End of Week Snack: Double Deep-fried Korean Fried Chicken Drumsticks

What synonyms can one use to convey the extreme fried-ness of the chicken drumsticks that were going for £1 for six at Sainsbury’s? None that I could think of after a small group leaders’ evening and two staff days.

Needed to express excess energy in some productive way. So still agog with the thought of poking stuff round boiling oil and spotting some cheap chicken in the supermarket, hit upon trying to replicate some fried chicken someone let me have off their plate a few years ago. There was, of course, nothing organic, biodynamic, or healthy (in the modern #firstworldproblems sense) about this snack. Much encouragement from Acts 10:34 – 11:18 and Acts 20:17-38, from team meetings that were not about corporate strategies and new programmes but about trusting in God’s promise that speaking the plain word would fulfil his purposes, and also over meals with church planters and people who have been reading the Bible with senior management in the Square Mile for decades and writers of soon-to-be-published books and materials and stay-at-home mothers whose children just had their first day at school.

Double Deep-fried Korean Fried Chicken Drumsticks
Ingredients
2.5kg of discounted chicken drumsticks (dark meat being better for deep frying due to the larger percentage of connective tissue)
1 tbsp salt
1 tbsp freshly ground black pepper

½ cup potato flour
¼ cup plain flour
¼ cup glutinous rice flour
(but really, just proportionally 2:1:1)
2 eggs
1 tsp baking soda

vegetable oil

4 cloves of garlic, minced or thinly sliced
1 cup of tomato ketchup
½ cup of hot pepper paste
½ cup of honey
2 tbsp apple cider vinegar

Directions
1. Marinate chicken with salt and pepper for an hour while you cycle out to get the other ingredients.
2. In a separate container, mix the flours and the baking soda.
3. Beat the eggs in a bowl.
4. Dredge chicken in beaten egg, then cover with flour mixture. This gives a thicker crust (which is preferable in these parts) than real proper KFC (korean fried chicken). Set aside.
5. Heat oil to 180°C. Spread old newspapers on the floor next to the cooker to absorb oil splatters.
6. Fry chicken while talking to housemates about the ins-and-outs of the Church of England.
7. Make the sauce by saute-ing the garlic in some oil, then with the heat on lowest setting, adding the ketchup, hot pepper paste, honey and cider vinegar, stirring to combine.
7. Re-fry chicken – the curate’s genius idea from Sunday lunch for a superior crunch.
8. Immediately coat chicken with sauce.
9. Set aside and sprinkle with roasted white sesame seeds.
10. Think of buffalo wings and look around for blue cheese dips and carrot and celery sticks but find none. Offer a plateful to health-conscious housemates. Feed hopeful neighbours who, nosing the air, have appeared in the kitchen. Deliver a tupperware-ful to brothers living a 5 minute ride away.