Crispy Sichuan Pepper Chicken Wings
By Nicola Lando
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40 minutes prep time
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5 minutes cook time
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Easy
Potato flour is the quick and easy path to 'crisp' in Japanese cooking. Whether deep frying crispy tofu to make Japanese agedashi tofu (delicious) or coat chicken wings, I always rely on on a quick and simple coating of potato flour. There's no need to mix a batter, and the potato flour coating puffs up beautifully and stays crisp for a long time.
These wings are marinated in a mixture of sake, mirin, ginger and garlic before cooking. Then they are tossed in a potato flour mixed with Sichuan pepper for a hint of spice, before deep frying.
A Thermapen thermometer is one of the best tools for making wings (and pretty much any other cooking task). Getting the frying temperature spot on will ensure the wings cook through whilst keeping a perfect golden colour and crispy crust. And secondly, by checking the temperature of the cooked wings, you'll be 100% confident that every piece of chicken is perfectly cooked.
The wings Serves: 2
- 6 large chicken wings, cut into 12 pieces (wing tips removed) (around 700g in total)
- Marinade
- 15g ginger
- 15g garlic
- 1tsp salt
- 1 tsp sugar
- 1 tsp mirin
- 2 tsp sake
- 2 tsp sesame oil
To fry
- 75g potato flour
- 1-2 tbsp Sichuan peppercorns
- 1 litre vegetable oil
Equipment
- Cooking thermometer (we love Thermapen)
Method
- Mix together the marinade ingredients and toss with the wings. Leave to marinate for 30 minutes (or even a few hours)
- Roughly grind the Sichuan peppercorns and toss together with potato flour in a large bowl. Add the wings and use your hands to coat well.
- Heat the oil to 160 C. Gently lower in the wings. You may need to fry them in two batches depending on the size of your pan. Fry for 5 minutes or until golden brown and the temperature at the centres of the wings read at least 80C. Using a slotted spoon, lift out onto paper towels to drain and cool for a few minutes. Serve.
About the author
Nicola is co-founder and CEO at Sous Chef. She has worked in food for over ten years.
Nicola first explored cooking as a career when training at Leiths, before spending the next decade in Finance. However... after a stage as a chef at a London Michelin-starred restaurant, Nicola saw the incredible ingredients available only to chefs. And wanted access to them herself. So Sous Chef was born.
Today, Nicola is ingredients buyer and a recipe writer at Sous Chef. She frequently travels internationally to food fairs, and to meet producers. Her cookbook library is vast, and her knowledge of the storecupboard is unrivalled. She tastes thousands of ingredients every year, to select only the best to stock at Sous Chef.
Nicola shares her knowledge of ingredients and writes recipes to showcase those products. Learning from Sous Chef's suppliers and her travels, Nicola writes many of the recipes on the Sous Chef website. Nicola's recipes are big on flavour, where the ingredients truly shine (although that's from someone who cooks for hours each day - so they're rarely tray-bakes!).
