Greg's oil-dripped chicken

Work in progress

This is an old recipe that I haven't looked at since 2007. I've brought the format up to date, but I need to try cooking it again.

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.

Ingredients

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

Preparation

Clean the chicken, remove the parson's nose.

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:

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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°.
Deep fry in fat at 180° until crispy. Be careful to ensure that the chicken is relatively dry before putting in the fat.
Chop the chicken into serving size pieces. Chop the spring onion, grind the pepper, and sprinkle over the chicken with some sesame oil.

Discussion

I first cooked this recipe on 5 March 2005. 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. And since I wrote it, all the links have decayed. 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, which is now also gone, 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.

On this occasion I wasn't very happy with the results, but 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.

Other recipes

There are more recipes for “Crispy skin chicken”, but they have now all disappeared. That's not a great loss: all these recipes, without exception, had completely illusory cooking times. None cooks a whole chicken for more than 25 minutes, and some cook for as little as 3 minutes. I was left wondering whether crispy chicken softens the brain.