Can't get breading to stick to fried chicken

I know this topic has come up many times on r/Cooking at least, and I've read them all. Unfortunately, none of them seem to directly respond to my situation. I'm making chicken using a wet marinade overnight, then into the dry, and then directly into the oil. I've tried it many times, but only ever managed to get the breading to stick well once, and then it was ultra gross and thick and undercooked (the breading, not the chicken). I'm trying to roughly achieve the effect seen in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5nKYqvu29w&t=1448s

But I'm not cooking a whole chicken, but trying to make breast strips. Unfortunately, there are no measurements in the video, and Kenji says you can just eyeball things, so I can't imagine that this is a significant factor. In any event, my marinade/batter is 350 ml buttermilk; two eggs; 150 g flour; then salt, pepper, garlic, and paprika. My dredge is 450 grams flour, a tablespoon or so of baking powder, and then salt, pepper, and garlic.

Marinade overnight, then dredge thoroughly, then throw into a paper shopping bag with the remaining dredge, and shake it up. Comes out of this process looking, if anything, over-breaded.

As I'm cooking smaller pieces of chicken, I figure I'll just fry them for a shorter time. I heat my oil to 325, and put all my pieces (consisting of two large breasts) into my 9 quart dutch oven, which is about half full of oil. Kenji manages to get an entire chicken into a much smaller wok, and cooks it for 20 minutes without getting oily and gross. I leave mine in for four minutes, and then pull it out. Half the breading is already off, and may not have ever been there in the first place somehow (?!) judging by what's left in the dutch oven. I gave up without even attempting the second fry, but my plan was to heat the oil to 375 and cook for another 1-2 minutes.

So I have the following theories about what I'm doing wrong, and since this recipe requires overnight marinading, I don't have the ability to iterate on it effectively.

• The size of the pieces is dooming me. Because they're much smaller than the giant whole breasts and thighs in the video, I can't leave them in too long or the chicken will overcook. But I can't leave them in for too short a time because the breading won't be able to set up.

  • To solve this, I was trying to reduce the temp as much as possible to allow a long enough cook time, but after four minutes starting at 325 (the lowest temp the oil ever got to was about 250, which the video says is in range for the first fry, and I actually had to turn off the burner to get the oil temp down to the 250-275 range as per the video), the largest piece was cooked through.

• My batter/marinade isn't thick enough.

  • The one time I managed to get it to stick, with the super gross thick stuff, I used a very thick batter, with maybe double the amount of flour quoted above.

• I overcrowded the pot. I almost flatly refuse to believe this is the case considering that Kenji cooked a whole chicken at once in a smaller vessel and with less oil. He even had an end of dry flour sticking out for like five minutes!

• One thing I definitely did not do that Kenji does was in how he placed his chicken in the wok, which was a pure oversight by me. I kind of just dropped mine gently in, rather than letting it set up kind of in stages as it's inserted in the oil.

Any help would be much appreciated, except telling me to dip things in egg and then breadcrumb or whatever. I'm not using that technique, and I don't plan to.

submitted by /u/BillyDeeWilliams1990
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