鹽酥雞

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.