Colm O'Gorman's Karaage: Japanese Fried Chicken, served with Yum Yum Sauce

Pic: Colm O'Gorman

I am in Japan this week, fulfilling a long-held dream to visit a country whose food culture I adore. As I have discovered over this past week, it seems impossible to find bad food here. Everything tastes amazing, from sushi and sashimi that is so fresh it simply melts in your mouth, to yakitori skewers and dumplings that are insanely delicious. Street food here is just amazing. Every small bar, or izakaya as they are called here, serves small plates of fabulous food served alongside cold beers or sake.

One of my favourite small plates to order is karaage, or Japanese fried chicken. I have made this at home; it is easy to cook, and absolutely delicious. Bite-sized chunks of chicken thigh meat are marinated in a combination of sake, mirin, soy sauce, garlic, and ginger, before being tossed in potato flour and twice fried until deeply golden brown and super crispy.

Karaage is best made with skin-on, boneless chicken thighs. Most supermarkets stock boneless chicken thighs, but they are usually skinless. It is fine to use those if you want to avoid the hassle of removing the bones from regular thighs, but that only takes a few minutes to do in any case. You do not have to be terribly careful when removing the bones as you will be cutting the meat into chunks, so it is fine if they are a little messy.

If you do not have sake, you can use rice wine or sherry. Apple cider vinegar is a decent substitute for mirin, but it lacks much of the sweetness of mirin, so add another half a teaspoon of sugar to this recipe to compensate for that. Karaage is traditionally made with potato flour, which can be found in any Asian supermarket, but cornflour is a decent substitute.

This recipe serves 2 people for a main course or 4 as a snack.

recipe by:Colm O'Gorman

I serve my Karaage with a simple Yum Yum sauce. This is a lovely dipping sauce for grilled, fried, or barbecued food and takes just minutes to make. Allow a few hours for marinading!

Servings

Preparation Time

Cooking Time

Total Time

Course

Ingredients

Fried Chicken

15g fresh ginger root

3 cloves garlic

30ml sake

45ml soy sauce

1 tbsp mirin

1 tsp caster sugar

4 boneless chicken thighs

150g potato flour

½ tsp fine sea salt

½ tsp white pepper

1 litre sunflower oil

1 lemon

1 spring onion

Yum Yum Sauce

200g mayonnaise

1 tbsp ketchup

15g melted butter

1 tbsp mirin

1 tsp sugar

½ tsp smoked paprika

2 tsp rice or white wine vinegar

½ tsp cayenne pepper

1 tsp garlic salt

1 tbsp cold water

Method

Peel and finely grate the garlic and ginger. Combine both in a bowl along with the sake, soy sauce, mirin, and caster sugar. Cut the chicken into 5cm chunks — do not worry about getting them all the same size, roughly 5cm each is fine. Add the chicken to the bowl and toss it in the marinade, coating it thoroughly.

Cover and pop the bowl in the fridge. Marinade the chicken for at least one hour, or overnight if you have enough time.

When you are ready to cook your chicken, heat the sunflower oil to 180°Celsius in a deep saucepan.

While the oil is coming to temperature, combine the potato flour, sea salt, and pepper in a wide shallow bowl. I use a pasta bowl for this, which is perfect. Place a wire rack over a baking tray and place that on the countertop, next to the bowl of potato flour. Remove the chicken from the fridge. Working in batches of two pieces at a time, remove the chicken from the marinade and toss it in the cornflour to coat it thoroughly. Take a little care with this step. To ensure perfectly crispy chicken, every part of the chicken needs to be well coated in potato flour.

Place the coated pieces of chicken on the wire rack as you go, and when they are all ready, move the rack over to your hob, close to the pan of oil. Use a thermometer to check the temperature of the oil. It needs to be at 180 Celsius before you fry the chicken. If you do not have a thermometer, you can use a piece of bread to check the temperature. Drop a 2.5cm square piece of bread into the oil. If it takes 60 seconds to brown, then your oil is hot enough.

Fry the chicken in batches of three to four pieces at a time so as not to crowd the pan. Shake off any excess potato flour before carefully lowering the chicken into the hot oil. For their first fry, give the chicken about three minutes until it is golden brown. Remove from the oil using a slotted spoon and drain on a few layers of clean kitchen paper. The oil will cool down when as you cook the chicken, so make sure to bring it back to 180°C before you fry the next batch.

When all the chicken has had its first fry, bring the oil back up to 180°C and fry the chicken for one more minute until the crust is a deep golden brown and super crispy. There is no need to cook in batches for the second fry, you can fry all the chicken at once this time. When it is done, drain the chicken on some fresh kitchen paper while you make the Yum Yum sauce.

Simply pop all the ingredients for the sauce into a bowl and whisk to combine them thoroughly. Taste, and add more cayenne pepper if you want a bit more heat.

Serve the Karaage hot, with chopped spring onions scattered over the top, and fresh lemon wedges, and the Yum Yum sauce on the side.

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