Yan Su Ji (Taiwanese Salt-Crisp Chicken)

Name: Yan Su Ji (Taiwanese Salt-Crisp Chicken)
Total time: 1 h 30 min
Yield: 4
Cuisine: Taiwanese
Ingredients: 700 g Boneless chicken thigh, in 3 cm pieces; 3 tbsp Light soy sauce; 2 tbsp Rice wine (mijiu); 5 cloves Garlic, finely grated; 1 tsp Five-spice powder; 1 tsp White pepper; 1 tsp Sugar; 1 Egg; 180 g Coarse sweet potato starch; 1 L Neutral frying oil; 1 large handful Taiwanese basil (九層塔) or Thai basil; 1 tsp Fine salt; 1.5 tsp White pepper, for the pepper-salt; 0.5 tsp Chilli powder

The default night market order: thigh meat marinated in soy, garlic and five-spice, armoured in coarse sweet potato starch, fried twice, then thrown in a basket with a handful of basil leaves flash-fried until crackling.

Fuente

Receta de Taiwanese night market stalls · 🏺 Tradicional · Yeshi (夜市) stall cooking — the evening street kitchen that feeds most Taiwanese towns after dark

Taiwanese night market street food — An ownerless night market snack with no documented creator. The reference confirms the two names 鹹酥雞 and 鹽酥雞 (both meaning "salty crispy chicken"), a marinade of soy sauce, sugar, garlic, rice wine and five-spice for at least an hour, a dredge in flour or sweet potato starch, lightly fried basil leaves, salt and pepper as the staple condiment, frying in two pots of oil at different temperatures for texture, and its popularity at Taiwan's night markets. Chinese-language Wikipedia's 鹹酥雞 article independently confirms the fried 九層塔 basil and the 胡椒鹽 finish. Quantities and temperatures here are this book's own.

Background on Wikipedia ↗

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Sin lácteos

Pasos

Mix the chicken with the soy, rice wine, garlic, five-spice, white pepper, sugar and egg. Cover and leave it in the fridge for at least an hour — overnight is better.
Tip the sweet potato starch into a wide bowl. Take the chicken out piece by piece, letting the excess marinade drip off, and press each one into the starch so the granules stick all over.
💡 Now wait 5 minutes. The starch will go from dusty white to patchy and damp — those damp patches are what fry into the crags. Frying it dry gives you a powdery coating that falls off.
Heat the oil to 160°C. Fry the chicken in two or three batches for 3 to 4 minutes each, until pale gold and cooked through. Lift onto a rack and let everything rest 5 minutes.
💡 No thermometer? Drop in a pinch of starch — it should sink briefly then rise in a steady stream of small bubbles. A violent fizz means the oil is too hot.
Raise the oil to 190°C and fry everything again, all at once, for 40 to 60 seconds. It will go deep gold and start rattling against the sides of the pan — that sound is how the stalls know.
In the last 10 seconds, drop in the dry basil leaves. They will spit hard for a moment and then go still and translucent. Scoop everything out together onto paper.
💡 Stand back and use a lid as a shield. Basil in hot oil is genuinely violent for two or three seconds.
Toss immediately with the pepper-salt (and chilli powder if you want it) in a big bowl, then eat standing up, out of a paper bag, with a bamboo skewer.

💡 Consejos

The same marinade and coating make 雞排 — the palm-sized fried chicken cutlet. Butterfly a whole breast, pound it to 1 cm, and fry it 5 minutes at 160°C then 1 minute at 190°C.
Stalls fry mushrooms, green beans, sweet potato, tofu and squid in the same oil with the same coating. Anything on the counter gets the pepper-salt treatment.
It is at its best about 90 seconds out of the fryer and it does not travel. Cook it when the people eating it are already in the kitchen.