She made Lexington’s best fried chicken for 50 years. Can the Save-A-Lot recipe be saved?
When Judy Rankin started working at the Shoppers Choice grocery store deli on Romany Road, she didn’t realize that she was going to become the keeper of the biggest fried chicken secret since Colonel Sanders.
But that’s just kind of how it worked out.
For more than 50 years, Rankin made chicken that people hungered for.
First at Shoppers Choice, which became Randall’s on Romany, and later at the Pantry Fresh Market at Henry Clay and Liberty, also run by Walt Barbour.
She also had stints at other stores, including one at Lansdowne where tailgaters would stream in on game days for chicken to take to the football stadium.
“We would start like 6 o’clock in the morning frying chicken,” she said. “And keep it in warmers.”
Eventually, Rankin, along with best friend Katie Fyffe who joined her in the grocery deli along the way, went to work for Slone’s Signature Market on Southland and took the chicken with them.
When Slone’s sold a decade ago to Save-A-Lot, they were part of the deal. Rankin retired in 2017 and Fyffe not long afterward.
Now, Save-A-Lot is closing Aug. 1 and a mad scramble is on to save the chicken recipe. The three other Lexington Sav-A-Lot locations do not have a deli to serve or make the fried chicken.
Kentucky Sports Radio host Matt Jones, who is a partner in KSBar and Grille restaurant in Lexington tweeted that he was working on a plan.
“I would like to keep it alive by finding another outlet for it,” Jones said in an email. “Possibly a food truck or integrating into what we have already.”
Another possibility: A new grocer could take over the store and keep the deli going.
Meanwhile, the Southland store deli is closing early next week, or whenever they run out of chicken. So if you need a last lunch, don’t dally.
But Rankin has some bad news for people: “There’s not a recipe for it.”
No, really, she said.
“I’ve had several people to call, wanting the recipe,” said Rankin, now 77 and retired. “I never thought it would be like people are just yelling for the recipe. I don’t think they believe me when I say there’s no recipe.”
Her answer to what makes it so special, then?
“It’s the right combination with the right combination,” Rankin said. Fyffe was not immediately available to comment.
Secrets to the Save-A-Lot chicken recipe
When Rankin started in the late 1960s-early 1970s, they marinated the chicken in a salt solution, a brine basically.
“I found out that makes more tender,” she said.
She remembers that they had to mix the marinade, let the chicken sit overnight. “Then you had to dip it out, flour it and fry it,” she said. “It was a lot of work, but it proved off through the years.”
Then they found a company that sold a pre-marinated version: George’s Chicken is the brand she remembers using.
“We tried several different kinds and all voted on one,” Rankin said.
The chicken Rankin made was then coated in a commercial Southern-style breading mix, she said. She doesn’t know exactly what was in it.
“It just said ‘spices.’”
It was cooked in vegetable oil in a pressure fryer for 12-15 minutes.
And that was it, she said.
Making Save-A-Lot chicken at home
Rankin’s advice on how to duplicate the famous flavor at home:
“I would put it in some salt water and put it in the refrigerator overnight. That saltwater flavors it all the way through and it tenderizes it,” she said. “And then you just drain it and flour it, and fry it.”
She’d put some salt and pepper in the flour.
“You could probably put a little garlic in it ... some seasonings.”
Somehow the results were magical.
Popular in Lexington and beyond
Rankin said customers would place orders from Richmond, Winchester, Paris, Nicholasville and as far away as Pikeville. Even her sister from Olive Hill would place orders.
Customers fell in love and followed Rankin, Fyffe and their chicken from store to store over the years.
The biggest order Rankin remembers off the top of her head was for 1,200 pieces. Probably for a local church.
“We had a lot of churches,” she said. “Wasn’t nothing for them to order 500 pieces for church picnics.”
At their busiest, they would go through about 75 to 100 50-pound boxes of chicken a week, rivaling even fast-food chicken places.
“We started selling that chicken and it grew to be very, very popular,” said Barbour, who ran the store on Romany. Then on Henry Clay, we “sold lots of chicken from there also.”
And not just to your average neighborhood customer.
Barbour said that local caterers (he won’t name names) used to buy it by the panful.
“That chicken has been to a lot of places,” he said.
“We took it to Rick Pitino’s house. We fed the philharmonic at Picnic for the Pops. A lot of well known caterers used that chicken,” Barbour said.
What does he think the secret was?
“Those two ladies,” he said. “They were just very good at what they did. Those two ladies were almost irreplaceable and a dying breed.”
Without them, even using the same chicken and breading might not be enough to recreate the magic, he said.
“I got some chicken about a month ago, and I could tell they weren’t there. It just was not quite the same.”
This story was originally published July 1, 2020 at 12:01 PM.
