Dakgangjeong (Sweet Crispy Fried Chicken) · Maangchi

Rinse the wings in cold water and drain them properly, then tip them into a bowl big enough to mix in with both hands.

💡 Drain them well. Water left on the skin thins the coating and makes the oil spit at you later.

Add the salt, the pepper and the eggs, then the flour and starch mixed together, and work it through with your hands until every wing is slick and evenly coated.

💡 There is no water in this batter — the eggs are the only liquid, so it clings tight rather than dripping off.

Heat the frying oil to 175–195°C (350–380°F). A pinch of the coating dropped in should sink briefly, then float back up ringed with steady bubbles.

Fry the wings in batches for the first round, leaving room around each one, until they are set and pale gold.

Rest them a few minutes out of the oil, then fry them a second time until they are deep gold and audibly hard when you tap one.

💡 The second fry is what survives the sauce. Fry once and the coating goes soft the moment the syrup touches it.

Pour the 240 ml of water into a big wok or wide pan and bring it to the boil over medium-high heat.

Drop the sliced ginger into the boiling water.

Add the soy sauce, the brown sugar and the vinegar and keep it boiling over medium heat.

After 5 minutes, pour in the corn syrup and drop the heat to low-medium.

Let it boil there for about 30 minutes. It goes from watery to lazy and glossy, and the ginger slices turn translucent and chewy at the edges.

💡 Do not rush this on high heat. Thirty slow minutes is what candies the ginger; ten fast ones just gives you hot syrup with raw ginger in it.

Test it the way Maangchi does: lift a spoonful high above the pan and let it fall. When the stream stops partway down instead of running out in one thread, it is ready. Turn the heat off.

Reheat the sauce until it is sizzling again, then add the fried chicken, the peanuts, the chili flakes and the sesame seeds all at once.

Turn it all over with a spatula. The loose sauce keeps shrinking onto the wings as you work until barely any is pooling in the pan, then kill the heat.

Pull the pieces apart from each other before they cool — Maangchi's own warning, and a fair one.

💡 Cooling sugar is glue. Leave them heaped together for ten minutes and you will be serving one large chicken brick.