How To Roast Meat

Welcome back to School of Wok. Today's lesson in this course of double cooking is lesson two, blanching and roasting. How to get that lovely glaze from your roast meats in the oven. Now I'm going to go back to my pre-blanched wings. I could, in theory, have poached these chicken wings much like I did for the pickled chicken wings and then taken the fully cooked wings out from the poaching liquid, all the salt and the extra spices, then come to the roasting for the second cook. And what that would have done is added more flavour and sort of softened the texture of the wings before I then finish it off for like a, not a crisp but a sticky glaze from roasting. But I'm going to use the blanched ones either way, doesn't really matter. I'm just going to make up a quick sauce and this sauce is more like a glazing sauce that I'll sort of wrap around the wings and then we'll whack it in the oven. The oven's at 200 degrees C, a little bit of oil for some ginger and garlic and then I'll use a Worcestershire sauce and some honey or maple syrup, whatever I've got, to bring a very, very simple glaze together. So garlic and ginger work a treat of course, half and half. Of course everything's going to go into the oven so and if you, in theory, if you think about this like I'm bubbling up a sauce to get it to a good texture before I then wrap the chicken wings in and then pop it into roast. So really this is triple cooked rather than double cooked but sits in the double cooked section because as I said it's piecing together two or more of these core Chinese cooking techniques. Rough quantities, similar amounts of dark soy, Worcestershire sauce and honey to get a nice glaze around this. I might use a bit of Shaoxing rice wine, let's see. I'll have a little taste first before I get my wings wrapping around this sauce. Tastes lovely. Take a little tablespoon, again one-to-one of Shaoxing rice wine. So one-to-one to one-to-one, one-to-one to one-to-one to one-to-one to one. Everything the same, all the same. Now I want to get this sauce to a very, very thin syrupy texture before I put some wings into it so that it can then wrap around the wings and then when they roast you'll get a really lovely glaze around the skin or the fat of the chicken wings. Got this lovely drizzling consistency and whilst that's still bubbling up you can then get your wings and wrap them around the sauce and you can see immediately that that sauce sticks around that fatty meat, the skin of the wings. Just wrap those around. Now it really doesn't need much more than that to then go straight into the oven. 10-15 minutes and you'll get these lovely sort of soy glazed roasted chicken wings, double cooked of course. My roast chicken wings with that lovely soy glaze. It's taken actually about 20 minutes to get the glaze to a nice sticky point around the wings and you can see they've got this lovely colour around the skin. Tune in tomorrow for lesson three, blanching and deep frying or double frying. Oh you want to get that crisp.