No question about it: I’m making that again. Now I’m curious about what a really good restaurant (or night-market!) version of Taiwanese fried chicken tastes like. This may take further research.
It’s not a particularly difficult prep, especially if you don’t insist on breaking down two full chickens beforehand. Oh well, now I have some fresh chicken broth and some chicken skin for making the special popcorn with fried chicken skin and schmaltz instead of butter.
Basically you have your cut-up chicken (the NYT recipe calls for thighs, many other recipes I looked at call for breasts, I used both), you marinate it in soy sauce, sesame oil, Shaoxing wine, five-spice powder and white pepper. (The NYT doesn’t call for the sesame oil, but I thought it would make a good addition.)
Then you dust it in tapioca flour (I thought I had some, but I didn’t, so I used rice flour instead. Worked great.) with a teeny bit of water in it so the flour ‘beads up’. Into the fryer, toss some salt and coarse-ground black pepper on it, and some fresh basil leaves that have been quick fried. Fortunately my basil is doing great this year in the garden after a couple of mysteriously disappointing episodes.
Really good.
It wasn’t easy to find something in a cookbook that fit with what I had to work with in the fridge. I had a really nice “pointed cabbage”, some shiitake mushrooms, some snow peas.
I was going to settle for just making a basic stir-fry on my own, and then I saw that the Lopez-Alt cookbook The Wok had a lo mein recipe. I had meant to do a column on the book soon, so I’ll do a fuller job of working through it eventually. (I’m pretty sure my cast-iron wok is going to get some shade cast on it, but we’ll see.) It was a good lo mein recipe that reminded me of the importance of cooking each component separately in order to get a good wok char on it.
(Has anyone else ever had an issue with the smoke from snow peas being fried on a hot wok, by the way? For some unknowable reason, it made all of us cough a lot during the cooking. It was kind of weird.)
Good outcome. I endorse his view that you want to go light on the sauce, but I wish I’d thickened it slightly so it stuck to the noodles a bit more.