March, 2020. There was nowhere to go (not safely, anyway). The public was advised to stay home rather than risk getting infected with COVID-19 or, worse, infecting others unwittingly. Good advice, really, until someone thought to add some wit to it. Stay home and watch Netflix.
It reeked of elitism for some. And I agree. But it was still good advice even if it wasn’t for everybody. Netflix was a welcome alternative to illness or worse. Whatever looked good, we watched. Even those we’d seen before, if we remembered enjoying them, we watched again. When we ran out of what we thought were good, we started checking out unfamiliar titles with even more unfamiliar actors. That was how we found Extreme Job and drooled over Korean fried chicken.
No, Extreme Job is not a movie about food. But fried chicken figures prominently in the story. It’s a comedy and a cop caper. You have a team of undercover cops who just can’t manage to catch a drug lord red-handed. Team leader Chief Go takes out his retirement fund and buys Brother Chicken, a flailing fried chicken restaurant, across the street from the drug lord’s lair. From there, they perform surveillance work.
But it’s impossible to keep the restaurant as a cover without raising suspicion in the neighborhood unless the place is really functioning as a restaurant. Each team member cooks a version of fried chicken so they can choose which is good enough to sell to the public. Detective Ma whose parents owned a restaurant back in his home town comes up with a winner by using his parent’s rib marinade to make sticky fried chicken.
Oh, my goodness, the food scenes… The most memorable montage had chicken being scooped out of the deep fryer with a kitchen spider… I was wide-eyed and my mouth fell open. There was this momentary urge to hit the pause button on the remote and search the web if someone had already managed to replicate the fried chicken from the film so we could make our home version. But, you know, it was a momentary urge. We did finish the movie first before I scrambled to try to find a recipe — and found none.
So, we recreated the dish. For the first attempt, I used chicken thigh fillets. I cut them into strips, breaded them as though I were making ebi furai, deep fried them and then tossed them in the reduced sauce.
When I asked my daughter, Alex, to recreate the dish using chicken wings, she did things differently. She dipped the chicken wings in a batter as though she were making tempura. Because she used a mixture of cornstarch and flour (as opposed to flour alone) for the batter, the surface of the chicken wings retained the crispness even after tossing in the sauce. Wonderful. Truly wonderful.
Fried chicken wings with sticky soy honey glaze
Ingredients
- 12 chicken wings
- 1 teaspoon salt
- ½ teaspoon pepper
- ½ cup cornstarch
- ¼ cup all-purpose flour
- oil for deep frying
- ¼ cup honey
- ¼ cup soy sauce
- 1 tablespoon rice vinegar
- ¼ cup rice wine
- 1 teaspoon chili oil
- 1 teaspoon ginger juice grate a piece of ginger, squeeze and save the juice
Instructions
- Pat the chicken wings dry then cut each along the joint that separates the drumette from the wingette.
- In a bowl, toss the chicken with salt and pepper.
- Heat enough cooking oil to reach a depth of about three inches.
- Whisk together the starch and flour. Disperse ½ cup of the mixture in ¾ cup cold water to make a batter. The consistency should be thinner than pancake batter.
- Add the remaining starch-flour to the chicken and toss to coat all pieces evenly.
- Dip each chicken piece in batter then drop in the hot oil.
- Fry the chicken in batches until golden brown on all sides.
- Drain the fried chicken on a stack of kitchen paper.
- Mix together the honey, soy sauce, rice vinegar, rice wine, chili oil and ginger juice in a bowl.
- Pour off the oil in the frying pan.
- Pour the sauce into the frying pan and boil gently for about half a minute.
- Add the chicken to the sauce and toss until each piece is evenly coated with the thick dark sauce.
- Serve as an appetizer, or as a main dish with hot rice.
