A Real Colonel Sanders Story
I met the real Colonel Sanders on three different occasions way back in the early and mid-Seventies. Kim Kohatsu , your brief bio-article on him was full of information easily gleaned from internet sources but there is much about him that that never made it into your article.
Back then I was the head chef of one of the five KFC test kitchens across the country. I did not work for a KFC franchisee but rather for KFC Corporation, which at that time was a subsidiary of Hublein Corporation. (It has changed hands many times since then.)
One of the fun things about being in charge of one of those test kitchens is that whenever KFC rolled out a new product we were the very first ones to get it and start working with it in order to see if it would be successful before rolling it out to the rest of the country. Just during the few years that I worked there KFC experimented with a great number of different products, only a few of which the company adopted.
Another aspect of that job was training new managers in every single little aspect of running a KFC kitchen. I was pretty young back then and every manager I trained was older than I was. But they were never accepted as new managers unless I gave them the thumbs up. Someone else trained them on paperwork and other managerial aspects of being a KFC manager but it was I who taught them every facet of cooking KFC as well as cleaning every square centimeter of every piece of equipment in a KFC kitchen. No KFC manager got approved until they learned every aspect of the KFC kitchen that every KFC kitchen worker had to learn. They were never okayed by me until their hands had been covered in chicken blood handling every different piece of chicken and until they had gotten down on their hands and knees and cleaned out the bowels of the giant pressure cooking machines.
And then came the day I found out that the ‘Colonel’ himself would be visiting my kitchen — as well as all the other test kitchens across the country.
We scrubbed the hell out of that kitchen in preparation for his visit. While the Colonel was at that time merely a corporate icon he insisted on playing a hands-on role. He was famous for going into a KFC restaurant with a white glove on his hand. He would walk throughout the kitchen and run his gloved hand over various surfaces to see if there was any dust or grime. He was a clean freak. If he went through an entire KFC kitchen wiping his gloved hand over countless surfaces and his glove would be completely free of any dirt at the end of the inspection he would award that restaurant with his “White Glove Award.”
And so the day came and the real Colonel Sanders in person stepped into my kitchen. Everyone stood in silence as he put on his white glove. He then wandered through my kitchen wiping his gloved hand over every surface imaginable — many of them surfaces that one would normally never think to clean.
After his inspection he looked at his glove and it was perfectly clean. He then asked who the head chef was. I raised my hand. Taking off the glove he came over to me and shook my hand, saying, “This is the goddam cleanest KFC kitchen I’ve come across in the last two or three years!”
A celebrity was shaking my hand. It was pretty cool!
Then a photographer from the city newspaper came into the room for a group photograph. All the management and staff of the restaurant posed with the Colonel for a photograph for the local newspaper. After the photo Colonel Sanders then dismissed all the females from the kitchen. Once the photographer and reporter had left and the females employees left the kitchen and there were only male employees left, the Colonel then proceeded to tell the most outrageously raunchy dirty jokes that I had ever heard. One minute he was a celebrity in pure white clothing and then suddenly he was a comedian telling the nastiest jokes imaginable. He never uttered a sentence without at least four or five cuss words in it.
I laughed but I was confused. In recent news I had heard about how he had walked down into a river back in Kentucky (in his white suit) and, in his old age, was finally baptized as a Christian. Very publicly he had became a born-again Christian. Yet there he was in my kitchen speaking with a toilet mouth that would put any sailor to shame. I couldn’t help but wonder if the whole baptism thing was a PR stunt to overshadow his shadowy past — and I wondered if the white suit was part of portraying him as more pristine than he was.
A couple of months later the Colonel came back to my city and all the managers of the 13 KFC restaurants in the city as well as all their head chefs and head hostesses were invited to a luncheon at one of the star restaurants in the city. One of the highlights of the luncheon was the awarding of the Colonel’s “White Glove Award” to me for having the very cleanest KFC kitchen in the entire universe of Kentucky Fried Kitchens.
It was quite an honor. I was essentially being named the number one head KFC cook in the world. Sadly, the award came without any money compensation whatsoever. I did, however, get a freaking plaque — and an autographed copy of the Colonel’s new autobiography.
Later that day the Colonel came by my kitchen again. We spent about an hour together alone in MY kitchen. This is my fondest memory of the man. As he followed me around in MY kitchen I finally asked him if he wanted to see my personal technique to make KFC’s extra crispy chicken even extra crispier.
“Hell yes, I’d love to see that,” he said.
So I showed the Colonel my entire process of making KFC’s extra crispy fried chicken even extra crispier than it was. As I breaded the chicken (with my own enhanced technique) and prepared it the Colonel himself was standing right next to me watching what I was doing and listening to my explanation of what I was doing. I then put the chicken into the deep fryer and then cleaned my hands. As the Colonel and I waited for the chicken to cook he told me some disgusting raunchy joke.
When the chicken was done I set aside a drumstick for the Colonel to try and then I took the rest of the chicken up to the heat vaults to be sold to customers. I brought back some napkins for the Colonel and after the drumstick had cooled a bit I invited him to try it.
So there was Colonel Sanders eating a piece of fried chicken that I had cooked! That’s right, I cooked fried chicken for the real Colonel Sanders!
How many people can say that?
After a few bites the Colonel said something like, “Shit! That’s the goddam crispiest fried fucking chicken I’ve ever eaten!”
A couple of months later we got a memo from corporate headquarters stating that there was a new change in the cooking instructions for the extra crispy chicken. I read over the new instructions and I immediately realized that the new instructions included everything that I had shown the Colonel. Once again, I got no monetary compensation for my work and this time I did not even get any mention. But KFC extra crispy chicken got extra crispier because of ME!
Soon thereafter the Colonel came to town once again for another luncheon. Afterwards, I went up to him to thank him for adopting my techniques for making the extra crispy chicken even extra crispier.
“Oh, that was you?” he said. “Well shit, thank you. I didn’t remember who it was but it sure has helped. Man, that crispy chicken is so fucking crispy you don’t even have to eat it to enjoy it. Just lookin’ at that flaky crust is enough to get yur juices flowin’”
He shook my hand yet again.
A couple of months later I quit my job with corporate KFC. Why? Because I was leaving town to go off to college.
In the several decades since then I have tried to eat at KFC at least once a year, mostly for the sake of nostalgia. Sadly, I have to say that the quality of the fried chicken — both original recipe and extra crispy — has been slowly going downhill since the last time the Colonel shook my hand. It seriously is not the same as it was back then. If anyone would know, I would.
And when I see the actors portraying the Colonel in today’s commercials I just want to puke. Their performances do not even come close to portraying the Colonel that I met and spent an hour with in MY kitchen. They don’t even speak or sound or look like him. What a joke!
A little over a year ago the one KFC restaurant in the town in which I live closed down after their fifth consecutive failed health department inspection. So it’s been a long time since I’ve had the Colonel’s fried chicken.
That’s okay. I know how to make fried chicken in my own home kitchen — and it’s pretty damn good!
