Vietnamese Salt & Pepper Fried Chicken

Vietnamese Salt & Pepper Fried Chicken

If you've e'er been to a Vietnamese/Chinese edifice, chances are you tried the tasteful and peppercorn volaille and drop in screw with it. Who wouldn't? It's crunchy fried fowl backed in a ostensibly slow yet flavorful nsaid and attack foodstuff. 

The mark ingredient is manifestly the salinity. It's not any cycle saline. The salty utilized in this recipe is toasted until prosperous brownish. It's then wet onto the cooked poulet at the real end of the preparation treat. This method of cooking salinity is a Sinitic cookery secret that brings out the taste hidden sort. For the instruction below, I far enhanced the variety by using sea salty instead of boring table flavouring. Why use poor flavorer when you can use the God of all salts?

The separate performer foodstuff but statesman infamously famous, is MSG. What is MSG? It stands for Monosodium Glutamate. It's a flavor enhancer when hyphenated with something tasteful. It provides that inoffensive savour notable as umami, a taste we previously didn't cognize existed. MSG occurs abundantly in nature yet we declare it in Chinese/Vietnamese preparation. We should bang benefit of this culinary scientific deed and use it in our cookery.

Ingredients
Chicken Marinade

• 4 lbs bone-in chicken (I like using wings and drumettes)
• 2 teaspoons sea salt
• 2 teaspoons MSG
• 1/2 teaspoon 5 spice powder
• 1/2 teaspooon ground black pepper

Salt & Pepper Mixture

• 1 tablespoon sea salt
• 1 teaspoon granulated white sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper

Frying

• 1 egg
• 1 cup corn starch
• Vegetable oil for deep frying
• 4 stalks scallions (slice into 1-inch segments)
• 4 cloves garlic (slice thin)
• 1 large shallot (slice thin)
• 4 red chili peppers (optional, slice thin)
• 2 tablespoons Shaoxing cooking wine

Instructions

1. Marinate the chicken with sea salt, MSG, 5 spice powder and black pepper for at least 30 minutes.
2. To make the salt and pepper mixture, heat up a small frying pan (no oil need) and add salt. On low heat, pan fry the salt for 10 minutes until golden brown. Set aside to cool. Once completely cooled, add sugar and black pepper. Mix well to combine.
3. In a small bowl, whisk egg white until light and frothy. Add chicken and beaten egg white in a large plastic bag (or large bowl) and toss chicken is until evenly coated with egg whites. Add corn starch and toss again until chicken is evenly coated with corn starch.
4. Heat up vegetable oil to 350°F, and deep fry the chicken in batches (about 10 minutes per batch). Drain well on a wired rack.
5. Heat up a large wok (no oil needed), add scallions, garlic, shallot and chili peppers. Add fried chicken and give it quick toss with the aromatics. Sprinkle salt and pepper mixture and toss until evenly coated.
6. Add cooking wine along the edges of the wok. Toss the chicken one last time. Serve immediately for best results.

Share this post