Hey Hive!
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! Both because it's cheaper and also healthier to cook for yourself compared to eating out. While I usually stick to the usual recipes I do like to try new ones once in a while and figured I'd share the new ones I've tried once a month so here we go!
This is actually a sequel of sorts to another recipe I tried a while back, where I made gochujang (Korean spicy paste) tofu in the air fryer. It actually came out pretty well, and it was also the first time I've tried cooking with Gochujang.
But because I followed a recipe that was to be made with twice the amount of tofu, I had quite a bit of sauce leftover after I made that. The sauce was a mixture of different sauces and garlic so I wasn't sure how long I could keep it, but I just wanted to finish it before it went bad.
So the next day, I decided to try making gochujang fried chicken!
Ingredients:
- frozen chicken fillet (or fresh if you prefer)
- corn starch
- oil
Sauce:
1 tbsp Gochujang (Korean spicy paste)
1 tbsp Corn syrup
0.5 tbsp Soy sauce
0.5 tbsp Oyster sauce
0.5 tbsp Garlic
1 tbsp Cooking oil
These were the chicken fillets I was using, which is the standard pack of chicken I use in almost all my chicken recipes. It's very convenient compared to other frozen chicken packs I've seen since it's frozen 1 by 1 so I can just defrost how many pieces I want.
Step 1: If using frozen chicken, defrost the chicken fillets.
So this recipe just requires the chicken and the sauce, basically.
Step 2: Once the chicken fillets are defrosted, pat them dry with paper towels.
Step 3: Coat the pieces in cornstarch to prepare them for frying. Do not use corn flour, because I found out the hard way it's quite different and not for frying.
Step 4: Heat a pot or wok on medium-high heat and pour 3 tbsp of oil. If you rather deep fry, I recommend using a pot instead. But since I'm going to be using the same wok to stir fry the chicken with the sauce later I just did a shallow fry.
Step 5: Gently place the chicken pieces into the oil and fry for about a few minutes depending on the size of your chicken.
Once you see that the chicken is slightly brown on the bottom, flip them over to cook on the other side.
Step 6: Once the chicken is sufficiently cooked, lower the heat slightly and add in the sauce, stir frying with the chicken until they're coated in the sauce.
It looked and smelled really good! I served in on top of some fried rice I made and it was perfect!
I think this would work with some white rice and veggies as well, since the gochujang sauce will add some spice to it.
The chicken was nice and tender (although probably not as tender as fresh chicken), and it complemented the gochujang sauce very nicely. I'm not sure if it's better than tofu since it's only coated in the sauce and if you're using bigger pieces of chicken the inside might be a little bland, so I would recommend using smaller pieces for this one.
I think for normal Korean fried chicken they would coat the chicken with batter and deep fry it until it's real crispy before mixing it in sauce but since my sauce had fresh garlic in it I wanted to stir fry it. Maybe next time I'll try deep frying and making it real Korean fried chicken?
Overall though it's still a pretty good recipe and I think this sauce works with most white meat. If you can get gochujang, try it out if you like spice; with the garlic it's truly delicious!
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!
