Cooking The Books

Some Japanese Fried Chicken This Time - Karaage (or is it Kara-Age?)

I recently posted about Korean Fried Chicken and in the comments Mr Noodles suggested I needed to make some Japanese Karaage for the blog.  Not wanting to miss out on any excuse to fry some chicken here it is, I think it will be the first in a few fried chickens, adding to the Chicken 65, Southern Fried and Korean Fried Chicken that are already on here to make a complete(ish) guide to the Fried Chickens of this world.  Feel free to suggest some more.

I've already stated that it is the coating that makes fried chicken and the karaage method calls on a starch for this purpose.  Cornflour (or cornstarch as it's known in a lot of places) gives a coating that is harder and more durable than wheat flour or batter - knobbly and lumpy and keeping its crunch for a long time.

In karaage, before coating the chicken takes a reasonably short marinade in sake, soy, ginger juice and sesame oil.  The bath is short so the salt in the soy doesn't toughen the meat but it's long enough to impart its flavour on the smallish morsels.  For health purposes you can use breast if you want (but it's not very forgiving and turns dry rapidly) or you can omit the skin if you do choose thighs.  This is deep-fried food though, so forget trying to be healthy and leave the skin on, it will crisp up delightfully, giving another layer of texture between the crunch of cornflour and the juicy thigh meat underneath.

Karaage (Kara-Age) Recipe

A good snack for 3-4 people

Ingredients

7-8 Chicken Thighs with skin, or without if you must

3 TB Japanese/light soy

3 TB sake

8cm ginger

Few splashes of sesame oil

Cornflour to coat

Method

If the thighs still have their bones in take them out, they're handy for making a chicken stock.  Cut each thigh into medium chunks, maybe 4-6 per thigh depending on its size.

Roughly chop the ginger and then blend in a mini-blender with the soy, sake and sesame oil.  Strain the marinade through muslin to remove all the ginger fibres then marinate the chicken in it for 45 minutes.

Remove the chicken into a sieve, shaking to remove excess marinade, then dump into a bowl with a couple of handfuls of cornflour, coating well.

Heat oil to 180C and fry the chicken, in batches so the oil stays hot, until it floats - around 3 minutes.

With the oil still at 180C add the chicken back and fry till golden, this time around 2.5 minutes.  For this second fry I'm happy to put the chicken in all together as it is still hot from the first fry so doesn't bring the temp of the oil down like cold chicken does.

We ate this dry, but it would happily take mayonnaise, chili sauce or Japanese katsu sauce (or a squeeze of lemon or some ponzu) as a dip.

Korean Fried Chicken

I adore fried chicken, whether it's nuggets of chicken 65, a leg or two chopped up on a mee goreng in Malaysia or even a KFC (sorry chickens). I think the crisp coating is the perfect way to pep up what can be an underwhelming meat. With fried chicken the light flavour of the bird works perfectly, adding the texture that all meat eaters love whilst allowing whatever is on the outside to shine, and let's admit it - the coating is the high point.

With this in mind when I heard of the double-frying method of Korean Fried Chicken - the first rendering fat from the skin, the second crisping up - that left the skin delicate and thin and with crunch that didn't go, I had to find a recipe and give it a try.  Add to this a fiery sauce, packed with flavour from the fermentation of the chilli, and it stayed on the to-do list for far less time than most dishes.  I read a few American websites, where it seems to be a popular dish, and played with them until I got this, whether it's traditional I don't know but it is damn tasty.

There's one slightly awkward to get ingredient in this and that is the aforementioned Korean fermented chili sauce, or gochujang, and unfortunately it's the main ingredient in the sauce.  It was easy enough to find in London though (in the Korean section upstairs in Gerrard Street's New Loon Moon), or you can buy it online and according to this you can even make it.  It really is worth trying to get some as the flavour is quite distinctive, although if you're more fussed about trying the crunch than the sauce I guess you could try using sriracha instead but the taste won't be the same. Alternatively just cook the wings using this method and dip them in whatever sauce you fancy.

Korean Fried Chicken

1kg - 1.25kg of chicken wings

Plain flour to dust

Batter

1/2 cup plain flour

1 TB cornflour

1 cup water

1/2 ts salt

Sauce

1.5 to 2 TB gochujang

1 TB light soy sauce

1 ts sesame oil

2 ts rice vinegar

1 ts sugar

1 clove of garlic

Method

For the sauce grind the garlic to a paste with the back of a knife, a pinch of salt helps here.  Mix this with all the other sauce ingredients and you're done.

Next off you need to prepare the wings. I may make myself look like a bit of an idiot here but I always wondered where fried chicken shops got those tiny little drumsticks from, I thought the chickens they came from must have been tiddly to walk around on such stumpy legs.  It was only whilst preparing these that I realised they were part of the wing and suddenly the talk of Korean fried chicken aficionados ordering upper- or lower-wing made perfect sense.  If like me you've never prepared a chicken wing this photo may help, and it clears up the stumpy leg confusion too.

Once the wings are split you can chuck the tips, or save them for stock, then take the upper and lower wings and dust with flour, shaking well in a sieve to leave only the finest dusting.

Mix the batter ingredients into a thin batter then coat the wings in it, again shaking to remove excess - it's all about a delicate coating here.  Once this is done fry in 150C oil for 8 minutes.

Remove into a sieve and - you guessed it - shake vigorously to remove any lose bits, Korean chicken doesn't have the spare batter that southern fried chicken does.

Turn the heat up and let the oil reach 180C then fry the wings for another 3-4 minutes, or until golden and cooked through.

Remove the wings and drain well on kitchen paper then place into big bowl with the sauce, tossing until the wings are thinly coated all over.

Eat.

Chicken 65

If you're anything like me the first thing you think when reading chicken 65 is where on earth does that numerical name come from.  It seems no one knows for definite.  Some say it was originally number 65 on a menu, others say it contains 65 spices, yet more say a chicken was cut into 65 pieces.  We're still not at the end though.  Maybe the dish first cost 65 rupees or maybe, and this seemed the most common version when we asked people, it was named that by the Chennai hotel that invented the dish, in 1965 obviously.

Name aside what is it?  It's little nuggets of chicken, on or off the bone (as a snack I have to go with off), marinaded in a fiery paste of ginger, chili powder, vinegar and mustard before being deep fried till crisp and tender.  Served with some fried curry leaves, sliced shallots and lime wedges it's a fine start to a meal or snack with a cold beer. 

On my recent Keralan holiday we went for a trek around the tea plantations of Munnar and I got talking to the guide about the dish, this started off with me asking the origin of the name but soon he was telling us about a famous chicken 65 based joke from a movie.  As he told it a man walked into a restaurant and ordered some chicken 65 at a cost of 35 rupees.  He sat and waited for the chicken and when it came out and they placed it before him he complained that he had ordered chicken 65 yet there was only 6 pieces.  The waiter tried and failed to placate the man, saying it was only a name, but he wouldn't let up.  Then a hero (?) turned up and said 'Sir, see this 10 rupee note, it is only one item but within it are 10 rupees.  It is the same with your chicken 65, this piece here is one piece but contains 12 pieces, this here contains 11...' and so on until he reached a total of 65, so saving the day.  All the way through telling us this joke our guide was in hysterics so we politely chuckled along. 

Whilst Chicken 65 based jokes may not work well for the British ear the dish certainly works well for the British palate.

Chicken 65 Recipe

Serves 2-4 as a snack, definitely 2 in this house

450gr skinless chicken thigh fillets, breast would work too but be careful not to overcook

Marinade

1.5cm ginger

2 cloves of garlic

2 ts chili powder

2 TB plain yoghurt

1 ts vinegar

1/2 ts mustard powder

3/4 ts salt

1 TB cornflour

1 TB plain flour

To Serve

1 shallot, peeled and finely sliced

Small handful of curry leaves

1/2 a lime, cut into wedges

Method

This couldn't be much simpler.  Cut the chicken into 2.5cm cubes, blitz the marinade ingredients till smooth (add the flours at the end) and then mix together.  Leave for 1-4 hours.

Heat the oil to 180 C (or hot) and add the curry leaves, fry for 20 seconds till crisp then sieve out and drain on kitchen paper.

Cook the chicken for 3-4 mins, or until dark and cooked through.  It's good to chuck any extra marinade in too as it makes nice little crispy bits.

Drain the chicken onto kitchen paper then place on a plate and scatter with the fried curry leaves, shallots and lime.

Southern Fried Chicken

I've spoke before that I can be a bit partial to a Kentucky Fried Chicken, not that I eat a lot of it.  Over the years I've tried to replicate the Colonel's secret herbs and spices in an attempt to make something similar tasting at home.  I've used mustard powder, sage, thyme, onion and garlic powder, paprika, chili, salt and pepper and whilst the chicken tasted good, it was never quite the taste I was after.  Reading up a bit about traditional southern fried chicken led me to realise that less maybe better when it comes to additions to the flour - well maybe not better but definitely more traditional.

This recipe came from a lady who has edited a Southern USA cook book and she described it as old school.  She said people do put other spices in, and they make tasty chicken, but if you're after the real old school taste you should miss them out.  The spices may have differed from other times I've tried but the biggest difference was in the cooking method.  Out went deep frying and in came a whole half hour of low temp shallow frying.  Supposedly this makes the coating stick to the skin throughout the eating experience not fall off in big lumps.  It works too, the last mouthful still had coating attached and on top of that the 30 minutes at a low temp left moist, tender chicken from the surface to the bone.  I loved the coating too, not the bombardment of different spices some recipes provide but tasty nonetheless.  I think I'll experiment in the future, some of these new fangled spices like chili and paprika I think to try and perfect it for my tastes.