Yes, and the technique is not as complicated as it looks. The confusion comes from people treating it like spicy fried chicken, which it is not. Nashville hot chicken is fried chicken with a cayenne-oil paste applied after frying, not before. Get that sequencing right and everything else follows.
The One Step Most Home Cooks Get Wrong
Most “Nashville hot chicken” recipes you find online are lying to you. They mix cayenne into the flour dredge, fry the chicken, and call it hot chicken. What they’ve made is spicy fried chicken. The spice baked into the crust during frying loses potency, mellows out, and distributes evenly through the breading. The result tastes nothing like what Prince’s or Bolton’s serves.
The defining step is the post-fry paste. Immediately after the chicken comes out of the oil, you brush or paint it with a paste made from hot frying oil, cayenne, brown sugar, smoked paprika, chili powder, and garlic powder. The paste bonds with the hot, freshly fried skin. The capsaicin hits the surface directly, stays concentrated, and builds as you eat. That’s the experience. That’s what makes it Nashville-style.
The Full Process
Brine first, without skipping it. Pickle juice is standard. Mix pickle brine with buttermilk, submerge the chicken, and refrigerate for a minimum of two hours, up to overnight. The pickle juice creates that specific salty, slightly sour baseline that underlies the heat. Prince’s uses a pickle brine marinade as part of their traditional process, and it shows. Without it, you get dry chicken under a lot of spice.
Build a double-dredge that holds. The crust needs to survive the paste application without going soft. The fix is cornstarch and baking powder mixed into your flour. Cornstarch creates a lighter, crispier crust. Baking powder helps it stay that way. Dredge sequence: shake off excess brine, flour mixture, wet dip back into buttermilk and egg mixture, flour mixture again. Let the coated chicken rest on a wire rack for 15 to 30 minutes before frying. This drying period helps the crust bond to the chicken rather than sliding off in the oil.
Fry at 350°F in a cast iron skillet or Dutch oven. Don’t use fridge-cold chicken, which drops oil temperature fast and produces greasy, undercooked results. Let the chicken sit at room temperature for 20 minutes before frying. Batch-fry without crowding the pan. White meat (breasts, wings) needs to reach 160°F internally; dark meat (thighs, legs) is best at 175 to 190°F. Lower temperature for dark meat is safe but will be dry. Use a thermometer and don’t guess.
Make the paste while the oil is still hot. This is where most home cooks either rush or overthink it. Carefully ladle out about a half-cup of the hot frying oil into a bowl. Whisk in cayenne, brown sugar, smoked paprika, chili powder, garlic powder, and salt. The ratio is adjustable. Two tablespoons of cayenne produces something in the Mild range. Four tablespoons gets you to Medium. Five or more pushes into Hot. If you want more heat, let the cayenne settle to the bottom of the bowl and scoop from there. For less heat, skim from the top. The paste should be thick enough to coat a spoon but pourable enough to brush.
Paint the paste onto the chicken immediately while both the chicken and the paste are still hot. The heat helps the paste bind to the crust. Let it sit on a wire rack, not a paper towel. Paper towels trap steam and destroy the crust from the bottom.
Serve correctly. White sandwich bread, dill pickle chips on top. This is not decoration. The bread soaks up the paste drippings and becomes part of the eating experience. The pickles cut the fat and give your palate something to reset on between bites.
What You Can Control at Home That Restaurants Cannot
The best thing about making hot chicken at home is calibration. You can build a heat level tuned exactly to what you want without the social awkwardness of ordering Mild at a restaurant and feeling judged by the person behind the counter.
You can also experiment with the paste base. Traditional lard mixed with some of the frying oil creates a slightly different adhesion and mouthfeel than pure vegetable oil. If you can source lard, use half lard and half frying oil for something closer to how the original recipe worked.
Reheating Without Ruining It
Hot chicken is non-negotiable about temperature. Eat it immediately. If you have leftovers, reheat in a 375°F oven on a wire rack over a baking sheet, or in an air fryer. Never microwave it. The microwave steams the crust from inside and produces something close to hot chicken flavored mush. Budget Bytes, whose test kitchen is based in Nashville, confirms the oven method restores most of the crust texture.
The home version will not be identical to Prince’s or Bolton’s. Those restaurants have decades of refined technique, dialed-in equipment, and specific processes they don’t publish. But the home version, made correctly, is substantially better than what you get from a chain claiming “Nashville Hot” on their menu.
Sources
- Budget Bytes, Nashville Hot Chicken recipe with technique notes: https://www.budgetbytes.com/nashville-hot-chicken/
- ThermoWorks, temperature science for hot chicken: https://blog.thermoworks.com/nashville-hot-chicken/
- The Kitchn, Nashville-style hot chicken technique: https://www.thekitchn.com/nashville-hot-chicken-recipe-23345561
- Chef Billy Parisi, lard and oil combination method: https://www.billyparisi.com/nashville-hot-chicken/
- A Spicy Perspective, pickle juice brine technique: https://www.aspicyperspective.com/mind-blowing-nashville-hot-chicken-recipe/