welcome friends it's Saturday morning so we're going to do another one of our
most watched recipe videos on YouTube videos and today I want to make
Taiwanese popcorn chicken um real phenomenon right now in Toronto
Taiwanese chicken fried chicken places are popping up all over the city so
we're going to filter that by viewcount and the number one video is Taiwanese
popcorn chicken by garden time homemade cuisine 1.6 million views this ought to
be good the chicken certainly looks good let's see it's in Mandarin my Mandarin
is but I think I can do okay so the chicken looks great the recipe looks
pretty straightforward let's get started so this is all pretty straightforward in
this bowl I've got some chicken thighs that I've deboned obviously and then cut
up into bite-size chunks I've left the skin on the skin is a very important
component in this dish and then next in is soy sauce use whatever soy sauce you
have salt white pepper and we've got a video I'll link to it somewhere about
white pepper and how white pepper is different than black pepper and how
essentially they're the same next in is a couple of cloves of garlic we're just
going to crush those in and like I said earlier these Taiwanese chicken shops
are everywhere um they're doing really well right now in Toronto and for good
reason I mean the chicken is amazing I
dare say better than KFC there I said it so now we just mix up the chicken and
those spices and the soy sauce get it all combined
and I'm gonna sit this in the fridge for 15 to 20 minutes before we move on to
the next step okay the chicken is marinated and we're ready to move on to
the next steps so I've got I've got oil in this pot and I'm starting to heat it
up and in this bowl I have some flour to that I'm going to add salt baking powder
and Chinese five-spice powder now as much as you might think that Chinese
five-spice powder is always the same five spices when I was at the grocery
store buying this I looked at three different brands and although they were
similar they each had one item that was different they all still had five spices
but there was one thing missing and they was different so I'm gonna have to do a
lot of more research on that and we may even have an episode where we make our
own so that goes in I mean it just smells amazing it's got some really
amazing things in it now I'll get a spoon and we're just gonna use this
water and stir this together to make a paste maybe a little more water now we
put this in with the chicken and we mix it around to coat the chicken fully
looks good pretty gummy not sure if that's exactly the way it's supposed to
be but I imagine that it needs to be gummy in order to stick this ingredient
to it which is sweet potato sweet potato flour some places might call it sweet
potato starch depending on where you are in the world it is very fine it's like
corn starch or corn flour depending on where you are in the world so my
understanding based on the video is I dip these pieces into the potato flour
potato starch and get them coated and then we set them aside and let them
dry out for four or five minutes before we start frying them so the oil is just
about at temperature I'm looking at about a hundred and sixty degrees
Celsius or 320 degrees Fahrenheit for the first fry these get fried twice once
at a lower temperature to cook them through and a second time at a higher
temperature which crisps up the outside just like making french fries so I'm
gonna put these into the oil and you don't want to crowd the pan you don't
wanna put too many in you don't want the temperature to drop too much well that
first batch fries I'm gonna strip off the leaves on this Thai basil it's gonna
get deep fried into a great garnish we take the first set out and I'm just
gonna put it on a rack so that the oil drains away and in goes the next batch
okay so that's the second batch cooked now here's the deal the chicken at this
point is cooked through safe to eat but you know if the colors a little anemic
and the outside not all that crunchy so the idea now is we raise the temperature
of the oil to 180 degrees Celsius or 360 degrees Fahrenheit fry the chicken a
second time and we'll get a really nice beautiful brown crispy crust there we go
second fry goes by pretty quickly so
that smells wonderful and it looks beautiful
not that I'm surprised I just you know sorry so this is this is Taiwanese
popcorn chicken okay it's the number one most watched Taiwanese popcorn chicken
recipe on YouTube at 1.6 million views and who is the creator of this because I
go ahead that's bet so this this is basil this is Thai basil that I just
deep-fried it takes like five seconds and you'll see it as Thai basil or
you'll see it as cinnamon basil okay but it's the basil with the red stem it's
not doesn't hold a lot of flavor once it's fried No so he's just for look
pretty much pretty much for show um the recipe was in mandarin the voiceover
was in mandarin or the person talking was speaking yes um but I looked at
their kitchen I should taste this I looked at their kitchen I'm very
Canadian and so I looked at a couple of other videos and there was a Tim
Horton's Cup so there are yes there in Canada there they're obviously here in
Canada but it's yeah it's just perfectly fine hmm hmm yeah super crispy what's
the flavor you get what's the first thing that comes to your mind about that
flavor this smell or the flavor the flavor Hong Kong Hong Kong mm-hmm
everywhere you go in Hong Kong there's sweet it's the five-spice it's
the five-spice yeah everywhere you go and I at first I didn't like that but
now I absolutely love it so I have a question about the outside cuz I look
the inside is it's crispy but not in that fried chicken kind of way mm-hmm
right cuz it doesn't have but it's still very crispy and crunchy but why
what is the it's got this kind of sweet potato it was how why it's that color
okay but color is roomy off em hmm fucking
razor mmm what really is good so I looked at a bunch of other recipes for
this mm-hmm all basically the same some added ginger and some added rice wine
vinegar so it's that's one of those preference things and I imagine that's a
family preference thing or different restaurants will do it a little bit
differently but I could eat hey be careful I could either yeah yeah I
imagine you could make much amazing beyond the fact that I don't like
deep-frying different does come with its it's clean up and just clean up there's
safety issues do this old-school thermometer for anything we've got a
fancy fryer in the basement I just I can't be bothered to use it because it's
a pain in the ass to clean really it's a payment yeah it really is a pot just
seems so much more civilized to me but anyway back to the true choice the
chicken is amazing I would um I would suggest that you check out some of the
other recipes from this channel and the team in the channel um I've completely
gapped on it because it's anyway it's long as it's on the screen right now
link below thanks for stopping by see you again soon
you