My buddies and I are trying to figure out the Colonel's eleven secret herbs and spices. Supposedly there's a recipe at KFC headquarters, but they keep it locked up in a vault and nobody knows what it is. Do you? (Apologies if it's in your book, but I didn't read that.)
Amazing Larry, Athens, Georgia
Even in the course of my research for my biography of Colonel Sanders, I never came close to even seeing this fabled vault, Larry, though I'm sure it exists. I did get to see the animatronic Colonel Sanders robot they keep there, and god, is it horrifying. But anyway, you will be pleased to hear that there are not one but two avenues to get at that legendary spice mix, the most potent in the history of the restaurant business. One, the hard way, is to follow this thread on a British cooking forum, whose members, led by a mysterious figure named "The Colonel," engaged over the course of years in a heroic quest to reverse engineer the spices using scientific methods. (They even used microphotography to analyze individual grains and flakes.)
The easy way, which is the one you want, is to just get a bottle of the stuff they are analyzing: 99X Chicken Seasoning, produced by the Marion Kay Spices of Brownsville, Indiana. You can buy it here.
This article originally appeared on Esquire.com.
