Japanese Fried Chicken Karaage 唐揚げ

Today on Nicko's Kitchen, I'm telling you, you haven't had fried chicken like this before. We're making my karaage, Japanese fried chicken. So firstly we're going to marinate our chicken. Now I'm using some beautiful chicken thighs. You can use any part of the chicken. Try and get a little bit of fat on there as well because that's going to crisp up nice later. But if you want to use the wings, the breasts or the thighs like I am, it's completely up to you. I'm just going to add that into a larger bowl. Next in, I'm going to be adding in some soy sauce. Also adding in some sake, which is a fermented Japanese rice wine. I've got some crushed garlic and ginger here as well. And lastly, just a pinch of sugar. So now just give this a good mix around, get everything combined. So leave this to one side for about 15 minutes, just so all those flavors can marinate with that chicken. Now to prepare your vegetable oil. Place the oil in a large wok or pot and bring it to 190 degrees Celsius or 370 Fahrenheit. Once the chicken is ready, coat it in potato flour or use cornstarch as a substitute. Then leave out for five minutes to dry on a rack. So now we're going to fry our chicken and I'm just going to place our chicken in the oil. Now I just want to cook our chicken for one minute here and then I'm going to take it out and place it on a rack and let it just air dry for another minute. And then I'm going to pop it back in here in the oil for another minute and then do the same thing. Let it air dry for another minute and take it out and then repeat that process again. But on the last stage, we want to cook it for two minutes. So fry number two, let's dry it back in the oil for another minute. And once again we're going to move our chicken out of the oil back onto that resting rack to just dry out for another minute. Now the reason why we're doing this is the fried chicken takes on a much more crispier coating when you fry it like this. When you fry it, dry it, fry it, dry it, it gets a really really crispy coating on the outside. After the third and final fry, leave aside on the rack. Now to prepare our karaage dipping sauce. In a saucepan add spring onion, sesame oil, sugar, soy sauce and sake and bring to the boil and serve. And now all we have to do is get stuck into this to be right up there near the top of the list. It is just absolutely sensational. The flavours are amazing and I love this dipping sauce that goes with it. That saltiness, the sweetness in there and it just goes so well with that crunchiness on the outside and that beautiful moist chicken that's in there. And I love the chicken thigh because the thick chicken thigh has got a little bit of dark meat, a little bit of white meat and of course the flavour of the dark meat is where it's at with this chicken. So if you want to use the chicken breast, fine, but you're really going to get a much better flavour with the thigh or a wing you could do it with as well. But in any case you have to try this out because it is just that damn good.