Text 30937, 104 rader
Skriven 2012-11-10 12:51:00 av JIM WELLER (1:123/140)
Ärende: KFC 2
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MMMMM-----Meal-Master - formatted by MMCONV  2.10

     Title: The Best Korean Fried Chicken Pt2
Categories: Korean, Chicken, Info
  Servings: 4

    chicken

I fiddled around with the ratios and found that a 50/50 mix of
all-purpose flour and corn starch was as good as I could get it. But
I was still unhappy with the results. For starters, everything could
have browned a bit better. And more importantly, no matter how hard
I tried, no matter how many flour/corn starch batter I used, no
matter how many cooking temperatures or different fats I tested,
there seemed to be a limit to how crisp I could get the coating.
Heck, I even tried using no batter, just tossing the dry
starch-coated wings directly into the fryer. No dice.

Powdering Up: In a classic fried chicken or any other batter-based
recipe, how do you make the batter crisper and lighter? One trick is
to use a leavening like baking powder. This accomplishes two goals.
First, it raises the pH of the batter, which has the effect of
increasing its browning properties.

Secondly, and more importantly, it creates tiny, tiny air pockets
that bubble up as the batter hits the hot oil. These pockets not
only increase the surface area of the batter, making it crisper and
crunchier, but they also break up the thick layer of batter,
reducing its toughness.

Ok, so then why not just increase the amount of baking powder in a
recipe until the batter is as crisp and as light as you want it?

With too much baking powder, the bubbling gets out of control.
Rather than forming crisp bubbles and layers, when an over-
baking-powdered batter hits hot oil, it erupts violently, popping
bubbles and blowing them off of the wings. The goal is to inflate
those bubbles to maximum capacity without causing them to rupture,
not to make them burst. When that happens, grease rushes into the
cavities where the bubbles used to be. You end up with an inedibly
oily wing.

1/2 teaspoon of baking powder per cup of flour/corn starch mix was
about as high as I could go.

My next thought: what about double-frying as some recipes suggest?

I tried it repeatedly, and found that I never really got anything
that was markedly superior to a single-fry. Double frying works in
some cases—when building up the gelatinized starch layer in a
perfect french fry, for example, or when softening naked chicken
skin to get ready for bubbly expansion in a confit-style double-
fried buffalo wing. It's even a great method for an ultra-crunchy
craggy batter in traditional Southern fried chicken.

But with a thin batter-based fried food? It doesn't really make much
difference, other than allowing you to rapidly re-heat and serve
large portions of par-cooked chicken; I suspect that's where the
idea for the technique originated from; It's something that's useful
in a high volume restaurant, but unnecessary for a home cook.

Thinking Thin Here's the problem: I had two conflicting goals here.
On the one hand, I want to get my coating as thin as possible.
Eggshell thin with a crunch to match, remember? This meant that
unless I was willing to manually paint a thin layer onto each wing
pre-frying with a paint brush ( a prospect I didn't completely
disqualify), then making a thinner batter by adding more liquid was
the only recourse.

Unfortunately, adding more liquid to a batter has an unfortunate
side-effect: It actually makes the batter tougher. Weird, right?
You'd think thinner batter = thinner coating = crisper crust.
However, what you find is that as you thin a batter out, the final
fried product goes from having a too-thick, too-crunchy crust when
the batter is thick, to a thin-but-leathery-and-not-crisp crust when
the batter is too thin.

The culprit, once again, is gluten formation. The more water you add
to a dough or batter, the more easily those flour proteins swish
around and bind with each other, thus the more easily gluten forms.
What I needed was a way to thin my batter while simultaneously
limiting gluten formation.

My first thought was to make a very thin slurry with just corn
starch to coat the chicken, then dip it into a dry corn starch/flour
mixture to add a bit of heft and extra brownability to it (as we've
seen, a plain corn starch slurry doesn't work so well)

No dice. It came out crisp alright, but the coating was unpalatably
thick and tough (the wing on the left in the photo above).

The solution had to be built into the batter itself, and it just
happens to come in a bottle.

MMMMM-------------------------------------------------

YK Jim


... Another disgusting chapter in his food shenanigan journal.

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