Everyone Loves You for This Kara-age Chicken

Ingredients

• 250-350 grams chicken thigh (I used chicken fillet as it was on sale... :)
• 3–4 cm3 ginger (grated, use only the juice)
• 1 tbsp soy sauce (Try not to use "tamari" soy sauce here. It might be too strong for this. Let me know if you do and like it that way :) )
• 1/2 egg (I didn't know how to have only half of an egg, so I used 1 egg...)
• 1-1.5 tbsp potato starch (could not find it in my local supermarket, so used a product called Saucebinder in German)
• 1-1.5 tbsp flour
• salad oil for 2-3cm in the saucepan to be used

Steps

1. Cut the chicken, put in a bowl. Add ginger juice and soy sauce, and mix well (by hand seems to be a common way). Leave 30 minutes. You can do other dishes in the meant time :)
2. Remove liquid from the chicken mix. Whisk the egg and add to the chicken mix in the bowl.
3. Mix the potato starch and flour in a bowl, and coat the chicken (as I had more egg than the recipe, I moved the chicken to the bowl of starch+flour mix, instead of the other way around).
4. Place a couple sheets of paper towel on a plate -- You will use it later to drain the oil from the chicken
5. Pour the oil in a sauce pan (2-3cm from the bottom) and heat it to 160-165°C. Put the heat down to lower medium. You want to fry the chicken slowly to cook in this first round. Carefully place the chicken and fry for 5 minutes. Japanese tend to use long cooking chopsticks for this. If you are not used to using them, perhaps a tong is a better option -- you don't want to make a splash by dropping the chicken from above... Try not do all the chicken at once. Fry the pieces in batches of 2 or even 3. More chicken in the pan, cooler the oil becomes. This makes it difficult to control the timing and may change the result.
6. Take out the chicken from the oil. Use a strainer and put the chicken on to a paper towel placed on a plate to absorb the excess oil. Do all the remaining batches to cook them all.
7. For the second round, heat up the oil to 180-190°C. Put the chicken back to the oil to colour the surface. This will be very quick -- in my case, it was so quick that I had to do this process one piece by piece.

Notes

It’s one of the all-time home-cooking favourites, right? :) A friend of mine who lives in Poland asked me how to make kara-age chicken. He wanted to cook it for his grandma. What a great idea! I also wanted to learn an easy way to do it in Germany, so here it is.

I failed in my first attempt (I think I’ll update and expand this post later to share lessons learned). I asked for some advice on Facebook. Overnight, I received tons of expert advice from my friends all over the world.

This recipe is based on the knowledge collected from my friends. I then adapted the recipe from my recipe book below which just had arrived from Australia in my container :): 覚えておきたい！ 料理の基本123 (Fundamentals of Cooking Ichi-Ni-San).

It is good that this recipe does not require sake or mirin. These days it’s easy to get soy sauce — even my very local German supermarket has them.

Have fun cooking und Guten Appetit!

nobiot