Colonel Sanders was always experimenting with food at his restaurant in Corbin, Ky., in those early days of the 1930s. He kept adding this and that to the flour for frying chicken and came out with a pretty good-tasting product. But customers still had to wait 30 minutes for it while he fried it up in an iron skillet. That was just too long a wait, he thought. Most other restaurants serving what they called "Southern" fried chicken fried it in deep fat. That was quicker, but the taste wasn't the same.

Then the Colonel went to a demonstration of a "new-fangled gizmo" called a pressure cooker sometime in the late 1930s. During the demonstration, green beans turned out tasty and done just right in only a few minutes. This set his mind to thinking. He wondered how it might work on chicken.

He bought one of the pressure cookers and made a few adjustments. After a lot of experimenting with cooking time, pressure, shortening temperature and level, Eureka! He'd found a way to fry chicken quickly, under pressure, and come out with the best chicken he'd ever tasted.

There are several different kinds of cookers used to make Original RecipeŽ Chicken today. But every one of them fries under pressure, the principle established by this now-famous Kentuckian.

The Colonel's first pressure cooker is still around. It holds a place of honor in the Colonel Sanders Museum at KFC's Restaurant Support Center in Louisville.

Colonel's Story  | Chicken Under Pressure | Original Recipe | Back to Colonel Sanders