The Secret to Crispy Thai-Style Fried Chicken

In the true words of my Thai friend Ting, who recommended this, this chicken is truly fatty, salty and oily, all in a good way. Thai style fried chicken. We tried this down a little alleyway in Bangkok recently and it was the best fried chicken I've ever tasted in my life. So I'm going to try and recreate it, but if I don't do it as well I'm very sorry. Not sorry. Because I'll just go back to Bangkok to try it again. It was that good. Okay. For me it's about the batter not only being crispy, but having really good flavour in the actual batter as well. So we're going to start off with quite a lot of garlic. I've got about six or seven large cloves or eight to nine small cloves of garlic. I'm going to get all this into a pestle and mortar in a second, so just roughly chopped. And then to join that garlic, a whole load of spring onion. Getting really finely chopped up. I've got about four or five spring onions here and it's the spring onion and garlic that really give it the base flavour of this coating. But also, because I've got quite a lot of it in here, the moisture or the liquid that will come out of pounding this spring onion, the juice, will kind of make the batter. I've got some black peppercorns here with a little bit of white pepper as well. Crush those. What I find great about proper Thai cooking is that the pestle and mortar is a Thai chef's best friend. You get all that fresh flavour from that cracked black pepper before I then add all this spring onion and garlic to the pestle and mortar. Some coriander here as well. Again, just roughly chopped. A handful or so of coriander, some for garnish later on, but I'm going to put a good amount of this into the pestle and mortar along with that spring onion and garlic. Now start to really pound that together. All the juices of the spring onion, coriander and garlic come out. I've also got some fried crispy onions here. They're going to add a really nice, deep, savoury flavour to this. But also, when you're frying this batter, you get this sort of almost quite deep, almost orangey-brown colour. And this fried onion will help with that. Of course, fried onions or pre-fried onions are most often used for garnish, you know, on top of a hot dog or something like that. It's a great sort of secret weapon ingredient. To help with the brown, sort of almost caramelised colour, that orangey-brown colour of the batter, a tablespoon of sugar works a treat. And then, for real flavour, your fish sauce. About two tablespoons of fish sauce. And that will bring that all together. Almost looks like an Asian pesto right now. Just try that for intensity. So that's about three tablespoons or so of fish sauce. Now you can see the sort of pastiness to this paste. And there's a lot of moisture come out of the spring onions and garlic and that coriander. The pounding of all those ingredients. I'm just going to add a bit more water to this. I've added about two to three tablespoons of water to the mix before I then start to bring in the flours. And this flour here is what really makes this batter a Thai batter. It's the rice flour. So I'm going to go for sort of one, two heaped tablespoons of rice flour first and see how that comes together. This is all, at this point, a little bit of an experiment because I want the batter to be sort of the right consistency to wrap around my chicken which is why I've got this extra water here. Just to bring it together and get it right. Now my oil next to me is hot so I'm just going to do a little test of, a little blob of that batter without any corn flour or anything else added to it yet. This is a good little sort of tip I guess if you're sort of creating batters like this by eye. Let that double fry. Nice thing to see is that that has stayed in one clump which is good. And secondly, if I try that. Oh, I'm very close. Great flavour, nice and salty. Could do with a pinch more sugar actually. I feel like it's a little too thick to go around the chicken so I'm just going to thin it out a little bit more. That's roughly about seven tablespoons of rice flour so far. I'm going to add one tablespoon of corn flour to get it even crispier. Now you can see that sort of dripping consistency coming off my spoon there. One half a spoon more of water just to make sure that wraps around the chicken well. Now every bag of flour you buy will be slightly different than the last one. So yes, we give you the recipe but it's good to sort of have an understanding of how to get the right consistency depending on the day. Now this chicken just needs to go in it. The classic Thai way is to slice a few slices down to the bone like so before you pop it into the batter. And that just allows all the flavour to get into the meat as well rather than just sort of sit on the outside of the skin. Got drumsticks and thighs here. Brown meat always best for fried chicken. Now this place in Bangkok is called AA Fried Chicken. You can look it up. And the auntie was just amazing. We arrived there, Lee and I, very hungry for a late lunch and it was pretty much closing shop. They had three or four slightly sorry looking chicken wings sitting pre-cooked on the side and that's all they had left. And she said, no more chicken, no more fried chicken. I was so sad. And so was Lee. And we kind of pulled a sad face and decided to get Google Translate out. But actually before we did, she came over to us with her phone and typed in her phone Can you wait 20 minutes? And our faces just lit up and we said we'll wait as long as it takes for you to fry that chicken. And sure enough, 20 minutes later, we had the best fried chicken we've ever tasted in our lives. I feel like that needs a bit more. I think that's about 10 tablespoons. So what's a tablespoon? Yeah, probably. Yeah. Now, I guess the marinade process and the batter process for this is quite particular and it takes a little bit of time. You want to get it right. But also to get the best fried chicken in the world, you need to know how to deep fry well. I've got my oil here on a medium to high heat to get it to a good temperature to start. Once I've got my chicken in and I'm not going to sort of deep fry it all in one go because it will just overflow my wok. I'll probably do four pieces, five pieces at a time. Once all those pieces are in at that sort of slightly higher heat, I'm going to turn the heat right down to medium to low heat. Let it cook for a good 12 to 15 minutes so it cooks all the way through to the bone and gets really nice and crispy on the outside. You want to test that your oil is fizzing, which it is. But I don't want it too high, as I say. But the first sort of seal of that chicken is really important. So I want it high enough to seal it all the way around. Let's make sure that that's got a good bit of batter around the chicken. And it's always good to test one piece for seal first. Let that sit in there for 30 seconds or so before you touch it. You don't want to touch it too soon. If you touch it too soon, you'll break into that batter. I'm just going to remove this now it's had its first 30 seconds. Just to show you guys, you wouldn't usually do this, but you can see that batter's sort of really sort of stayed intact where I want it to be, which is great. I'm good with that consistency. So I can start to place more chicken into the wok. Ideally, you want to get as much sort of batter around each piece as possible before you layer them in. So now that these guys have had an initial sort of hit of heat with that quite hot oil, I'm going to bring the heat down to medium to medium-low heat and let that sort of bubble away and fry and cook the chicken through for at least 12 minutes, if not 15. You can see that lovely deep colour on the chicken, on that batter. I'm salivating. I hope you are too. I mean, probably not necessary, but seeing as I've got it, a bit of coriander over the top. And I've got this homemade Nam Prik Pao Thai chilli paste that I made for a Thai omelette for another video on the side. You can find that video here. Got that right side of crispy, but with all the flavour from the herbs, the spring onion, the coriander, the garlic in there. It's just so Moorish.