 Alright, I'm excited to tell you the story. Okay, this is the KFC recipe secret. Now all of you that are older, 40, well probably 38 to 50, you know, and up, if you're over 40 years old, you remember, you probably remember KFC Kentucky Fried Chicken tasting unbelievably good. When I was a kid in the 60s and the late 60s, I remember we went to Kentucky Fried Chicken every once in a while. Not very often, I grew up in Bloomington, and there was a KFC on Lundale Avenue, I believe, in the 60s. We didn't go very often, but once in a while we get a couple of buckets of chicken, bring them home, and the, you know, the mashed potatoes and gravy, and the coleslaw. That was the main thing, and of course the biscuits. If everybody remembers that, and I'll listen, if you're from, if you grew up in the 60s or you're older and you remember the 60s, and maybe even into the very early 70s, the Kentucky Fried Chicken was unbelievable. It was a original recipe, and the coleslaw and the chicken and the gravy was really spicy. It was just so good. Well, later on, they changed the recipe. I don't care if they say they didn't, they did. I lived it. And anybody out there, you know, go ahead and comment below if you grew with me, or you disagree on our care, but I'm telling you, I remember, and it was super spicy, it was so good, I loved. Even the coleslaw was spicy. They put something in there, and they took all that stuff out. But anyway, here's the story. The story is, I'm going to read it to you. KFC Recipe Revealed, a family scrapbook with 11 herbs and spices surfaces after decades. Could Colonel Sanders' secret recipe blend up 11 herbs and spices be tucked away in an old family photo album? The recipe that was found is from Colonel Harlan Sanders' nephew Joe, leading 10 of Kentucky. Maybe it's leading 10, I don't know. So many stories have been told about Colonel Sanders and his Kentucky Fried Chicken. It's impossible to know where the true fans and the fiction begins. This is one of those stories, a mix of memory, mystery, and a pinch of what if. It involves one of the best-capped culinary secrets of all time, and the man who's arguably the original celebrity chef, which is of course Colonel Sanders. I'll read on. In the past, the late Colonel has been resurrected on TV commercials as a caricature played by the likes of George Hamilton and Jim Gaffington. But as many of us remember, the real Colonel was a bespeckled white-haired guy named Harlan David Sanders, who spawned a fast food empire for decades. The Colonel was synonymous with snow-colored suits, black-string ties, and finger-licking good chicken. Attempts to an earth that Colonel's original recipe, or replicated, have been made too many times to count. For KFC Corporation, keeping the elusive mix of 11 herbs and spices under wraps, has been paramount. I gotta stop there. You know what? Who cares? Who cares what their recipe is now? It's nothing. The recipe they have now is nowhere near as good as it used to be. I'm telling you people, I'm sorry. All the people who are younger, you've never got to have the original recipe. I'm really sorry because you're missing out. But this story will give you the original recipe. We've got it. I've got it right here, and I'm gonna tell you what the original recipe was. So you can mix it up and make your own chicken. I'm excited. I'm gonna try it. We're gonna get all these herbs and spices on this list. We're gonna get them, and we're gonna make chicken. It's gonna be awesome. Hopefully it'll taste just like I remember it in the 60s. If it does, I'm gonna make another video, and I'm gonna tell everybody about it. Alright, back to the story. Not to mention a great marketing tool in 2008 that Louisville Kentucky Base Cup Company used a Brink's Armored Truck. In briefcase, Mark Top Secret, when it made a big show of beefing up the security at the vault containing the kernels handwritten recipe. Other protective measures include using two different suppliers to prepare the 11 herbs and spices so that no single entity can crack the code. Feeding into the mystique, the recently revamped KFC website, kernelstanders.com features a kernel Sanders character saying he's finally ready to tell the world what's in the recipe. Just as he's about to spill the beans, the sound malfunctions, and out of order signs pops up on the screen. Funny. The recipe is without question as secret as juicy as well fried foul, whatever that is, and has been for the better part of a century. So imagine my surprise when 11 herbs and spices was plucked from a Sanders family scrapbook and placed into my hands. Crazy right? This is the guy writing the story, which is I think it's some newspaper, whatever. Our story begins with a small town of Corbin, Kentucky where the kernel first served his chicken more than 75 years ago, to hungry motorists at the service station he ran. I'm here to visit the Harlan Sanders Cafe in Museum so he must have went there. A shrine of sorts to the fried chicken magnet. His namesake restaurant has been restored to its mid 20th century appearance, but with a modern KFC store as an appendage. This guy's assignment was to research the restaurant museum and fried chicken in Corbin for a fork in the road feature in the Chicago Tribune's travel section. Okay, so this is from the Chicago Tribune, so I'll give them a little credit for this, but I'm reading it. Okay, with the help of local tourism office, I arranged to meet a man named Joe Leadington, the 67 year old retired teacher has spent his entire life on Appalachia. He still lives in the house, which he grew up in, just north of the city limits of Corbin, a town of about 7,300. He agrees to meet me and share a few yards about the kernel. You see the guy called HD, an old man's Sanders, was his uncle. Leadington says he used the Guchors in the modest cafe as a young boy, making a quarter a day, that's 25 cents a day to sweep and clean up. I entered the panel restaurant and Leadington defined Leadington, leafing through a photo album. His wife, Jill, sits quietly at the next table, munching chicken from a familiar red and white box funny. Leadington and I are letting to shake hands, so tell them about the assignment that brought me to this part of Kentucky. He's got the photo album in front of it, over stuff with pictures, newspaper clippings and various family documents. This, he says, Leadington says, this was Aunt Claire's album, he says, referring to his father's sister, Claudia Leadington, who became Harlan Sanders' second wife when they wed in the late 40s. Claudia worked as a waitress in the cafe, it was instrumental in launching what would become a multi-billion dollar fast food chain boasting nearly 20,000 KFC restaurants in more than 125 countries. The album with its non-descript cover and clear self-range sheets looks like the one I used to buy for a bucket wall grains. Leadington turns the pages occasionally, stopping to point out certain pictures like the one of him posing with his famous uncle and others taking it at the opening of a KFC in some faraway land. Sanders was always sporting one of his iconic white suits. Leadington says he had a closet full of them. Yeah, he had a bunch of those same suits. Leadington continues to leave through the family scrapbook, pausing here and there to share a memory or two. Let's see, his last one testament of his Aunt Claire tells me, and she died in 1996 at age 94. I can show you every family member, I can show you what every family member got. He, they all inherited some money. He got a couple hundred thousand. But what he's really interested in is a handwritten note in the back of the document. At the top of the page in Bluink it says, 11 spices mixed with two cups of white flour that's followed by all the herbs and spices and the measurements of each. Now, it lists here the recipe, but I'm not going to read this until the end of the video. Sorry, everyone. Okay, so he shows the original handwritten sheet with the 11 herbs and spices, which I will reveal at the end of this video. Okay, so let's see, he's had this album forever. Okay, and then he says he quickly points out that the writing isn't his uncle's. He's not sure who jotted down the list of 11 ingredients, but he says he sure that's authentic because as a boy, he helped blend those herbs and spices on a flat concrete roof of his uncle's garage. Okay, so what he's saying is this handwritten note is not his uncle's writing, but he is sure that this is authentic because as a boy, he helped blend those exact herbs and spices. Okay, so he's got the exact same spices on a flat concrete roof of his uncle's garage. I mixed them over the top of the garage for years, he recalls noting that the job came with the fringe benefit of getting to use the swimming pool at Sanders Motel Restaurant Complex. A nice perk during the hot summer months. The big thing was the big thing we did was to mix it up with flour and bag it up and sell it to restaurants. My job was cutting up chickens and bagging up chicken mix. That's what I did as a 12, 10, 11, and 12 year old kid. The main ingredients for this coating, the main ingredients for the coating of the chicken, the fried chicken, Kentucky fried chicken, according to this recipe, are I'm going to read it later. I'm not going to give it a whip yet. The main ingredient is secret, I'll tell you in a minute. Could the KFC, is this the recipe, is this the exact recipe? Well, I think it is, I really do. I'm really excited to mix this up in my kitchen and make myself this kind of a shaking-baked thing. My own, you know, you got that shaking-baked stuff which is okay, but this is going to be so much better. It's going to be the real deal. Alright, let's see what it says. In the early 50s, the Colonel in Honorary Title, bestowed by the Governor of Kentucky, began selling to other restaurants as two keys to his tasty birds, custom pressure cookers, and the mix. So it is a pressure cooker, also, so I don't have one of those, but I'm going to try it. Alright, so I've always wondered that, was the Colonel Sanders really a Colonel? Looks like he wasn't, I don't think he was in the military. It looks like his title was an Honorary Title bestowed by the Governor of Kentucky in the early 1950s, so he wasn't really a Colonel, but that's okay. You know, if the Governor gave him the title, he gave him the title. So he says the original KFC chicken was better because it had more breading to it, so it had breading, okay. It was individually hand-bredded and topped in those pressure and dropped in those pressure cookers. You cooked it until it started turning brown, then you put the lid on the pressure cooker and brought it to 12 browns of pressure for 10 minutes. And then you started letting the pressure off. When you uncapped it and the pressure was off, it was perfect. Golden brown, fall off the bone. Okay, so he says the original KFC chicken, which is in the 50s, early 50s, was better, had more breading. So when you mix all this stuff up, bread it really thick, okay. And if you want to do it right, you put it in a pressure cooker, you cook it in the pressure cooker with the lid off until it starts to turn brown, then you put the lid on and bring the pressure up to 12 pounds of pressure for 10 minutes. And then you start letting the pressure off. And when you uncapped it and the pressure was off, it was perfect. Golden brown, fall off the bone. So he doesn't give times there, but you can figure it out. Make sure it's cooked right people. Make sure your chicken is cooked properly. You don't want to get any salmoneel or anything weird. Okay, sit across from, still in the raw blah blah blah. Took a few pictures, I watched, Liddington, in this scrapbook. Alright, so that was basically the story. And I do have some more information here about Colonel Sanders that I'd like to read. Hopefully I can find it. I got it right here. Okay, now I've got some interesting story about Colonel, I'm going to tell you the rest of the second, but I've got an interesting story about Colonel Sanders that was not in this start, this Tribune article. I found this a long time ago on the internet. Colonel Sanders, story of failure. Okay, now this is a story of Colonel Sanders life. And he didn't just make it, I mean he struggled, struggled, struggled, he turned out, he didn't really make it and make any money until he turned 65. He was pretty much a failure. Now here's the story. So this is something to tell everybody that's struggling out there. You've got a chance to make it. Don't give up. Okay. I don't care how old you are, this guy, Colonel Sanders didn't make the big time until he was 65. And here's the story. Okay, Colonel Sanders, story of failure. He was married at 19 and then later divorced. He had a son who died from infected tonsils. He got a job at a railroad, lost it for fighting with colleague, fighting with another guy he worked with. Practice law until his law career ended for having a brawl with his own client in the courtroom. So he was a lawyer. After that, he moved back in with his mother. He got a job with a life insurance company, lost it for insubordination, started ferry boat company, crashed shares to start lamp. Okay, started ferry boat company, cashed in the shares to start lamp manufacturing company, which failed. Let's kind of hard to read that. Got a job as a salesman, lost it. Ran a service station which closed due to the due to the great depression. So that's right there. That's the 30s. Ran another service station for 10 years was going well. Then a fire burned it down. He rebuilt it into a restaurant in a motel. But in World War II, it dried up. But World War II dried up tourism and his business failed. So now we're talking 1941 through 1945. Worked in as an assistant cafeteria manager for 10 years, that brings it to 50 something. Started licensing as chicken idea to restaurants at age 65. So we had a chicken idea with his original 11 herbs and spices and he started mixing it up and selling that to restaurants at age 65. I think what he did is he was secretly mixed it up and then he just sold the breading to the to the restaurants originally. He drove from a restaurant to restaurant, sleeping in his car to cook chicken and negotiate franchise rights. And once he got going, he grew it to over 600 franchises. Notice Kentucky fried chicken. Wow. So, and that was the 50s. So he finally made it. More of the story success is coming. Never give up. All right. So we've come to the conclusion here. I'm going to read the 11 herbs and spices plus a day into this video. They'll be a picture of it. So you can see a picture of the original note handwritten note with the recipe. Okay. The spice recipe as written 11 spices mixed with two cups of white flour. Now I'm assuming this is enough to make one chicken. So if you got a whole chicken and you want to make yourself a whole chicken, this is what you do. You take two cups of white flour and you mix these 11 spices. Number one, two third teaspoon of salt. Number two, half teaspoon of thyme. Number three, half teaspoon of basil. Number four, third teaspoon of oregano, spelling incorrect. So it's oregano. Number five, one teaspoon of celery salt. Number six, one teaspoon of black pepper. Number seven, one teaspoon of dried mustard. Number eight, four teaspoons of paprika. Number nine, two teaspoons of garlic salt. Number ten, one teaspoon, ground ginger. Number eleven. Now I want a drum roll here because this is according to the story and according to the, the, the, according to his nephew, okay, who was in the family business. This is the secret ingredient right here. This is the one that it's really actually hard to get. And this is the absolute secret ingredient that really made this taste good. And I believe it because I grew up in the 60s and I'm telling you, this is the secret ingredient right here. It's the number eleven, okay. Now this is what made it spicy and taste really good. I know it and I know right now this is the ingredient they don't put in it anymore. If you go to a KC right now, maybe they still put this in. Maybe, but they don't put as much in or they don't put it in at all. But if you mix this up and you put this ingredient and I'm telling you, it's going to taste really good. And put it in your gravy too and put it in your, I say take all these ingredients and put them in your gravy and also put them in your coleslaw mix. I'm telling you, this is what's going to taste good. Okay, this is number eleven. Sorry, I took a lot so long. Three teaspoons of white pepper. That's the secret ingredient. White pepper. Where do you get that? I don't know. But go out and find it. Find all this stuff. But I'm not sure I've ever seen white pepper. Now this is the secret, okay. And there's quite a bit of it. Three teaspoons of white pepper. I might even put four in because I love this stuff. But anyway, that's the eleven herbs and spices. I want everybody to go out there and make this chicken. Especially anybody older than 50 that remembers this stuff, the original stuff. I'm way older than 50 and I'm telling you I remember this and it was amazing. I want you to make this chicken. I want you to come back and I want you to put comments in on this video and let me know how much you love this. And if you remember the old chicken and I want you to put comments in and say, hey, thanks for getting this recipe out there. I love this stuff or tell me you don't like it. Whatever. But I'm telling you, anybody older than 50 years old is going to love this. So don't forget that white pepper. All right, I'm signing off. Please like this video. Please subscribe. I'd really appreciate it and keep looking for more great videos. Take care. God bless everybody.