Panama’s passion for fried chicken runs deep. Whether found in a fluorescent-lit dining room of a colossal U.S. chain, a dusty fonda located off a rural highway, or at a sleek counter imported straight from South Korea, “everybody likes fried chicken,” says chef José Olmedo Carles Rojas. Popular to eat at both breakfast and lunch, fried chicken has captured the appetites of Panamanians for as long as the chef can remember. Growing up in Panama City and continuing to live there part-time while running the restaurant Si! Mon in Venice, Carles says the country’s dining landscape is dotted with fried chicken purveyors of all price points, ethnicities, and approaches.

“I have a couple of friends who are chefs with restaurants and they opened fried chicken shops on the side,” he says. “It’s almost like a competition, and now everybody’s like, ‘Who makes the best fried chicken?’ There’s a fried chicken wave happening.”

This collective fervor surrounding fried chicken, along with the chef’s adoration for the dish, inspired his early fried chicken recipe development about a decade ago. Carles initially aimed to recreate the buttermilk-battered versions — full of crunchy crags and delectable nubbins — characteristic of the American South. He winged the ingredients and techniques at first and soon found out that preparing the classic dish was trickier than it seemed. The outer coating on early batches was too thick, while the coloring was overly dark. “I was so angry I couldn’t do it. And at this stage, I was not even trying to do more research, I was probably a little bit cocky, like ‘Oh my God, it shouldn’t be that hard,’ you know?” He swapped in pickle brine for the buttermilk, among other incremental tweaks, but never felt fully satisfied with the results.

“It was kind of a love-hate R&D process,” he says of the many years it took to refine the recipe.

Carles’s fried chicken fortune began to change after sampling Japanese karaage. “I got some potato starch and I decided to try that and it was super close to what I had envisioned,” he says. Finally achieving both the color and texture that had long eluded him, Carles deemed the fried chicken recipe finished enough to serve at his acclaimed Panama City restaurant, Lo Que Hay, in 2017. Since its menu debut, the recipe has evolved even further to include a dry curry rub, gingery egg wash, and an umami-packed finishing salt.

Now, the famed fried chicken has arrived stateside at Si! Mon, the chef’s first U.S. restaurant. Each order includes three lollipopped drumsticks perched on their wobbly heads, along with some spicy ketchup and curtido served on the side. With the meat carefully pulled to the tip of each leg, the remaining inch or so of scraped-clean bone makes for a utilitarian handle. It’s hard to say where the skin stops and the meat begins at first bite. The dramatic crunch of it all — bolstered by a generous coating of roasted rice powder tinged green with scallions, mint, basil, and rosemary — induces a veritable flood of savory fried chicken bliss.

Eater LA sat down with Carles to learn how his fried chicken recipe has adapted and shifted since entering its Los Angeles era. Including understanding the importance of humidity, incorporating Asian diasporic influences, and his unwavering commitment to dark meat, Carles discusses his trials, triumphs, and enduring passion for making fried chicken, his way.

On drumsticks

José Olmedo Carles Rojas: I have a very, very big kitchen at Lo Que Hay; I actually have two kitchens in Panama. Just on the line, I have four fryers and then in my production kitchen, I have three more. Panama real estate is very different from LA’s. At Si! Mon, my kitchen is smaller and I have less equipment, so I cannot afford to spend 21 minutes frying the thighs — it’s just too long and would take forever for the volume we serve. I decided just to do drumsticks because the first fry takes less time and I can keep up with the volume. Also, I love drumsticks. I feel like you go to places that serve the whole chicken, some places have only wings, and I was like, “Nobody’s doing only drumsticks,” so I always like to be a little bit different than the rest.

On lollipopping

We get the drumsticks like that from our supplier because obviously, it would take forever for us to do it. It makes the whole meat and skin come together like a little ball at the end, which makes the meat a bit thicker. When you don’t lollipop it, you’ve got to be so careful of the skin shrinking back — then the main part of the chicken won’t be covered by the skin. It’s very important in this preparation that you have the skin covering as much of the meat as possible. It just allows you to have juicier, more concentrated meat.

On the marinade

We use curry powder, garlic powder, some salt, and a little white pepper in Panama. Here, I already have so many things on the menu that have a Caribbean vibe that I wanted to make sure we’re not overdoing it. We do a very simple salt, garlic powder, onion powder, and fresh culantro. We marinate the chicken overnight because it’s just drumsticks, and because they’re lollipopped, the marinade can penetrate more easily.

On the batter

In Panama, we batter the chicken one by one, piece by piece. That technique isn’t possible here because my labor cost would be too crazy. I tried to do the same recipe using potato starch but something about Venice’s humidity and the environment was not cooperating, like the reaction wasn’t the same even though I was doing exactly the same process. So I started playing a little bit with cornstarch.

Instead of doing a batter on the side and then adding the chicken, what I do here is in the same hotel pans where I have the chicken marinated, I weigh the chicken and add a very specific weight of cornstarch, club soda, and beaten eggs. I massage the whole thing until it becomes a uniform batter or coating. It always has to be adjusted a little bit with either cornstarch or liquid depending on how much water the chicken released when it was marinating.

Once it looks like a thick batter’s holding onto the chicken well, that’s when I start doing the test fry. Based on how the batter puffs up when I fry it, I decide if I want to make it a little bit thicker or not because, for me, it’s very important that the meat part not covered by the skin also has a little crunch. I always fry it, I touch it, I bite it, and if I feel like it needs a little bit more crunch, I probably add a tiny bit more cornstarch.

On double-frying

It’s very important that as soon as the batter is ready, we fry the chicken right away, because if you leave it too long, the batter and the chicken start getting weird and you gotta keep adding stuff and it’s just a pain. I fry the chicken in batches, like 30 pieces at 300 F for around 8 to 12 minutes, depending on the size of the chicken. The second fry is when the order is fired. We fry it at a higher temperature (370 F) for around 4 to 6 minutes and strain it well.

On “chicken salt”

At the beginning, the fried chicken didn’t have anything on the outside. The batter was good, the flavor was good, and it had a nice sauce. You eat it with the sauce and it’s like, “Boom,” right? I started eating the fried chicken on its own and then I was like, “You know what? Something’s missing.” I didn’t want to add any seasonings to the batter because I didn’t want to change the color, so I started playing with a little salt and a little herbs. One day I remember going to this Vietnamese restaurant [Restaurante Vietnamita in Panama City] and having this fried chicken and being absolutely in love with the salt. I remember being like, “Oh yeah, this thing is the bomb.”

I wanted to do my own version and started playing with herbs traditionally used in gravy, like rosemary and thyme. I was already playing a lot with mushroom powder. I also remember going to Korean restaurants that serve dipping salt with fried chicken. So I started putting things together: the umami salt from the Korean restaurant, my shiitake powder, and the rice powder from the Vietnamese restaurant. I started coating the chicken in the salt blend almost a year after I already had fried chicken on the menu at Lo Que Hay.

In Panama, we get the raw rice, which we roast until it has a golden color. We turn it into a super-fine powder and then mix it with shiitake mushroom powder. I also add black pepper, dried thyme, and rosemary. Here, I make it with more herbs like scallions, mint, basil, and a little rosemary. We keep the chicken salt in a salt shaker and we just go crazy putting it on after we fry the chicken the second time. I’m not gonna lie, when you see how much we put in, it’s a lot, it has to be a lot because it is diluted by the rice powder and you want that taste to be a big part of the experience. You do need to add a lot to have that mouthfeel, that powdery sensation when you’re eating it.

On accompaniments

When we’re making food in restaurants, I think our instinct always tells us to do something super-weird and different. But if you were in your house and you were eating chicken, like, be honest, what would you do? And I was like, “Fuck it, I’ll use ketchup.” Spicy ketchup or curry ketchup is not a new invention but we have this turmeric hot sauce that I love, made from habanero, mustard, culantro, cachucha peppers, fresh turmeric, grated coconuts, coconut sugar, and vinegar. I decided to mix it with ketchup — two parts ketchup, one part hot sauce, and a little bit of white vinegar. We just blended the two and somehow it didn’t fight with the flavors of the seasoning.

At Asian restaurants, anytime there’s something fried, usually there’s something fresh served on the side. We decided to make our version of spicy pickled veggies and just keep it simple with bell peppers, white onions, carrots, and celery. We boil vinegar, add a little salt and a little sugar, pour on top — and that’s it.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.