Business Insider
ChickenShack
It's testing a tasty fried chicken sandwich at three Brooklyn locations this summer. The company won't say whether or not it plans to expand the chicken to its 68 other locations around the world.
We tried the sandwich, which just went on sale today, at one of the Shake Shacks in Brooklyn. While there, we met Mark Rosati, the head of culinary operations for Shake Shack.
Rosati was there, along with Shake Shack's VP of marketing to get a sense of what people thought of the sandwich. (Our verdict: delish.)
We asked him about the development of the sandwich. He said it was two years in the making. When he started working on it, he didn't even have a vision for what it would be. He just landed on chicken, which he says is "having a moment" right now.
When we asked him about Shake Shack's sandwich, he gave us a detailed breakdown of exactly what he was going for with the sandwich. Here's Rosati:
I know a lot of people think that chicken breast can be dry, but I think if it's cooked properly it can be very juicy and very flavorful.
We wanted to give the chicken a lot of structure. Chicken is a blank canvas, that's why it's exciting for me to work with it. Beef can be so big and bold and has its own unique flavors that it can take a lot of different sauces and still stand out.
Chicken really doesn't stand out. It's a blank canvas. So I wanted to add some classic southern inspired flavors to it.
At the same time, I wanted to echo the buttermilk flavor in the sauce. So, I played with a lot of different flavors and tried a lot of different hot sauces and what I love best is the buttermilk provides a tanginess and the pickles provide that vinegary note to cut through the richness and keep it from being too heavy.
The lettuce, too, is doing something similar. It's adding crunch, to give you a refreshing note. Because everything else can be very flavorful, lettuce is like, "I'm not trying to do anything but be refreshing here, guys! I'm not trying to compete." If it wasn't on there, you'd notice something was missing.
So all these different elements we thought long and hard about to try create something that's just perfect.
Breading is classic. A little bit of pepper, a little bit of cayenne, a little bit of smoke paprika, nothing too crazy. We try to create classic comfort food.