It’s just the way we do it.”

What are your thoughts about this method for frying chicken? Is it something you would do/have done?