Korean Fried Chicken Wings - Crispy, Spicy, Sticky Wings from Heaven!

KFC, the real KFC that is, Korean fried chicken is one of the best things in the world. It's crispy on the outside, it's packed full of sauce, it's spicy, sweet, sour. I cannot believe we haven't done Korean fried chicken until today. We know you guys love fried chicken so this Wok Wednesday is for the people, it's for you guys. The video itself is sponsored by Neff and we actually use all of the Neff appliances here in the cookery school. We're going to start with some ginger and garlic. Now I want the ginger and some garlic for the marinade for my chicken and it looks like there's a lot of ingredients here which there are but the actual cooking process is really nice and simple so long as you're confident deep frying at home. I'll show you how to be confident anyway so don't worry. So I'm finely chopping some of this garlic and then the rest of the garlic I'll keep in sort of slices to go into this sort of wrapping sauce at the end. So all my finely chopped ginger and garlic can go straight into the chicken. Now we're going to season these chicken wings up nice and well. Good bit of salt and pepper and then you want to start to massage that flavour into those chicken wings and I've got my chicken wings in halves here so you've got easy to eat pieces. Now this dish is actually a lot easier than you think to make a super crispy batter for your Korean fried chicken wings and first off put some corn flour. Corn flour in any way is going to make this really crispy and it's slightly finer than plain flour. Has that sort of almost chalky texture to it. You want a good amount just to really wrap around all of those wings but then to make it even crispier and sort of create little bits of texture around each piece of skin I've got some baking powder and this will sort of almost sort of make that corn flour puff up a little when it hits the oil. Deep frying at home is really not as difficult as you may think and part of it is getting the batter right. The second part is getting to understand the heat of the oil to make sure that you get an initial good seal of high heat around each wing when you fry. So I couldn't fry all of these wings in one go in one wok of oil. Take your time and you'll get there very easily if you follow these simple instructions. Before I fry all that chicken up I'm gonna get a little wok clock of ingredients ready to finish this off. That's the glaze and that sort of sticky sauce that goes around that crispy chicken. I've got my whole load of garlic there. I've got some soaked dried red chillies. You could just stir fry them dry but then they burn very very quickly and then to finish off I've got some crushed peanuts and sesame seeds and then last but not least get your sauce ready so you're fully prepared so you can just concentrate on the frying process and that again should help your confidence. Now the sauce it starts with the famous gochujang. It's Korean spicy chilli paste which has a sort of sweetness and texture similar to hoisin sauce. Light soy for some saltiness. Some mustard bring in a depth of heat. Honey and we're getting to the sweet stuff now. So we've got spicy and salty and savoury. We're balancing this out with that sort of great sweet flavour of your honey and also some brown sugar. Lastly we want a perfect balance of sweet and savoury and I'm going to use some rice vinegar here which you'd think might make this sour but you won't taste any sourness at all. That sauce can sit on my mini wok clock over here. Now deep frying at home especially chicken wings where it's quite sort of a lot of meat to fry in one go it can be a little bit daunting. Don't be scared of it just follow these rules. First rule don't walk away. Second rule we're going to start your chicken wings and frying process on a high heat. I've filled my oil no more than halfway up my wok and that oil needs to get really nice and hot. Anything wooden will show you how hot the oil is. You can see my chopsticks my wooden chopsticks are fizzing away straight away. That tells me that my oil is at around 170 to 180 degrees C. Number three never allow your oil to smoke. If your oil or this amount of oil is really smoking hot it could catch fire so just take care of it don't do anything else. We're going to get onto the frying. When I start frying again I'm not going to put all of these wings in in one go. I'll probably have to do two or three batches a little bit at a time just so that it retains the heat and doesn't lose too much of that heat in the oil. When you take your chicken you want to sort of dust the pieces a little before you place them into the wok and I tend to sort of get four or five pieces ready before I start to fry. Carefully lay those in one by one and you can see I'm frying with confidence here. Just enjoy it but make sure you're concentrating. Once you've got your first batch of chicken in I'd highly recommend to turn your heat down and I only do this when I'm deep frying chicken wings or whole pieces of chicken because you want to make sure that it cooks through whilst keeping nice and crispy on the outside. You want it to go golden brown not black. So I'm on a low heat now and I'm going to deep fry these wings for about eight to ten minutes. So once your chicken has gone a nice golden brown colour just give another minute or so. You might want to whack the heat up for that last minute just to get that extra level of crisp and actually once those bubbles have really slowed down it means that your chicken is definitely cooked all the way through because there's not a lot of sort of water or liquid or moisture coming out of the meat into the oil. Look at this I mean it's so crispy you could just eat it as is. I'm pretty sure I have a cheeky little taste behind the scenes. On to the last bit and this is where it's a great time to talk about our sponsors Neff because we've got here our gas wok burner which is some serious fire. Perfect for home Chinese or Asian cooking and especially for something like this because what I want is I'm going to quickly stir fry my garlic and my chilli and then when my sauce goes in I want it to vigorously boil up and caramelise almost immediately. My garlic's going in. You want to hear that sizzle never lose your sizzle guys. It's that quick stir through and then my chillies. Allow those to blister for about 10 seconds and then on this really high heat the wok should be smoking hot at this point. My sauce can go straight in. Bring that to a vigorous boil it should when you watch that hot start to boil straight away. Give it a little stir just so the edges of the sauce don't burn. Once that's got this nice sort of sticky texture you're ready to put your chicken in. Now be ready for this prepare yourself because once the chicken goes in I'm just going to toss it through five or six times and then it'll come straight out. Chicken in. If you need both hands go for it. Flick that over and then serve that up. Look at these guys. I am salivating just dishing them up. The rest of my peanut and sesame seed mix go over the top of that. My proper KFC Korean fried chicken. Thanks to our sponsors Neff. This is one of those dishes that you kind of want to build a wall around so no one else can get in. Maybe even a chicken locking key just for me. Thank you chicken gods. Thank you Neff for creating such an awesome wok burner. Thing is about Korean fried chicken it is just so perfectly balanced. Got this deep sort of lingering spice sweetness from that honey and the sugar. Tint of sour but not really sour it's just perfectly balanced. There's so many other dishes like this you know sweet and sour pork or other different dishes as well. Don't forget to check out those videos on the channel too. I'm just gonna keep eating.