Korean Fried Chicken - One of my Top 3 favourite fried chicken recipes

Korean fried chicken. It's definitely in the top three of fried chickens in my opinion and it's really not that difficult or that expensive to pull together. We're going to make a whole bunch of fried chicken today with some sides all for under 25 Australian dollars. But is it the top fried chicken? Let's find out. It's way cheaper to buy whole birds and break them down yourselves. So I'm going to show you how to do that first. If you don't want to break down bird yourself you can just buy drumsticks. They're normally pretty affordable as well. But I like doing the whole birds because then you get some of the dark meat some of the light meat you know everyone's happy. Take them out of the packet and get them nice and dry and then we're going to take the legs off first. Run your blade between the bottom of the breast and the top of the leg. Then you're going to twist this leg out until the the joint of the leg that meets the carcass pops out. Like that. Then just run your blade as close as you can to the rest of the and you've got a leg. We're going to split that leg in half so you have the drumstick and the thigh and again find the middle cut it down and if you get it right in the right spot you can cut right through. If you don't find that joint straight away feel around for it and then you'll find it. From there you can trim a little bit of this fat off but I think that's what makes the the the thigh meat so delicious is that fat. But if it is a little bit too much then then feel free to trim that off. There you go there's the first two pieces. Just quickly whip this other leg off. This is what we call the crown of the chicken once it's got the depth bottom part off. I'll show you that just because why not. So if you cut down the middle of the frame and you're going to see here it kind of opens up. What we're trying to do is cut this back spine off. So make sure the wings are out the way and then just cut straight down like so and then that there is the crown. Now keep this makes delicious stock. So from here you can take these these breasts off the bone. I prefer to leave them on. I think you get like a better flavor the the bottom part of the bone or the carcass kind of protects the breast a bit. So just run your your blade down the center and then with a bit of force you should be able to cut right through the middle. From here just trim out the bottom and then I like to take that wing part off and keep that as a piece. Make sure there's none of that neck bone left there. Pull that out and you'll find where that wing attaches to the rest of the carcass. Like the other joints you'll be able to cut right through it. So there you go you got a wing and then this piece I'll leave that backbone on there. Just make sure you warn your guests or if you've got kids that are eating this feel free to whip that off. But I'm just going to cut that right down the center and right through and you've got two pieces of the breast. The same with this side it's got a bit more of the neck on we'll get rid of that. Get rid of that bit of fat there and take that wing piece off and we'll cut this breast in half. There you go there's one chicken broken down. We'll break this other one down and then we will season these and marinate them. All right now we're going to get our chicken into a bowl and we're going to season it. Now you can leave this to season for two three hours if you want. I'm just going to do it for an hour. To season our chicken ginger, garlic, pepper, salt. So this all depends on how much chicken that you are cooking at one time but I'll give you in the recipe below I'll give the amounts that I use for two chickens and if you're just doing one then just half it. And we're just going to grate some ginger in there and garlic. I'm going to give that a good toss just to make sure especially that salt and pepper or all of it really is all well incorporated and all over the chicky. Now ginger is definitely in Korean food but I think the the more prominent aroma is garlic. You find a lot of garlic in Korean food and I think that's one of the reasons I love it. All right I'm going to wash my hands and we'll get this in the fridge to chill out for a couple hours. All right it's time to make the sauce. Without a doubt the most important ingredient in the sauce is gochujang or Korean chili bean paste. There's different levels of temperature with this and it appears that they're kiddie proof. I usually go for the medium hot one. I think that's kind of a nice level. The extremely hot one is extremely hot. I've got a decent tolerance for spice. If hot ones ever want me on I should get through it but I won't have a good time. Whoa what's going on here? It's all right I got it guys. So now I've fought with that for a while. We've got that open. So gochujang, ginger. I like quite a lot of ginger and I like to microplane it. You can just crush it and use your knife if you want to. I'm gonna do it onto that. Save my board smelling like garlic. I just call this ginger. I don't know why. It's clearly garlic. Done. All right I know it looks like I'm overkill. I'm cooking this in a much bigger pot than I or a wok than I should be but that's because I'm going to toss all the chicken in a medium low heat. Before it gets too hot add your garlic. Just about called it ginger again. And we're just cooking that so it's just slightly fragrant. Just want to get rid of some of that really strong garlicky smell. Then add the gochujang. Some tomato ketchup. People always say oh you're cheating using tomato ketchup. I'm not making it. Just buy it. Honey. I'm using hot honey because it kind of makes sense. Three tablespoons. You can usually use brown sugar if you don't have hot honey. Vinegar. To be perfectly honest should be rice wine vinegar. I don't have any so apple cider will do. And salt. We're also just going to add a little dash of water to help kind of let it down a bit. So turn that back on to a medium low heat. And just kind of get all those ingredients worked in together into the same the same sauce. And then you don't want to reduce this too much. You just kind of want it you know loose enough to you can toss the chicken in it easily. But not so loose that it doesn't stick to the chicken. If that makes sense. And of course a little bit of soy sauce. It's a Korean soy sauce. The first time I've had that it's really good. I'm going to cook that for another two or three minutes. Just want it to thicken up slightly more and it's good to go. Delicious. Sweet. Savory. Salty. A little bit spicy. Nothing wrong with that at all. All right. Time to fry some chicken I guess. So we're going to dredge our chicken. But before we do that let's get the oil on. So you want a large pot. You only want to fill it about halfway. For safety you don't want to boil over. And I'm going to use peanut oil. You will kind of want any high temperature oil. Canola. Peanut. You could actually do it in olive oil if you wanted to. There's a big a big burger chain in New Zealand that fries their chicken in olive oil. People in the comments are going to be like you can't fry in olive oil. You can. It's just very expensive. Put a lid on it. Makes the heat up faster. So our chicken. Two eggs. Straight in. Now this is the trick to crispy Korean fried chicken. Potato starch. For some reason I don't. I'm not a food scientist so I don't know the reason why. But it gets way crispier than even cornstarch. So you get equal quantities. So that's about a cup of potato starch. And I made a mess. And a cup of just plain wheat flour. Now there's no denying it this is messy and you kind of have to use your hands. So start working that stuff around. Careful because if that cornstarch puffs out it goes everywhere. You just want everything evenly coated. There's a couple of different methods for breading Korean fried chicken. There's also a method where you use like a dry dredge and then you use a wet dredge. Which also works really really well. I just like this one because it's just a bit easier at home. You're not kind of double double dredging. But I think my eggs were a bit small and I'm going to add another egg. That's what home cooking is all about. It's adapting. Daz can you get me an egg? Go on. No pressure. Perfect. That's better. The other thing that you want is all these like scraggly bits. Those nice little crispy bits that are so nice to eat. What makes it all crunchy. All right so that's what you're looking for. You know it's the the chicken's all coated. It's got little scraggly bits on it. That looks good to go. To be perfectly honest I probably should have used a bigger bowl. It would have been easier to get a more even coat. But I'm pretty happy with that. I'm going to clean my hands and then we will start frying some chicken. Now I've got clean hands and the oil is heating up. It's a great time to remind you that I wrote a cookbook and the link for it is below. And it's got this fantastic jerk chicken recipe in it. Another awesome spicy chicken. Let's get frying. All right so we're going to double fry this chicken. The first fry we're going to cook at 175 degrees celsius. And the second fry I want to cook 190 degrees celsius. I'm going to remind myself of those fahrenheit temperatures. So that's 350 fahrenheit 375 fahrenheit. So to get ready make sure you've got your pot. You've got this thermometer so you know what temperature it is. Probably aim a bit higher for the first fry because it's going to drop as soon as you put chicken in there anyway. And then have a rack ready pair of tongs and a scoop. So let's get frying. Because we're doing this in batches don't be afraid to do a few at a time. And don't overcrowd your oil. So this first fry is all about setting that that crust and starting to cook the chicken. Now it doesn't need to be cooked completely through. It will keep cooking once you pull it out. And use your intuition right. So these wings are going to cook a little bit faster than these big thigh pieces. So you're going to pull those wings out first. But that's all the color you're looking for like we've got on these wings in this first fry. And be really careful. Make sure you're using tongs. Have one of these nearby as well which will help to you know have somewhere to rest the oil. You want to keep as much oil in there as opposed to on the tray. So we're just going to fry the rest of this. Once it's all done we'll turn the oil back up. All right there's the first fry done. It's a pretty good looking tray of fried chicken. Now we're going to let this really come up with the temperature. So like I was saying we want this at 190 degrees celsius for the moment to start doing the second fry. Then we'll toss it through the sauce and we can start eating some fried chicken. We're at 190. Time for the second fry. And now we're looking for really nice color. And there we go. Our chicken beautifully fried. Wow that looks pretty good. So the chicken's fried twice. It's definitely cooked through. We've got our sauce. I'm actually going to pull half of this out because I'm only going to attempt to toss half at once. Turn that heat back on that. Just control that temperature because you don't want the sauce to reduce anymore. I'm going to add half of the chicken and the stuff that came out of the fryer first. Obviously it's had the longest to cool down. You can turn that off altogether now. You just want it hot so it kind of is a bit looser and when we start tossing it'll stick nicer to the chicken. Now we're going to carefully start tossing. Warning it may get messy. And you really want to make sure that it's all coated. You don't want any dry bits on there. Start piling on our plate. Then we'll get the rest in. The other thing to remember is that if you're someone that in your family doesn't like spicy, just serve it to them like this. There's nothing wrong with that at all. A little bit of salt on the top. Delicious. Making a bit of a mess here today. A tower of chicken. Is that going to stay there? I'm going to take all my skill to get this last piece on here. Oh no. Garnish with some sesame seeds. Some spring onions. And there you go. Arguably one of the best fried chickens out there. I'm going to clean up. This is a disaster. And then we'll eat it. So there you go. A big old plate of delicious Korean fried chicken. I like to serve it with some steamed rice, a bowl of kimchi and a really fresh cucumber salad. Just simply dressed with some sesame seeds and a bit of rice wine vinegar. But I guess it's time to taste. It's crazy how that crust still stays crispy even though it's covered in sauce. Beautifully seasoned. Nice and spicy but not overpowering. Sweet, salty, savory. What is not to like about that? Korean fried chicken. That's definitely top three fried chickens in my head. But is it number one? I'm not so sure. Why don't you let me know in the comments where you would rate this on fried chickens. And also let me know what you think my favorite is. Thanks for watching Legends. Like this video if you took anything from it. Subscribe if you're not. And we'll see you next week for another recipe. Peace.