How to cook YOU LIN JI (Fried chicken with spicy sauce) 〜油淋鶏〜 | easy Japanese home cooking recipe

Welcome to Taiji's Kitchen. Today I'm going to show you how to make Yurinchi, Chinese-style fried chicken with scallion sauce. So from the name itself, Yurinchi, you may notice it's not Japanese, it's Chinese. But this is also another popular Chinese dish that we often make at home in Japan. So this is actually not very complicated. You just have to prepare the chicken, fry it, and then make the sauce and put it over it. It's so, so savory, so delicious. So I really hope that you give this a try. Then, let's get started. Here are the ingredients for Yurinchi. Here I have chicken thigh meat. For this recipe, it's better to use chicken thigh, but you can, of course, use other parts of chicken. For the seasoning for chicken, I have salt and pepper and starch to coat the chicken. And of course, you need some kind of frying oil. And then for the sauce, I have scallion, ginger, garlic, a little bit of roasted sesame seeds, soy sauce, sugar, and also doubanjiang, or chili bean sauce. If you don't have this, then you can substitute this with other chili sauce. Or if you don't like it spicy, then you can skip this also. And also here, I have rice wine vinegar. If you don't have rice wine vinegar, then you can also use, like, apple vinegar. A little bit of sesame oil for the aroma. Let's start preparing the ingredients. First, I'm going to make the sauce. I'm going to cut up the scallion in thin pieces, like so, and then just cut it as thin as possible. So if you can't cut the scallion like this thin, then don't worry too much about it. It doesn't make that big of a difference if it's not too thin. And also, I wasn't able to cut like this thin when I start cooking, so it just comes with practice. The key thing of cutting thin like this is that you want to put a knuckle like this. We call this a cat's paw. Not like this so that you cut your finger, but like this so the knife touches the knuckle part of the finger, like this, and then you go sliding off your finger backwards like this. And then we're going to prepare the ginger and the garlic. So for the garlic, when you're using a garlic smasher like this, you don't need to peel the skin off. You can just put in the garlic like this with the skin on and then squeeze in. And then you have the skin left in the smasher. A little bit of a cooking hack. And then for the ginger, I'm going to kind of peel off the skin. I personally don't like wasting these fiber parts that's left in the smasher, so what I usually do is I'm going to cut this up in further pieces so that the fiber doesn't really matter. Then just put back in the sauce. And then for the sauce, I'm going to put in here 2 tablespoons of soy sauce. And then here, another tablespoon of vinegar. And then 1 teaspoon of sugar. And then 1 teaspoon of doubanjiang, or the chili bean sauce. And then there's about 2 teaspoons of sesame oil. And there's about 1-2 teaspoons of sesame seeds. So this is finished. We're going to let it sit like this until the chicken is finished. Then let's debone the chicken. So there's a way to debone the chicken as a whole piece, but I find it a little bit complicated and I find it easier to cut this in 2 pieces first. So I'm going to try to cut the thigh meat at the joint. So the bottom bone goes about like this part. And so what you want to do is you want to kind of find the joint. The joint is located a little bit above where it's kind of bending. When you put in your knife, then you kind of know, like that. And then for the bottom part, what you want to do is kind of want to make an incision like this. And then what you want to do is you want to cut the skin of the bottom part all the way through like this. And then you want to try to scrape off the meat. So you want to kind of go alongside the bone like this with your knife. And by the way, when you're deboning a chicken, or if you're cooking anything, if you're cutting anything, it's very important to have a sharp knife. There's nothing more dangerous than trying to cut things with a dull knife. So try to have always a sharp knife. So the bottom part is finished. And the top part, so there's a spine right here, so you want to go a little bit next to the spine right here. And you want to try not to cut into the bones like this. There's a bone right in the middle here, so you want to kind of try to find that bone and then go alongside here like this. And then you want to try to cut along around the bone like so. And then you want to kind of go around. And then this part there, you can kind of carve in the meat right here. So like this. And that's the top part. And there's a little cartilage here, so you want to take that, you want to cut this away as well, because otherwise it'll kind of stay in your mouth and it's not very pleasant. So that's that. So for this recipe, I want to have kind of flat. So I'm going to make a small incision like this, so that it'll be cooked evenly and faster. So with this chicken meat, I'm going to season it very lightly with salt and pepper. And also a little bit of salt and pepper on this side. And once they have been seasoned, I'm going to coat this chicken with the starch. So I'm going to put in here about a tablespoon of starch. Just enough to cover both sides. So try to put the starch all in the slits here as well, so that everywhere is covered with starch. This is finished for this chicken. Let's go fry them. So in a medium-sized pot, I'm going to put in some frying oil. And I'm going to heat this with high heat. I want to fry the chicken with about 180 to 200 degrees Celsius or so. So this has reached about 180 degrees Celsius, so I'm going to put in the chicken meat. So you want to make sure that you take off the powder part of the starch, because if you have the powder in the oil, then they'll start to burn and burn the oil, and it's not very good. So after frying this for about two minutes, and the color has turned kind of light brown, I'm going to take it off a little bit on the side. We'll let it rest for about three to five minutes or so, and let it cook on its own heat. This technique is called double frying, and the reason to do this is that if you cook this all the way in the oil, then the surface is going to get burnt, but you'll have the inside raw. So what you want to do is we're going to let it sit, and let the inside get cooked with its own heat. So we're going to let it sit like this for three minutes or so. So about three minutes has passed. I'm going to turn the heat to high again. I'm going to bring this about to 200 degrees or so. Now this has reached about 190 degrees, I'm going to put back in the meat. And we're going to fry like this for about one to two minutes, until the surface will be crispy. So after about a minute, the surface is turning crispy golden brown, then this is finished. And we're going to turn the heat off. So we're going to cut this up in small bite-sized pieces. Oh, look at this. Oh, so juicy. And then in this, I'm going to put in the scallion sauce. I'm going to sprinkle a little bit of sesame just as a garnish. Cherry tomato on the side, and a little bit of lemon. Oh, this is looking so delicious. Let's eat. Oh, this smells so good and looks so amazing. Let's eat. Itadakimasu. Let's dig in. Oh, I can't wait. Oh, this is looking so amazing. Crispy fried chicken and the scallion sauce. Itadakimasu. Oh, so good. So savoury. Oh my god. Oh, this is so delicious. Oh, this is just so divinely delicious. Oh, this is so perfect. So this chicken is fried so perfectly. Crunchy on the outside and so juicy on the inside. And this chicken is made with the scallion ginger garlic sauce. So as you notice, everything in this sauce is just full of umami. It's such a great combination. And it's also great to eat with lettuce like this. Because lettuce will kind of give a little freshness to it and give a little different touch to the flavour. Itadakimasu. So this lettuce gives a little salad flavour to it. And this is like a fried chicken salad. And this sauce and the chicken matches rice so perfectly. So there's a phrase, a compliment in Japanese, which is directly translated as the chopsticks don't stop. Meaning that it's so delicious that you can't stop eating. And this is exactly what that is. So, so amazing. And you can also squeeze in a lot of lemon to it. And this will give a little bit of refreshing flavour to it. Itadakimasu. So this lemon kind of changes up the game. And this lemon is just adding another good layer to it. Cherry tomatoes with the sauce. Also good. So this scallion sauce I just made for this recipe, you can also use it just as a regular salad dressing. This is going to match also any vegetable. Oh, I think I just kind of swallowed that. It was so delicious. Gochisosamadeshita. Oh, that was so delicious. So this is definitely one of my favourite dish. And this is definitely my favourite chicken dish. So I make this quite often, especially when I have like friends over. So because it requires frying, you may think it's a little bit difficult. But once you get kind of used to frying, then it's really not difficult. So to make this, it takes me no more than like half an hour. So I really hope that you give this a try. If you like what you saw, please hit the like button. And if you want to see more of these videos, please subscribe. And I'm always, always happy to hear feedback. So please feel free to write anything in the comments below. Then I look forward to see you in the next video. Bye.