One of the more common Chinese dishes is a crispy fried chicken. There appear to be
different recipes: some are deep-fried, others baked, others steamed.
I maintain a deep fryer with 9 kg of fat, which needs changing about every 4 to 6 months.
When I do, I try to find something to deep fry that I can't normally do without making the fat
too dirty. Very often this is a duck, first steamed and then deep-fried.
On this occasion I decided to do it with a chicken
instead. I was astonished how difficult it was to find a good recipe. It seems that the Gods of
kitchen guesswork have been particularly active here. What I found was:
-
There are at least two basic recipes, possibly more:
-
Crispy skin chicken is marinated in salt, vinegar and honey, hung out to dry,
and then deep fried.
-
Oil-dripped chicken, for which I only found a
single recipe, is marinated in herbs, spices and soy sauce, steamed and then deep
fried.
- I chose the second.
-
The quantities and times are particularly vague. No recipe that I found wanted to cook an
entire chicken for more than 25 minutes.
The first time round I wasn't very happy with the results, and wrote:
Note: this page describes a recipe that I probably won't make again. It wasn't good
enough. Still, the information might be interesting.
The next time I tried it I had decided on it
before reading the recipe. On reflection, the main issue was that the results weren't what I
expected. I wrote:
The chicken didn't get crisp, and it was surprisingly lacking in herb and spice flavour. It
was nice and juicy, in particular the breast, much more so than an oven-roasted chicken. My
best explanation is that a chicken, particularly a larger one, is much moister than a duck,
and steaming doesn't dry out the meat the way roasting does. Maybe I should have deep fried
it at 180° instead of 160°.
This time I took heed of these comments and marinated longer and with more ingredients, and
fried at a higher temperature. It still didn't get crisp, but it did have a good spicy flavour
(i.e. of spices, not “hot”). there.
Ingredients
I always weigh solids. In particular, things like “clove of garlic” or “big
onion” mean nothing. In a previous version of this recipe I included a “traditional
measures” column, but it's really very inaccurate and difficult to synchronize, so I've
removed it. See the weights and measures page for more details.
quantity |
ingredient |
step |
|
1.5 kg |
chicken |
1 |
|
2 g |
star anise |
2 |
5 g |
black pepper |
2 |
25 g |
spring onion |
2 |
9 g |
ginger |
2 |
50 ml |
light soy sauce |
2 |
50 ml |
cooking sherry or other light white wine |
2 |
|
|
oil for deep frying |
4 |
|
20 g |
spring onion |
5 |
5 g |
szechauan pepper |
5 |
5 ml |
sesame oil |
5 |
|
1: The chicken
Clean the chicken, remove the parson's nose.
2: The marinade
Grind the pepper and star anise, coarsely chop ginger and spring onions, and chop finely in a
blender with the liquids. Pour over the chicken and marinate for at least 2 hours, but not more
than 24:
3: Steaming
Steam the chicken for an hour or so until it looks cooked. Measure with a meat thermometer if
possible. The temperature on the inside of the joint at the top of the legs should be 80°.
4: Deep frying
Deep fry in fat at 180° until crispy. Be careful to ensure that the chicken is relatively dry
before putting in the fat.
5: Serving
Chop the chicken into serving size pieces. Chop the spring onion, grind the pepper, and
sprinkle over the chicken with some sesame oil.
Other recipes
I've already pointed at the oil-dripped
chicken recipe. This is identical to the recipe printed in “Pei Mei's Chinese Cook
Book, Volume 1” (Taipei, 1969), and I'm left wondering whether there aren't some
significant copyright issues here (quite apart from the question whether this is a Chinese or
Vietnamese dish).
There are more recipes for “Crispy skin chicken”. Here are some that look
relatively typical:
-
The Star online's recipe.
This is pretty close to the average.
-
Vietnamese
crispy skin chicken. Again, I have my doubts as to the ethnicity.
-
Lanka
Link. This one is interesting because it uses chicken breasts, not what you'd normally
expect.
All these recipes, without exception, have completely illusory cooking times. None cooks a
whole chicken for more than 25 minutes, and some cook for as little as 3 minutes. I'm left
wondering whether crispy chicken softens the brain.
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