Deep Fried Chicken

Boneless chicken in a coarse starch coating, fried once and served dry.

Chicken, Egg. Not vegetarian — contains chicken.

Ingredients

• 700 g boneless chicken thighs, in 4 cm pieces
• 2 tablespoons light soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon Shaoxing wine
• 1 teaspoon five spice powder
• 1 teaspoon ground white pepper
• 1 egg
• 150 g coarse sweet potato starch
• 1 litre vegetable oil, for deep frying, which is poured off
• 1 teaspoon salt, for finishing
• a handful of Thai basil leaves

Method

1. Toss the chicken with the soy sauce, wine, five spice and pepper and leave it an hour.
2. Beat the egg in, then press each piece into the sweet potato starch. USE THE COARSE KIND, which looks like fine gravel rather than powder — it is what gives the craggy shell this is for. Cornflour gives a smooth one.
3. Leave the coated pieces on a rack for 10 minutes until the starch looks damp. Dry starch falls off in the oil.
4. Heat the oil to 175C. Fry in batches of six or seven pieces for 4 to 5 minutes, until deep gold.
5. Fried once, not twice. The pieces are small enough to cook through before the shell colours, so a second fry only dries them out.
6. Drop the basil leaves into the oil for 10 seconds at the end — they will crackle hard — and lift them straight out.
7. Drain on a rack, salt while hot, and scatter the basil over. Nothing wet goes anywhere near it.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under China · All recipes