My Ultimate Karaage Recipe

After 6 years of trial and error (seriously!), I’ve finally come up with the ultimate karaage (Japanese style fried chicken) recipe!

Making karaage is not really complicated. You just need to follow these 4 steps. A classic recipe goes like this:

1. Cut chicken thighs into bite sized chunks (or use chicken drum sticks).

2. Marinate the  chicken in a mixture of soy sauce, sake, sweet wine (or sugar), freshly grated ginger and garlic for about 20 minutes.

3. Coat each piece of chicken with katakuriko (potato starch ).

4. Deep fry the pieces of chicken.

This recipe is good –  but it doesn’t allow me to produce the stable karaage all the time. Sometimes it’s subtle in flavor. Sometimes it gets greasy… I analyzed the reasons for failure and found a solution.

1. Use ‘shoyu koji’ (fermented rice malt with soy sauce) instead of the above mentioned marinade sauce. It gives mild and rich taste by bringing out the flavor of meat.

2. Use corn starch instead of potato starch. Corn starch has finer texture than potato starch, so it will keep less oil on the surface and make karaage crispy.

3. Add small amount of chilli powder to the corn starch.  It helps reducing the oily taste and make karaage teste much lighter. However, do not add chilli when it’s served for small kids.

Just take my word for it and give it a try!

🙂