Hey Hive!
It's been a long time since I posted about this but we're back with more of our home cooking! If you're unfamiliar with this series, it's where I showcase some of the food we've been making at home since we've been cooking a lot nowadays! Also I'm running out of content so yeah gotta make the most of it!
Since chicken is our favourite type of meat I've been looking for different types of chicken recipes and although I'm not a fan of deep frying, fried chicken is definitely one of our top favourite methods of preparing chicken! I've seen some different spice packets in the store and the other day this one caught my eye:
The chicken did look pretty good, so I thought I'd give it a shot.
This was the chicken we were going to use. I liked this brand and packaging since they were frozen individually so it's a lot more convenient since I could just pick out how many pieces I wanted to cook. Last time we bought a 2 kg bag of frozen chicken but the pieces were all frozen together and I ended up having to defrost the whole thing; it was a mess.
Step 1: I defrosted 6 fillets in a bowl of water for about an hour or so and after rinsing them, I pat them dry with paper towels.
There are instructions on the back of the spice pack so I followed them but since I had less than 1 kg of chicken I only used about half the pack.
The instructions said to marinate the chicken fillets for at least an hour. This is different compared to other spice packs I've tried which did not require marinating so I made sure to prepare this ahead of time.
This is what the powder looks like inside, and as it was garlic-flavoured it did have a strong aroma of garlic.
Step 2: Mix the powder with some water and stir until the paste becomes smooth, then marinate the chicken in the paste mixture, keep it covered and refrigerated for at least an hour.
Step 3: While the chicken was marinating, I prepared our regular rice and vegetables. To make this, I washed 2 cups of rice, cut a carrot into little pieces and dumped some frozen broccoli and cauliflower in a rice cooker. Easy!
Step 4: Heat up a pot of oil on medium-high heat. I used canola oil but vegetable oil works too. I used a pot this time since I thought there would be less splatter in a pot compared to a wok, but it does take a little longer to heat up.
Step 5: Once the oil is hot enough, take the pieces of chicken and gently place them into the pot. Since my pot isn't very big I fried the fillets 3 at a time.
Step 6: Fry the chicken until golden brown, and once they're done set them aside on a paper towel. I'm not sure if it was my induction cooker not being hot enough or I just didn't fry them enough but I thought they would come out a little more brown. I didn't want to fry them too much lest they get dry in the middle.
For the second batch I turned up the heat on the cooker and they did seem to fry better, although there were some black bits here and there but all good.
I'd say the chicken came out pretty well all things considered! It did look and smell delicious!
The rice was already cooked by the time I finished frying and it was time to serve!
We had a whole plate of chicken along with our plates of rice. It was a pretty dry meal overall but some chili sauce helped.
The chicken turned out pretty good! It wasn't as crispy as advertised, maybe because of my cooker or my frying, but I'm just glad the inside was still nice and juicy despite me frying it for a while. The garlic flavour wasn't as strong as the smell led me to believe but it was still really tasty!
Overall I'd say because of the prep time, this spice packet wasn't as worth it as some other spice packets I've tried which didn't need the marinating time. But it was still pretty yummy although not as crispy as I thought it would be. Maybe I added too much water in making the batter but I did try this a second time with less water and a thicker consistency and the result was similar. Either way I'd opt for other brands like McCormick which we've tried before that may be just a little more expensive but requires much less prep time.
I haven't had time to try new recipes for a while but I have found quite a few that I've been meaning to try and hopefully I'll find the time to! I realised this is the first cooking post I've done this year, so my goal is to try 1 recipe every month so I can post about it.
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
Check out my previous post in this series!
