Crispy Korean Fried Chicken At Home

If your Korean fried chicken doesn't look like this and sound like this, you're probably making it wrong. We'll start with a quick chicken marinade by combining some rice wine or, alternatively, a little apple juice and rice vinegar, as well as a few smashed cloves of garlic, a bit of freshly grated ginger, and a little salt and pepper. And we'll give this a quick mix. Now we'll prep our chicken. I'm using boneless, skinless chicken thighs. These have a higher fat content than chicken breasts, which means they'll stay juicy when we double fry them. I'm cutting my chicken here into two-inch chunks and dropping it straight in the marinade as I go. It's okay if they're a little bit different sometimes, but remember, the more uniform, the more even they cook. Now that our chicken's all in that marinade, I'll give it a mix, make sure that chicken's fully coated, and then we'll cover this up in plastic wrap and let it rest at room temperature for 30 to 60 minutes. And in the meantime, we'll work on our pickled radish. Why does Korean fried chicken always come with pickled daikon? Well, this style of chicken is fatty, sticky, and has lots of sauce. So pickled daikon acts as the perfect palate cleanser to cut through all that richness. Not only does it give a nice sweet and sour balance, it's also one of the crunchiest foods I can possibly think of. Listen. To make our pickling liquid, I'm going to put a medium pot over high heat and add in some water, rice wine vinegar, sugar, and salt. And I will bring this to a boil until the sugar and salt have dissolved. We'll pour this over our daikon, cover them up, and place them in the fridge until you're ready to eat. I'm going to show you two different sauces for the chicken because I think everyone should know both. First will be yangnyeom, the most famous Korean fried chicken sauce in the world. And the second, soy garlic, my personal favorite. For the yangnyeom, I'll add some gochujang, which is a Korean fermented red chili paste, then some sugar, rice syrup. This basically tastes like honey but with a little bit of a rice flavor to it. Ketchup, soy sauce, minced garlic, rice vinegar, gochugaru, which is Korean red pepper chili flakes, and some toasted sesame oil. Now we'll turn the heat up to medium, and once it begins to bubble like this, turn the heat to low and cook for six to seven minutes until glossy. Once that's done, we'll make our soy garlic. This one starts over low heat where we'll add in some toasted sesame oil, minced garlic. Sesame oil burns very easily, so make sure you stir, stir, stir. The goal here is to get rid of any bitterness in the garlic, so I'm only going to do this for about two to three minutes. Now I'll add in my soy sauce, a little bit of sugar, as well as some rice syrup, and a little splash of mirin. I'll bring this up now to medium heat, still stirring constantly, and cook for about four to five minutes until it thickens up. Every so often, if this one bubbles up, you can move it off the heat and then keep stirring. You don't want to burn that soy sauce. Our sauces are done, which means time for chicken. This next part is quick and easy. There's already so much flavor in the marinade and the sauces that we don't need to do much with the dry dredge. My method when frying is always the same. I've got one glove to take the wet stuff and put it into the dry stuff, and then I've got one glove to coat whatever it is I'm frying in all that dry dredge. Like any time we fry, we really want to squeeze it into the chicken here, and once it's fully coated, give it a little shake and put it off to the side. I did that first piece so you could see what I was doing, but now I can go in bigger batches. What that glove trick does is make sure that I'm not coating my fingers with all that batter. You know when they get really thick as you go back and forth? This trick totally fixes that. I'm also curious to see if I'm gonna like the soy garlic marinade we just made more than the yangnyeom. Watching this, you also may wonder why we're using potato starch. Think about the perfect french fry and that shatteringly crispy crunch that you get with it. That is what potato starch gives us. It can be a little tricky to find here, but if you look in the right places, you can definitely get it. I make absolutely sure here that every nook and cranny of that chicken is fully coated. I'm now realizing I'm gonna need a much bigger tray for this, and I'm just gonna fast forward now through the rest of the dredging process so you don't have to wait. Now it's time to fry. We'll fry our chicken in two different stages. First, at 300 Fahrenheit for what I call the cooking stage, because we're cooking the chicken at a lower temperature to cook it all the way through, but not getting any color quite yet. You'll see I also create this gentle vortex so the chicken pieces don't stick to each other here. We're frying for about six to eight minutes just to get it cooked through. Once done, I'll toss it on a paper towel, wire rack line, baking sheet, and space it out just so those pieces of chicken don't steam each other and become soggy, and then I'll continue with the second batch. Like I said, I'm making a lot of chicken, but don't worry, not gonna make you watch this all over again. The second stage of frying is at a higher temperature, where we want to get that golden brown crispy crust, and this one I call the frying stage. With this stage, I like to move the chicken around to make sure every piece is hitting the oil in different heat spots. That way, it'll crisp up evenly, and the nice thing about this frying stage is that your chicken should already be fully cooked, which means this stage is mostly visual. When you feel like your chicken is golden brown enough, you can take it out. You should also be constantly monitoring your temperature to see where you're at. I'm supposed to be frying at 350 right now, and I'm right at 358, which is perfect. When it looks something like this, we're good to pull it. Listen to this. Nice. And listen to this. Almost bit my finger off. For this batch, we're going to use our Yum Yum sauce. A little goes a long way, so let's first see how this looks. There's something that happens when you add on this sauce. It immediately, with all that sugar, becomes this sweet, sticky, tacky sauce. I'm just plating it messy because I don't even care. Oh my gosh. You gotta be kidding me. Remember, we still have to make our soy garlic real quick. It's hot and foamy, as you can see. That's perfect. I've had it over low this whole time. Here we go. Look at that foam. Looks like espresso. Oh, I smell it. It's nutty, caramelized, so different from our other one. I'm already eating so much of it. This is the most I've eaten before something's been plated in all of Nick's kitchen. So hot, it's burning my fingers, but I don't even care. Most Korean fried chicken spots garnish in the exact same way. A few chopped green onions over the chicken. It looks nice and gives that fresh flavor. And some toasted sesame seeds. And of course, we can't forget about the pickled radish. And now the big question, which is better? We're going to start with the Yum Yum. That is insane. There's sweet, there's heat, there's umami, there's tang. It's got the most perfect balance of any chicken ever. And the nice thing is we've got our palate cleanser, this pickled daikon. And now for the soy garlic. This one packs a deep caramelized, rich umami flavor right away. It's right on the verge of being too salty from all that soy sauce, but it's not quite there. This is hard. Both of the best bites of Korean fried chicken I've ever had. But the real question still, which one is better? I guess you'll never know. I'd say I'm joking, but I honestly can't decide. They're both too good.