Street Food Style Korean Fried Chicken | Anything with Alvin

This episode is sponsored by SimpliSafe, the home security system that you can customize for your needs. There's no safe like SimpliSafe. I travel a lot for work and for fun so it's important for me to know that my home is protected while I'm away. SimpliSafe is security for your whole home. The pieces are totally customizable to what you need and you can use the app to check on your arming status, lock and unlock your door, and view your cameras while you're not home. Save up to 50% on your SimpliSafe security system when you sign up for fast protect monitoring. Get your first month for free. Visit simplisafe.com slash babish to customize yours. Hello there, welcome back to an episode of Anything with Alvin, where I go and cook anything I want based off of a video that I really love. Some of my favorites are these street food vendor videos from all across the world, especially Asia, and one of my favorite things is watching these Korean fried chicken videos. In this YouTube video by Yummy Boy, they highlight a Korean fried chicken stall in Gwangjang Market in Seoul. This one in particular caught my attention because the title is fried garlic chicken but the sauce is rather interesting and apparently it uses whole garlic cloves, bananas, honey, and syrup and well it just looks really really good and I can't travel to Korea right now but I am curious in how this turns out when you make this in a large batch. Now there's no recipe given by the video so we're just gonna have to eyeball a bit. I'm gonna start by sautéing 24 whole cloves of garlic that have been peeled. These cloves of garlic are going in whole into a wok for about five minutes on medium to medium low heat with about a tablespoon of neutral oil just to brown it on all sides. Once this gets a nice color on them, I'm transferring them into a food processor where I'm just gonna blitz them until smooth just like they did in the video. Now the most fascinating part about the video is that they also blitz together whole bananas and some honey or syrup as well. I'm assuming to give the sauce some texture and as well as a flavor. I'm really curious as to how that goes so I'm plopping in three whole bananas with a nice glug of this Korean glucose syrup. It's a little thinner than high fructose corn syrup. It might just be a different version of corn syrup but it tastes sweet and it tastes good and it's going right in. This is all going to get blitzed together until the garlic, banana, and the syrup have become one homogeneous paste and well it smells like garlic and bananas which is a very weird combination but I am curious to how this performs after being cooked down a little bit. The sauce in the video also seems to have other components one of which is a soy sesame based sauce which I'm going to eyeball. It had green and white flecks in it with the white ones being sesame seeds and the green ones being parsley so I'm just chopping up a few leaves of parsley going back to the stove. As far as Korean fried chicken goes soy garlic is a pretty popular one so we're going to make a sauce by adding in one cup of soy sauce, half a cup of brown sugar, one half cup of honey, and one half cup of rice wine into a medium saucepan until the sugars have dissolved. Once that's nice and bubbly we're going to add in a tablespoon of sesames and stir and transfer back into a measuring cup. Before I realized that I forgot to add in the parsley and we should add a little bit more sesame seeds so we're going to go and put this back onto the stove and I was thinking this does look a little bit thinner than I hoped so we're going to add in one tablespoon of cornstarch slurry which is just one tablespoon of cornstarch and one tablespoon of water. Now this sauce can go directly into our garlic banana syrup puree. Let's give that a good mix and I think it does need a little bit more sweetness after giving it a tiny taste even though there's already a lot of sugar in here. Fun fact a lot of the good stuff in life tastes good because there's a lot of sugars. We're gonna add a little bit more of this syrup. Once the sauce is nice and mixed together we're gonna let this sit aside while we work on our chicken. For our chicken I'm gonna cut up two pounds of boneless skin on chicken thighs. I personally love it when the chicken thighs have skin on them when you fry them because they provide a nice chewy texture and a nice sort of tenderness. These are going to just simply get cut into one inch chunks they don't have to be exact. I honestly think Korean fried chicken tastes better when there's little bits of different pieces and sizes in there. Now in the video they have this pre-made Korean fried chicken powder mix which is pretty popular from what I've seen in restaurants. We ordered one on Amazon but it didn't come in in time so we're gonna have to make some from scratch. I'm combining two and a half cups of AP flour, one half cup of cornstarch, one tablespoon of salt, one tablespoon of MSG, two teaspoons of garlic powder, two teaspoons of onion powder, one and a half teaspoons of baking powder, one teaspoon of turmeric, one teaspoon of curry powder, one teaspoon of hot paprika. Before we proceed I'm gonna go ahead and separate about one and a half cups of this dry mix to the side. The remaining dry mix in the bowl we're gonna add enough water to make this until the consistency of about between pancake batter and crepe batter should be pretty thin. We're gonna dump our chicken in give that a good toss and then slowly strain out the chicken into another bowl with a spire. This is to avoid any excess liquid. Then we're gonna toss in the remaining dry mix into the wet chicken. This is so that the chicken can sort of be tossed around and develop a nice little battered exterior for frying. For frying we already have our large wok filled with neutral oil to about 350 degrees. Then I'm going to slowly put in one piece of chicken at a time into the oil to make sure that they don't stick. We're frying at 350 because putting the chicken in will drop this to around 325. This is sort of a longer fry, we're only single frying this time so we have to fry longer for a little bit lower. These fried for about five to seven minutes. Get taken out when they're crispy and golden brown and onto a sheet rack lined with a tray so that any excess oil can drip off. Then because I realized I was a little bit slow on the first one, Rachel is going to help me drop these in on the second one so that we can get a lot more chicken into the pan a lot quicker so that the cook time is a lot more even. Same deal, wait for them to fry up. This one took about 10 minutes because we put more chicken in and then take them out because they're crispy and let them dry on a rack. Now for the really fun part. We're gonna take our garlic, banana, soy, honey, syrup, parsley, sesame sauce and we're gonna get a nice big ladleful and put that into a wok at high heat to reduce. I'm guessing that this is the part that cooks out a lot of that garlic and raw banana flavor. Hopefully it transforms it into something a lot more delicious that we don't know about yet. So I'm gonna cook this until it's nice and sticky and dump in about half of the chicken that we have to the side. You guys can't hear this but the sound of this sort of crackly, pebbly chicken hitting the sides of a wok while you're tossing the sauce and giving it a nice crunch, it's pretty something else. Once each piece is nicely coated, we're gonna put this on a plate and continue with the second batch. Sauce goes in and gets reduced, the rest of the chicken goes in and gets a nice toss. I think we made a little bit too much sauce but that's okay, we can use that for other stuff. This is the part when watching those Korean fried chicken videos that gets me the most. I love it when they toss it with the sauce. There's just so much chicken, so much sauce, it just looks so delicious and I'm having a great time reliving that. Once the rest of the chicken goes onto the plate to join its first brother, we're gonna sprinkle with a little bit of dried parsley and well, this is it. This is our interpretation of the fried garlic chicken which is sold at the street market in Korea, one of the most famous food street markets in the world. I've watched their video probably 20 times at this point, sometimes to fall asleep, so it's pretty fun to see if I can get anything close to that as I can't really fly over there today. Let's give this a taste. Now from my experience, really good Korean fried chicken has a really crispy outside crust that stands up even though it's been glazed in a sauce, so let's see how we did. Yeah, there's definitely a crunch there. I think that long fry did a really good job at dehydrating any of the so that even though there's a sticky sauce, you can still crunch right through. The flavor is really good. I probably would have preferred it if we have the amount of banana we used. I like the soy and the garlic flavor, the banana is good, but I wish it was just a little bit more muted. Other than that, no complaints, it was really delicious and the number one rule when you have a lot of Korean fried chicken is that you must share it with friends if they are in the vicinity. So Steve, Kendall, Rachel, everybody dig in and I think they're pretty happy with it too. Can't really go wrong with fried chicken. I've never really had bad fried chicken, especially when it's warm and I definitely made Steve take home about 75% of this and he ate all of it. Thanks again to SimpliSafe for sponsoring this video. There's no safe like SimpliSafe. They keep my home protected with their cameras and sensors. With 24-7 live guard protection only from SimpliSafe, professional monitoring agents can see and speak live to intruders in your home, helping to actually stop crime in real time. If you know someone looking to increase their home security, recommend SimpliSafe this holiday season. Save up to 50% on your SimpliSafe security system when you sign up for FastProtect monitoring and get your first month free. Visit simplisafe.com slash babish to customize yours.