How to Make Taiwanese Fried Chicken

It's crispy, crunchy, light and airy, but not greasy. This is the best chicken I've ever made. Walk into any of Taiwan's night markets and you'll be hit with the delicious aromas of Taiwanese fried chicken. Dozens of vendors selling crispy, airy, crunchy fried chicken cutlets or popcorn chicken. What makes Taiwanese fried chicken different? American fried chicken typically uses wheat flour. Here, we're not using any flour at all. In fact, we're just using starches and the marinade itself as a way to adhere the starches. That results in a super crispy, crunchy coating with very, very little greasiness. I'm gonna show you how to make both versions, the popcorn chicken and the giant cutlet, starting from the butchery to the marinating to the dredging and frying, and finally seasoning with our not-so-secret spice blend. Let's get into it. We're on to step one, butchery. I have some boneless, skinless chicken thighs and some boneless, skinless chicken breasts. I'm gonna show you how to butcher the chicken thighs first for the popcorn chicken. So I'll set aside these cutlets. Now, we're using chicken thighs here primarily because it gives us a little bigger window for cooking. The thing about chicken thighs is that they can be cooked to a relatively higher internal temperature, so that lends itself to something that's small with a small form factor like popcorn chicken. What I'm looking for here, one-inch pieces. So I've just split it in half. I'm just gonna go in half again for this particular piece, and then I'm going to just cut about one-inch pieces. One thing I like about chicken thighs in particular is that there's a lot of irregularity. That's because they've been boned out. The bone has been taken out. There's a lot of texture and a lot of opportunity for the dredge to adhere, and so you end up with a really nice, craggy, crispy result. Big things I would look out for, big pockets of fat, sinew, things like this, membranous sort of fatty tissue. If there's anything like that, I'll just trim it off. And that is all of our chicken thigh cut into one-inch pieces, ready to marinate. Our chicken thigh is done. I'm gonna set this off to the side. Before we get into cutlet butchery, I'm gonna need a Ziploc bag. I also need a mallet. So I'm just making a little incision, cutting the bag open on two sides, and then you should have a little opening like that. I've got two chicken breasts. They're roughly 400 grams each, so just shy of two pounds. I am just removing some of this extra tissue. Maybe if there's membrane here, I might come in and peel it off. I'm just gonna trim a little bit here, and then we're left with a pretty clean breast. Before I pound it, though, I wanna do a couple things. So I'm gonna hold it point-side down toward me, and if I look at the breast itself, I actually see a seam here, and that seam is where the tenderloin used to be. So I'm just gonna make a small incision right at this little crotch here, tiny, tiny incision. At a certain point, you're gonna encounter some connective tissue, so you actually just wanna go knife up, and then that snaps that connective tissue slightly, and then you can continue with a tiny, tiny incision, and that's literally all you need to do for that side. And so at that point, when you go out to pound it, it's gonna be really nice and flat, and it'll pound out very easily without encountering some tough connective tissue. Now, because I'm left-handed, I'm actually gonna flip this 180. You'll notice that the chicken breast kind of slopes up this way, so it kind of goes up like this way. So I'm really gonna be focused on butterflying this fat portion. I'm not being very aggressive here. I'm just coming in long strokes. I'm just teasing apart that meat, and I'm really focused, if you can see on camera, on this part. It'll get thinner over here. I'm not too worried about that. I'm being really careful not to cut through the meat, because that would create a hole in our cutlet. And so I'm just going light strokes, really light strokes, flattening and pressing as I go. I don't wanna go too aggressive. I'm pretty happy with that. From here, we can start pounding out. So a smooth to slightly ridged edge or surface will do. And I'm just lightly pounding initially, working from the center out. I'm being really careful at the seam where I butterflied, because if I do hit too hard, I am gonna create a hole. So I really just wanna do very light pounding when I encounter that seam. But otherwise, I'm kind of going to town. So I'm looking for roughly a quarter inch, maybe up to a half inch, between a quarter and a half is a sweet spot. I'll flip, just get the other side. Now we have a really nice butterflied and flattened cutlet. Only other job I might consider is if I wanted to add a little bit of texture to the smooth side, I would take my knife and just gently tap it like this, and that'll add a little bit of texture, and that will help some of the batter adhere and also the dredge to adhere. So that's one cutlet done, and we'll continue on. All right, so we have our butterflied and pounded cutlets. We've got our chicken thighs cut into one inch pieces. They're both ready to marinate. Marinade is the same across the board. We are going to add light soy sauce. That contributes most of the salinity, if not all of the salinity, in the marinade itself. We also have mijiu, which literally translates to rice wine. It's a fermented rice wine, Chinese rice wine. It is very reminiscent of sake. It's used for both cooking and drinking, so it has a very sweet, sort of slightly dry, but also mild flavor that lends itself to this application. We've got some white pepper, and finally, most importantly, five spice. It defines the profile of Taiwanese fried chicken. So just give it a whisk, and then you're left with this brownish liquid. It is very powerful, though, and smells very, very intense, which is great, because we want to marinate and get a lot of flavor into our chicken. So for our chicken thighs, we go straight in. We're just gonna mix to coat. Just gently drape them in. Instead of really working with my fingers, I'm just sort of picking up and tossing to coat, because these are a little bit more delicate. I don't want to disturb the meat as much. As long as everything is coated, we should be good. So we have marinated our chicken thighs for popcorn chicken, our chicken breast cutlets for our daji pie. Once they're done marinating, we're gonna get ready to dredge and fry. For Taiwanese fried chicken, it's very common to have a spicy seasoning powder that's sprinkled on after it's fried. It's really nice, because out of the fryer, the chicken is super hot. So when you sprinkle on some of the seasoning powder, it blooms. It actually turns a little bit darker, and then you really get more aroma coming off. We're gonna start by grinding some of our ingredients. Chili flake, heaven-facing chilies ground up. Some julienne powder. We've got salt, of course. And I'm just gonna give this maybe 10 to 15 pulses. And so that's at a pretty good point for me. They're still, like, very, very small chunks, but I kind of like that textural variance. So I'm just gonna go straight into a bowl here. We have our ground elements. Let's finish off the seasoning blend. So we've got a little bit of sugar, some white pepper, and then finally, our rice vinegar powder. It's usually mixed with a bulking agent, something like maltodextrin. It adds nice acidity without being overpowering. I don't have to grind these things, because they're already finely ground enough. So I'm just whisking them in. If I'm picking it up, it feels really nice in my hands. That is our finished seasoning blend, ready to use. We need to thicken our marinade. Instead of, say, dipping this chicken in, like, buttermilk or, like, eggs, we're just gonna thicken the marinade itself. Let's first start with our chicken thighs. This is gonna be our popcorn chicken. For thickening, we have two ingredients. We've got a little bit of egg white. I did say that traditionally, maybe you would dip in whole eggs, but we do need a little bit of sticky protein here, so egg white is really helpful for that. We also have tapioca starch, and this is one of two starches that we'll be using. The reason why we're using two starches as opposed to one is because we want two separate phases here to create a sort of discernible barrier. Almost creates, like, a membrane. I tested into this. I used just one starch across the board in various trials, and I just wasn't getting as crispy of a result as opposed to using two different starches. Tapioca starch in particular is super cool because it doesn't necessarily gum up in the way that, say, wheat flour or even potato starch does. It sort of retains this nice, almost chewy, crispy, squeaky membrane, and it retains a lot of moisture in a pleasant way without getting gummy. So we're gonna add our egg whites and our tapioca starch. And I'm really just working it with my fingers and my hand. I'm just looking to hydrate all of that tapioca starch. And the more I work it with my fingers and agitate, the stickier things get. And so you end up with these pieces that are really nicely coated in this starch marinade slurry. And that's gonna go a long way to getting a nice, uniform, crispy coating. So those are our coated chicken thighs. Now, onto our chicken cutlet. The order of operations is very similar. Ingredients are all the same, but a couple differences. I'm gonna need a separate tray. I'm gonna need a whisk. And we have our starch and our egg white. Depending on the marinade time, there might be a case where there's less marinade left in the bowl and not enough liquid to really hydrate the starch. So one egg white is a good starting point. And if you need more, you could add up to an additional egg white. So I have that just in case here. Instead of dumping all the starch and egg white in and mixing, mixing, and really agitating, I'm gonna remove the cutlets first because they are more delicate. I don't wanna blow apart the meat and ruin all that hard work. And you'll notice these cutlets actually took up more of the marinade. That's okay. That's what our extra egg white is for. We'll go in with our tapioca. We've got one egg white. Just give a whisk. Immediately, I can tell there's not enough liquid in the bowl to really hydrate the starch. So I'm gonna need a little bit more egg white to help it along. So I've got an additional egg white here. Just gonna add that in. And some nice agitation. And that is a nice batter. It's a sticky little batter. So at this point, I'm gonna add in our cutlets. And just like the chicken thighs, they are well coated in this slurry situation. It's got sticky egg white protein as well as starch. So the marinade has been thickened. These are ready to dredge and fry. So I've got both the chicken cutlet and the chicken thighs for popcorn chicken here. Process is pretty much the same ingredients wise, just a little bit of technique difference here. I've got a landing spot for our dredged material. So that'll be here. I've got my fryer oil going. I'm setting this to 360 degrees. I've got a spider, got some tongs. Lastly, we are going to need a container, a large shallow container of our secret ingredient, sweet potato starch. Specifically, coarse sweet potato starch. Now this, many would argue, is integral to achieving the texture of classic Taiwanese fried chicken. Sweet potato starch and the coarse variety in particular has some unique properties. It has a unique composition of amylose and amylopectin. Those starches, once they hydrate, once they're cooked, they form a really brittle, crispy lattice sort of network, right? Also the granule size. Because of this larger granule size, your perception of crunchiness is actually greater. So you get this balance that's really unique. It's super crunchy, crispy, and then it yields to like a little bit of a chewiness that's super, super pleasant. Coarse sweet potato starch, in my opinion, essential to good Taiwanese fried chicken. So we've got our big cutlet chicken thighs. They are sitting in this marinade, super gloppy and thick. So I'm going half at a time just because I don't want to overwhelm the container here and the fryer. So we're going to be going in batches. This is a situation where you're going to want to go straight from dredging to frying. So I'm just shaking the container, trying to get everything coated. We did our job right. That egg white and tapioca starch mixture creates this nice glue for the sweet potato starch to really adhere. And that's well-coated in the starch. So both our popcorn chicken and our chicken cutlet are dredged and ready for their first fry. So I've got my oil heated to 360 degrees. This is two and a half inches of oil in a wok. We're going to go straight in. This is a double fry process. The first fry is really to cook the chicken through and to evaporate most of the moisture. And in this first few seconds, I'm giving a little bit of a stir, just a little bit of agitation to release things from the bottom. These are going to cook for about two to three minutes, not very long at all, until most of the moisture will have evaporated and the chicken is cooked through. All right, it's been about three minutes. And that is the first half of our popcorn chicken. For the cutlet, I would budget around four to six minutes for this initial cook. And that's really to drive off all that moisture, just like the popcorn chicken, and to cook the cutlet through. It's a big piece, so it will take a little bit longer. Give it a flip. All right. And I'm going to pull it at this point, right around the 530 mark. Let it drain sideways. Both our cutlets have gone through their first fry. Both of our batches of popcorn chicken have gone through their first fry. We're ready for our second fry. I'm bringing up the oil temperature to 375, a little bit higher, and that is meant to drive off all the rest of the moisture, get a really crispy result. Also get these a little more golden brown. To finish this up, I've got seasoning powder that we made earlier. And also traditional with Taiwanese popcorn fried chicken is Thai basil. And this will get deep fried at the very end and served together with our fried chicken. The last thing we'll need is a landing spot. So a big old bowl. I like a big bowl like this because you can really toss it without losing all your chicken. And that's going to be great for seasoning. So, all right, our oil is heated. Let's drop our chicken. Do not drop from high. I like to drop from the side, so there's no big splashes. And you'll notice with this second fry, the temperature drop isn't as significant. And that's because these items are hotter to begin with. In the first fry, the chicken was quite cold. It was straight from the fridge even. So the temperature drop was significant. These bubbles are getting fewer and fewer, starting to die down a little bit. And at this point, I'll start pulling straight into the bowl. Hear that? Very crispy. All right, we are right around the four minute mark. Super crispy. Drain it off and set it down. And I'm going to hit them immediately with our seasoning blend while it's still hot. And that's really to let the spice mixture bloom. At this point, we're going to plate it up, eat it. But can't forget our fried basil. I'm just going to turn off the fryer because the residual heat is plenty enough to cook this amount of fried basil.