Taiwanese Popcorn Chicken | Recipe | 鹽酥雞

Taiwanese popcorn chicken. One of my favourite things about Taiwan but you don't need to go all the way there to have it. We'll start with some chicken. This is just some chicken thigh. I've left the skin on and I've cut it into three centimetre pieces. Into the chicken just some really simple marinade ingredients. Five spice, ginger, garlic, sugar, some Shaoxing wine and some soy sauce. But the real secret to popcorn chicken Taiwan style is sweet potato flour or sometimes called tapioca flour and it's that texture that's so important. All you want to do whenever you deep fry anything is just get a light coating on the outside. It doesn't need to be a thick batter or anything. So I've got a handful of Thai basil and I want to add that into the oil as it's coming up to temperature. That's going to crisp up the basil and also flavour the oil. Watch out that I can spit a little. Next in with the chicken. Now the really important thing when you're deep frying is try to think of your wok or whatever you're using as only half of the surface area. Use half of the surface area for deep frying and leave the other half for the oil. That makes sure the oil can stay hot and as you can see all the little bits of flour are coming off. So it doesn't matter if you're doing tempura or schnitzels or whatever, you've got to get all of those bits out. That's going to make your oil taste burnt and of course it's going to make the food taste burnt too. And you've always got to season food after you've deep fried it. The deep frying process takes away a lot of the seasoning. So I've got some salt here, flavoured that with some chilli pepper and five spice again.