- What's going on?
My name is Mark aka Saucestache
and on today's episode of EATKINDLY With Me,
we're doing another recipe hack.
This time it's vegan KFC-style drumsticks.
I mean look at these.
Okay so first things first in our Kentucky-fried jackfruit
which I can't wait for.
This is gonna be so good.
All we're going to do is take our two cans
of young green jackfruit.
We're gonna open it up, drain it out,
rinse them, and then just wash the jackfruit really well,
squeezing the hard ends to break the jackfruit up
and removing as many seeds as we possibly can.
I mean, I just love how much jackfruit
once it's all broken up,
just looks like almost like a pulled chicken,
like how you would make like a chicken salad.
Like, I mean, it's just, it comes out so, so good.
So now at this point, we're gonna flavor the jackfruit,
get rid of some of that fruit taste,
add some more chickeny taste to it.
And to do that, we're just gonna use
a chicken-flavored broth.
Now me personally,
I really like the Shanggie chicken flavor broth.
This stuff's really easy to find online
or at like your local Asian market.
It is a hundred percent plant-based.
It uses artificial chicken flavor.
Now, if you can't find Shanggie,
there's loads of other chicken flavored broths.
Better Than Bouillon makes a chicken flavored broth.
It's like un-chicken or non-chicken flavor.
And then you could also just use like some vegetable broth.
So we're just gonna load the jackfruit into a sauce pan
and cover it with water.
I'm gonna use probably about four or five cups of water.
And then we're gonna add about a teaspoon
of our chicken flavor broth mix.
Bring it up to a simmer and let it simmer
for about 20 minutes.
Okay so the jackfruits looking really great.
All we're gonna do now is strain the liquid
out of the jackfruit,
put the jackfruit
into a separate bowl,
and then all we're gonna do is add one tablespoon
of cornstarch, sprinkled generously
over the top
of your jackfruit and give it a good mix in,
make sure everything's nice and coated.
And then we're gonna allow the jackfruit just
to sit for a little bit,
to kind of come down in temperature
before we start adding any of the rest of the ingredients.
We don't want it to be too hot.
We want to be able to work with it.
Okay so the jackfruits cooled down
to a more like workable temperature.
The nice thing is, is it's now it's like sticky.
That cornstarch has kind of like got everything
to where it can stick together and work together.
The next step, we're gonna add three tablespoons
of gluten flour or vital wheat gluten.
It's all the same thing.
It's going to really help bind these together
without having too much in between.
It's just gonna create like a nice malleable jackfruit
that we can kind of work into a chicken shape.
Then all we're gonna do is just work this in by hand.
Just kind of just almost like kneading,
just you're squeezing the jackfruit into the gluten.
And then once you're done you have a formable jackfruit
that will hold its texture and shape
and have like a really nice bite.
It's gonna come out so good.
I'm so excited for this.
Now to really amp up the texture of our jackfruit,
and really to give this Kentucky fried jackfruit
like a really realistic feel to it,
we're gonna add a layer of skin on the outside
of the jackfruit "wing",
on the outside of the jackfruit "drumstick".
And to do that, we're gonna be using bean curd sheets.
It goes by a few different names, bean curd sheets,
tofu skin, soy skin, Yuba, it's all the same.
A lot of times you can find it frozen.
This is the one that I recommend.
Now I'm just gonna carefully unfold my soy skin.
Sometimes the dried soy skin is a little bit harder
to work with.
That's why I like using this fresh frozen.
Because we want this to be in pretty large sheets
and the soy skin can break and crack,
which is gonna make it a little bit more difficult
to work with if that happens.
Now, some soy skin comes in like really large sheets.
Some of it comes in little squares.
We're gonna try to make them about the size
of a sheet of paper.
This is gonna be the perfect size that we need
to kind of coat our drumstick to make a skin.
So we definitely don't need all of these for this recipe,
but this stuff is a little hard to work with.
So I am going to hydrate all of it now.
I can store the rest of it in the refrigerator
and just throw it in different dishes
and just eat it how it is.
It's gonna be good.
But we're going to use the remainder
of our hot chick-un broth that we used here.
And just pour that over.
Now, if you don't have a whole lot
of your chicken broth remaining to hydrate this up,
then you can just add some hot water
or you can just add some more chicken broth to it.
The tough thing is, is once these fold on top of themselves,
they're really sticky and they're hard
to kind of peel apart.
And that's why we peeled them all apart first.
And then we're hydrating them flat
so that way we can pull the sheets up as we need them.
Okay so now that we have our jackfruit chicken and our skin,
we just need the bone.
For our bone today I am going to be using lemon grass.
So all I'm gonna do is just remove the outer layer
of the skin of the lemon grass.
You don't want to remove too much.
Otherwise you're going to really kind
of dampen the way this is going to work.
Cut off the top.
And then we're going to cut this
into probably five inch sections
to create the bone for our chicken.
And then these look great,
these are gonna be great chick-un bones.
So now all I'm gonna do is just give them a quick rinse.
That's gonna do two things.
It's gonna rinse off the lemon grass,
but it's also gonna dampen them up.
So that way we can add a little bit
of cornstarch to the outside
of the lemon grass.
That's gonna help the jackfruit kind of stick and adhere
to the lemon grass a little bit better
than it would if you wouldn't use it.
Okay, we've got everything ready to go.
Let's assemble our jackfruit chicken drumsticks.
We're gonna grab one of our lemon grass sticks
along with a nice handful of your jackfruit.
Place the lemon grass into the jackfruit.
Give it a squeeze.
Now you don't want to make these too big.
Otherwise they're just not going to really cook that great.
They won't hold that great.
And they'll kind of fall apart a little bit.
And you don't want that.
You want them to have a nice chickeny texture
and hold together really well.
And we're just squeezing the jackfruit
onto the lemon grass.
And then there we go.
That is our lemon grass jackfruit drumstick.
It's perfect.
Now at this point, we're gonna carefully grab one
of our soy skins.
Which just looks awesome.
And we're gonna lay it in almost long ways.
So that way the top is near the middle.
Fold over and then we're going
to kind of fold towards the bottom and then twist in.
And then there it is.
I mean look at that.
It's amazing.
So for the next step,
all we have to do is just cover these up.
I'm going to throw them in the freezer and let them freeze
for about an hour to two hours,
even really the longer, the better.
You don't want them to be completely frozen solid
but you do want them to be frozen on the outside.
That's what's going to make these fry
together really well.
And what's gonna allow them to get the batter
and just not kind of just fall apart
as soon as you batter them.
So now we're gonna make
our Kentucky fried coating for this.
Now this is gonna be based on a recipe
that I've done in the past,
which is based on a recipe that was found
in the Chicago Tribune a few years ago,
where the writer found what they believed
is the original Kentucky fried chicken recipe.
Now I've tested it and it comes out good.
Really good.
I have a video where I did a Kentucky fried mushroom,
where I did chicken of the woods mushroom.
I battered it and fried it
just like you would Kentucky fried chicken.
And it was delicious.
So here we're gonna do that same Kentucky fried recipe.
So we're gonna start with one cup of our cashew milk
and we're going to be making essentially
like a buttermilk batter.
Then we're just gonna add about a half
of a teaspoon of lemon juice.
And now we're going to add our egg replacer to this mix.
Now I'm going to be using Just Egg.
We just need one egg equivalent,
which is about three tablespoons.
Now you don't have to use Just Egg.
You can use just about any other egg replacer
and just measure out for their one egg equivalent.
It's all gonna work out pretty well.
I personally like to use Just Egg,
but you can also use Bob's Red Mill Egg Replacer.
I've used that quite a bit in the past.
You can even use some like aqua faba, flax seed, chia seed.
It's all gonna work pretty well.
You just need something that's gonna be thick
and something that's going to help the batter stick
to the chick-un.
So let's just give this mixture a whisk.
We'll just set that to the side.
Now let's put together our 11 herbs and spices.
We're gonna start with two cups of flour,
two teaspoons salt, one and a half teaspoons dried thyme,
one and a half teaspoons dried basil,
one teaspoon dried oregano, one tablespoon celery salt,
three tablespoons white pepper,
one tablespoon ground yellow mustard,
two tablespoons paprika, two tablespoons garlic salt,
and one tablespoon ground ginger.
Lastly, we're just going to crack
in some fresh black pepper.
And then whisk the dry ingredients.
Now, before we get into the process of coating these,
let's go ahead and get ready to fry them.
So I'm just gonna use a large Dutch oven,
and then I'm going to fill it with some vegetable oil.
And then we just want to heat this up
to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
Once we have it at 350 degrees Fahrenheit,
go ahead and dip your chicken into the wet better
than from the wet batter directly into the dry batter.
Pressing the flour into the jackfruit chicken.
As soon as you press it in, don't let it sit,
throw it right into the fryer.
We're gonna let these fry at 350 degrees
for about 12 minutes.
Let them get golden brown, remove them from the fryer,
throw them onto a rack and then enjoy
your Kentucky fried jackfruit chicken drumsticks.
Oh, these are gonna be good.
And baby look at these.
- Awesome. KFC chick-un
- Wait, do you like that I put them in the bucket.
- I love that, yeah,
it makes it.
- I love that.
- I'm so excited.
Cheers.
KFC jackfruit chicken.
That is really good, really good.
- It's awesome.
- It really does look like chicken.
That looks like chicken, come on.
Well, this is Saucestache for LIVEKINDLY.
What did you think of today's KFC-style recipe
and what plant-based hack would you like
to see me make next?
Leave a comment down below and don't forget to subscribe
and click the like button.
See you next time.