Is this top-secret recipe from KFC?

Corporate parent says blend stuffed into will was incorrect.

KFC describes its closely guarded original fried chicken recipe as “one of the biggest trade secrets in the world.” The company says the original handwritten recipe is housed in a 770pound safe encased in two feet of concrete and guarded by video cameras and motion detectors.

It is the Fort Knox of fried chicken. Despite that, the recipe for the spice blend used to prepare the chicken may have been accidentally revealed to a reporter for The Chicago Tribune by Joe Ledington, a nephew of the man who made the recipe famous. The newspaper printed the article, along with what might be the recipe, last week.

The reporter, Jay Jones, was sent to Corbin, Ky., to write a story for the Tribune’s travel section about the town where the colonel served his first fried chicken. While there, he arranged a meeting with Ledington, whose uncle, Col. Harland Sanders, founded Kentucky Fried Chicken and was its snowy-haired ambassador.

Ledington greeted the reporter with a family scrapbook that he said had belonged to Claudia Ledington, the second wife of Colonel Sanders, who died in 1996. Her will was stuffed into the back of the scrapbook and its final pages contained a handwritten recipe for a blend of 11 spices, Jones said.

“That is the original 11 herbs and spices that were supposed to be so secretive,” Ledington told the reporter, later adding that as a boy his job in the family business was to mix the spice blend in a tub on the roof of the garage.

“The main ingredient is white pepper,” Ledington said. “I call that the secret ingredient. Nobody knew what white pepper was. Nobody knew how to use it” in the 1950s, he said. In a later phone interview, the Tribune said, Ledington walked back his claim, saying he had never shown the recipe to a reporter before and did not “know for sure” if it was as authentic as he first said. He did not respond to a phone message requesting an interview.

Kentucky Fried Chicken takes any threat to its secret recipe seriously, and in the past has sued to keep it under wraps. In an email Wednesday, a spokeswoman for Yum! Brands, corporate parent of KFC, which is based in Louisville, Ky., said the recipe contained in Claudia Ledington’s will was incorrect.

“Many people have made these claims over the years and no one has been accurate — this one isn’t either,” the company said in a statement.