Do you know about Cheesling?

Fried chicken is, at its best, ephemeral. It is at its most delicious for a single moment: fresh out of the fryer, crispy, juice overflowing on the first bite, and not only as liquid: steaming juice overflowing from its liquid state to vapor. Excess transgressing its bonds! This moment, fried chicken’s zenith, is unreachable. Perhaps fried chicken was eaten at the right moment once in human history. Perhaps it has not yet happened, but some day it will, and on that day…

This perfect moment is impossible and fried chicken is delicious far past its zenith. The 10 minutes or so, post-fryer, are fleeting, too, if not as fleeting, and even hour-, day-, days-old fried chicken is excellent. But few would disagree that it is at its best at its most fleeting, when its decay from crunchiness is most rapid, when it stands most precariously upon the precipice. To pluck it from this position, to destroy it at its peak, this is when fried chicken is best.

Have the Koreans perfected fried chicken? I can’t say for sure. Certainly, rice flour introduces a degree and quality of crunch heretofore unknown to the western world. But I write not here of Korean fried chicken per se, but of its greatest innovation: yes, I write of Cheesling.

If you do not know it, Cheesling is Korean fried chicken which dusted with a cheese powder. The cheese powder adheres to the fried skin, but also rests in a powdery matrix above it. To perturb the chicken perturbs this superior layer of cheese powder and it is liable to slide down and off your chicken. You must be careful.

You may wonder what I mean by cheese powder. It is not the cheese powder of Cheetos or Doritos. Its closest cousin, as far as I can tell, is the cheese powder from boxed mac and cheese. Do you remember, as a child, taking a bit of this powder, putting it on your tongue, feeling it dissolve into pure cheese, ideal cheese, or something like it? I do. And I remember this every time I eat Cheesling.

The beauty of Cheesling is that it respects and amplifies the natural ephemerality of fried chicken. This is, for one, exemplified by the powdery matrix of cheese. There is an endless number of permutations of cheese particles. Each time you eat Cheesling, you are guaranteed to eat something you have never eaten before. But wait, you might say, is this not true of every food? Is this not true of everything you consume and everything you do? Yes, you are correct. But Cheesling wears it on its sleeve.

But the true fleeting beauty of Cheesling is the moment of contact between cheese powder and tongue. How long is this moment? It is infinitesimal. In a sense, it doesn’t exist at all. But there it is. Like the moment you put boxed mac and cheese powder on your tongue – it is gone as soon as it is there, but there it is.

Jonah Lubin