Paula Patton Addresses Criticism Over Controversial Fried Chicken Recipe

Poultry news has taken a compelling turn in recent weeks thanks to widely shared footage of Paula Patton, who last month gave her Instagram followers a nearly five-minute video showing a discourse-inspiring fried chicken method. Now, the Mission: Impossible franchise alum is sending out a message of “love” for critics of the recipe.

In a post captioned with “Peace, love and fried chicken,” Patton revealed that she’s currently in Mexico with her son. On Tuesday morning, Patton explained, she awoke to people informing her of the growing conversation surrounding her widely criticized chicken footage.

“I woke up and people were like, ‘Did you see on Instagram and TikTok and Twitter, they’re talking about the way you fry chicken?’ I was like, oh no. What?” Patton said. “But that’s okay. 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 is my mom’s recipe.”

Among the specific points of criticism, as touched on in @thetrackqueen’s TikTok upload below, were expressions of concern over the washing and seasoning parts of the process. When addressing the former, Patton explained that the way the clip in question was edited may have given the impression that she doesn’t “wash [the chicken] long enough,” which she highlighted as not being an accurate representation.

“I do believe in washing the chicken and maybe the way the video was edited it looks like I don’t wash it long enough, but I definitely do,” she said. “Because I feed it to my son and I fed it to his whole school. That batch I made, I made it for his school.”

Patton added that while she is open to “suggestions” about other fried chicken recipes, she will always follow this particular recipe the same manner due to her mother. “I’ll make a new kind of fried chicken but I’m gonna make my mom’s chicken the way that she did it. … It’s just the way we do it,” she said.

See more from Patton below.