How to Make Hawaiian-Style Fried Chicken and Macaroni Salad

[Music] today on cook's country we're taking a trip to the aloha state brian makes bridget the ultimate hawaiian style fried chicken adam reviews plastic wrap jack challenges bridget to a tasting of potato chips and natalie makes julia the best hawaiian style macaroni salad that's all right here on cook's country back in the late 1800s workers from china japan korea portugal and the philippines all came to work on hawaii's sugar cane and pineapple plantations they brought their meat and rice lunches and metal containers called cow cow tens but later on the farm started serving a meal on divided paper plates hawaii's plate lunch was born by the 1960s lunch wagons and roadside restaurants served plate lunch meals to everybody and it was still a basic meat and rice affair but today plate lunches will often include a third component a portion of creamy macaroni salad along with those two scoops of rice the makeup of the original plantation workers is still reflected in the infinite choice of proteins everything from kalua pork tuna poke or even japanese inspired fried chicken fried chicken is on the menu today so we're gonna head into the kitchen with brian to see how it's done [Music] fried chicken in the hawaiian islands can mean several different styles a lot of them are japanese inspired there's mochico which takes chicken and it marinates it in a batter of egg and sweet rice flour and then there's katsu style you take chicken and you dredge it in panko breadcrumbs but brian's here and he's going to show us what might be the easiest kind of fried chicken that's right we're going to do karage style which is also known as dry fried chicken meaning we're not going to use any batters to allow the starch to stick to the chicken just going to pull it out of the marinade and put it into our starch and let that do the work for you okay so we're going to start off with our marinade and that's going to be a combination of garlic and ginger and i'm just going to process the ginger i have three ounces here we just want to cut that into half inch coins and there's no need to peel this ginger because it's going to be processed into such small pieces it won't even be noticeable on the chicken i like it already very easy so four garlic cloves we remove the root end because it's a little bit woody and if that sticks on the chicken you'll definitely be able to feel that okay we're going to combine the garlic and the ginger in the food processor and we're going to process it for 15 seconds until it's finely chopped okay that's nicely chopped let's take a whiff of that and we're going to add that to our marinade now i've got one cup of water here and the reason why we have the water in there is because we just marinated it in soy sauce alone to make the chicken too salty so the water is there to kind of temper the marinade a little so that's our garlic ginger mixture now to that we're going to add one half cup of soy sauce three tablespoons of light brown sugar and one tablespoon of toasted sesame oil for that deep sesame flavor so we'll just whisk this together okay so that simple marinade is done now we're going to talk about the chicken here we're going to opt for chicken thighs it's typically when this recipe is made in hawaii they use dark meat chicken because it tends to stay moist during frying if you use breast meat it tends to dry out so you have a boneless thigh usually on the side there's a little piece of fat you can just remove that and then we're going to cut the chicken in half crosswise and crosswise in this situation means that we're cutting it against the length the last piece goes in the marinade and we just want to press this down to make sure the chicken is fully submerged in the marinade and now we're going to cover this chicken with plastic wrap and let it sit in the refrigerator for at least one hour or up to three hours after three hours it gets to be a little bit too salty a little too pungent okay okay rigid our chicken's been marinating for three hours and we're ready to coat it you notice that we're using very small thin pieces of chicken typically we coat chicken that's gonna be fried with a combination of flour and corn starch that takes a lot longer to brown than potato starch potato starch gets brown and crispy in the same amount of time it takes to cook that thin piece of chicken and so potato starch is a little different than potato flour just potato starch is the starch only from the potato potato flour is the whole ground-up potato so i have two and a quarter cups of potato starch to that we're going to add two tablespoons of sesame seeds one and a half teaspoons of baking powder which will give it a nice light crispy texture one teaspoon of salt and one teaspoon of ground black pepper just whisk this together this is probably the easiest fried chicken that we've ever made so we're just going to take the chicken from our marinade i'll just work with a couple pieces of chicken at a time let the excess drip off and go right into the potato starch that's it that's it there's no egg and dredging you don't even have to cook it dip it it's all done definitely it's amazing place it on the sheet pan so i've lined this sheet pan with a little bit of parchment paper to make it easier to clean up at the end now you notice i'm only putting in about three pieces of chicken at a time into our potato starch mixture when you're doing this at home you don't want to dump all the chicken in there because you'll essentially create a batter from all the excess moisture on the chicken okay all right so it's just going to take us a few more moments to finish coating the rest of the chicken okay and this is our last piece so if you take a look at the chicken it's a little bit mottled so that means that the starch isn't fully hydrated so we want to go back through and press on the chicken to kind of make sure that that starch gets in full contact and is fully hydrated by that moisture on the chicken oh you don't want any of these big pockets of dry white starch on right okay okay now we're going to cover this chicken with plastic wrap and we're going to let it sit in the refrigerator for at least a half hour or up to one hour and that'll just allow the starch to fully hydrate and really stick to the chicken all right [Music] okay so the chicken's been sitting in the refrigerator for an hour you can see that the potato starch has really gotten hydrated during that time we're going to fry in three batches so we don't cool the oil down too much so i have 375 degree oil over here it's about two inches deep which is about three quarts and we're gonna go about six pieces of chicken at a time it's a good sign when you get that pleasant little bubbling yeah the cauldron can't walk down the street in hawaii without hearing this sound huh okay right after i put the chicken in i want to just give it a quick stir to make sure it doesn't stick to the bottom of the pot or to each other we'll let that go for about five minutes until it's nicely browned and i'll monitor the oil during that five minutes and make sure it stays between 350 and 375. okay okay bridget you can see the chicken is nicely browned and starting to float up to the top of the oil which means it's fully cooked beautiful just drop it here on this wire wrap beautiful we're going to wait for the oil to come back up to 375. we're going to add another batch of chicken we'll cook this in two more batches okay okay bridgette our last batch is all set it's nicely browned shut off our oil and now to accompany the chicken we're going to make a bright acidic sauce we have one half cup of seasoned rice wine vinegar we're gonna add one quarter cup of lemon juice one quarter cup of soy sauce and then a good pinch of black pepper i'm just going to stir this together this couldn't be more simple right the chicken was basically pre-cut up there was no battering can't get any easier i'm going to give you a little bit of sauce then a little chicken to go with your sauce thank goodness i love this piece right here it's my favorite piece in the batch is it i gave it to you it's still crispy this was the first batch that you cooked yeah this stuff would stay crispy for days you should keep a batch of my glove box in my car [Laughter] [Music] noisy fried chicken is the best fried chicken i can't hear you exactly super crisp light as air yeah you could really pick up on those notes of ginger and garlic and the sesame seeds yeah little hits of sesame this potato starch makes me reconsider every fried chicken recipe i've ever made and the sauce love it now this is easy and excellent thank you thank you brian well this great chicken recipe starts with a marinade of processed ginger and garlic water soy sauce brown sugar and toasted sesame oil trim and have boneless chicken thighs submerge in the marinade and refrigerate make a coating with potato starch sesame seeds baking powder and seasonings dredge the chicken in the mixture and press the coating onto the chicken so it's nice and even refrigerate for an hour then fry in three batches until cooked through make a dipping sauce with rice vinegar soy sauce lemon juice and serve it all together so from cook's country via the aloha state it's hawaiian fried chicken mahalo moana plastic wrap was first invented back in 1933 and became available to consumers under the name saran wrap in 1949. today there are lots of brands of plastic wrap on the market so adam's here to tell us which one is best well you're right there are tons of different brands on the market we have eight of them here these seven are all consumer grade plastic wraps this one is a commercial grade food service plastic wrap the cost was anywhere from a dollar thirty to four dollars and nineteen cents for a hundred square feet now testers were concerned with a couple different things cling of course because these things have to cling to different materials durability and ease of use which related largely to cutting the sheets with the cutter on the box to get at the question of cling testers put eight ounces of grapes into bowls that were made of plastic nettle and glass as well as our favorite broiler safe ceramic baking dish sealed them with each wrap turn it upside down shook it go for it julia you have a bowl of grapes let's see that's pretty good it's holding steady not bad you know all of these plastic wraps did a fine job holding steady on glass and metal and the ceramic baking dish two of them would not hold on to the plastic bowl and that's because the materials from which these are made which is either polyvinyl chloride or polyethylene are not inherently sticky manufacturers add a proprietary adhesive to each one and it's the formulation of the adhesive and the amount of the adhesive which they would never spill the beans onto us that actually determines how well it will stick testers also wanted to get at the durability of each wrap and to do that they took a single sheet covered and recovered a bowl of grapes ten times and they were looking to see whether it would fray at the edges whether it got sort of misshapen or stretched or tangled whether holes appeared anywhere on it and actually a couple of holes did appear in a couple of the wraps big enough for grapes to escape it was the grape escape and they were curious as to why that happened so testers had an independent lab measure the thickness of all the wraps and it turns out that the ones that were a little more durable were a little thicker the thickest one was .68 millimeters the thinner ones that got some holes or got some fraying were 0.5 millimeters right around there well that's kind of a small sounding difference 0.6 to 0.5 but it made a real difference in performance now testers also used all of the wraps for common kitchen tasks one of them was to pound boneless chicken breast to an even thickness for even cooking and they used our favorite plastic cutting board for that which is about 14 and a half inches in width and the way we do that in the test kitchen is to cover the board with plastic wrap put the chicken on it cover the chicken with plastic wrap that just makes cleanup easier and it sort of limits cross-contamination you're not putting utensils right on raw chicken so the chicken test highlighted the widths of the rolls most of the consumer grade rolls are 12 inches wide so testers couldn't cover the 14 and a half inch wide cutting board with a single sheet the commercial wrap this one is 18 inches wide but it comes in a range from 18 to 24 inches but it was a little thinner it wasn't as durable and look at the size of that box that would not fit in my kitchen drawer no kitchen drawers actually you have to take a car out of the garage leave it in the driveway and store this in the garage this wrap split the difference this was 15 inches wide so you could cover the whole board with one sheet no problem now this also had another virtue which was the right kind of cutting mechanism there are generally two kinds there's the serrated edge on the box you have one of those in the glad presence heel why don't you give that a try just give us a nice neat sheet of plastic wrap julia oh jeez okay ready did i say something about nice meat sheep well it's kind of a nice edge you know testers had a hard time with these serrated edges because the plastic wrap would bunch up on itself it would stretch but the freeze tight over there had not only a serrated edge but a sliding cutter why don't you try and give us oh yeah i like these you can have your bowl your tray right there you can put it down and you go nice and easy perfectly straight perfectly neat so that was actually our winning plastic wrap julia this is the freeze tight clear high cling freezer wrap it was four dollars and 19 cents for 100 square feet but it had all kinds of virtues it's 15 inches wide it was thick and strong it was easy to tear neat sheets of and this is definitely the plastic wrap to beat all right there you have it our winning plastic wrap is by freeze tight it's clear high cling freezer wrap for 13.21 for 315 square feet [Music] uh snack chips i love just about any kind of chip of course there's tortilla chips pita chips poker chips eric estrada any kind of chip but today we're just it was the original chip well today we're talking potato chips because eric's not here so jack's going to tell us which bag of supermarket potato chips we should be taking home dig in all right gladly these are a mix of regular and kettle style okay so we have the nine top sellers across the country five of one kind four of the other what is the difference a couple things one is the kettle chips are sliced thicker more like 1.5 millimeters as opposed to one millimeter because they're thicker the fry time is longer and during that longer fry time for the kettle chips the moisture and the starches inside the potatoes can start to gelatinize and you get what i would say is a crunchy chip rather than a crispy chip the regular chips are thinner and more delicate and lacy and crispy kettle chips are crunchy and in some cases actually kind of hard there was a division here half of the audience chose the best of the regular chips and the other half chose the best of the kettle chips really no i do have to say i'm a kettle person and i like my chips to be so crunchy that 15 minutes later i'm still hearing them as i'm crunching away these are all the same ingredients so there's really just three things all oil salt and potatoes the oil can vary our winter was made with peanut oil but we're not sure that that makes much of a difference some of the salt levels are different but no real correlation our favorites were kind of in the middle of the pack so you find it crispy you find it crunchy i'm finding crispy this is i would say the traditional that you've snuck in here it doesn't feel like kettle these three are kettle here i would say these are the most delicate which i could see people liking that i like a chip that's going to take the roof of my mouth off while i'm eating it so this would be my favorite i i still really like these though okay are we starting with what we like sure let's start with what we like oh you have made me so happy is that the winner no you fell for the trick oh oh please this is such no no is it low fat it is no this is the low fat reduced fat version of our winner the utz kettle chips are our favorite they make reduced fat 40 less fat it is the exact same chip as the full fat except at the end of the process the chips leave the kettle and they go into a centrifuge and they're still sturdy enough that the oil flies off wow it's like a spin cycle it's a spin cycle and it's 40 less fat and this was your favorite that was my favorite so the good news is you can eat 40 percent more potatoes i've been looking at this completely and the wrong way i can eat 40 more potato chips yes all right you want to see the rest of the file sure this one was really they're all really good but this was just you know it was there hers the studio audience half of them love this this is our favorite of the regular chips like a thin delicate crispy chip that's the one for you all right this is the kettle brand this is the hardest one this had the least number of fans in the studio audience or the expert panel because although you like them really really crispy it was a little too hard and crunchy for most people you know it's interesting because this is the brand that i buy at home and in comparison to the other ones it wasn't my favorite and this one is the favorite kettle chip is there peanut oil in that one this peanut oil it was the favorite of studio audience of the people who like the kettle this was their number one choice overall it was our number one choice but you know that reduced fat version these two are the same product just add the centrifuge all right i learned something new about myself jack i like reduced fat potato chips well one in particular at least and i also like the winner and that was the utz kettle classics original potato chips it's 3.79 for an 8 ounce bag [Music] there are lots of different types of macaroni salad and hawaii has a version all its own and today natalie is going to show us how to make it hi julia hi so i'm sure you've had plenty of versions of macaroni salad but a hawaiian macaroni salad usually has a creamy mayonnaise-based dressing thinned out with a little bit of milk crunchy celery and pasta cooked until it's fat so past the point of al dente so before we get started on our dressing we're going to start our pasta this is four quarts of boiling water and to this we're gonna add one tablespoon of salt and then we're gonna add one pound of elbow macaroni we're gonna let this go for about 15 minutes or until it's very soft 15 minutes is a long cooking time usually macaroni goes about 10 minutes so 15 minutes is gonna be very soft we're gonna start our dressing and so this is two cups of whole milk and to this we're gonna add two cups of mayonnaise this is whole milk not low-fat milk low-fat milk is going to cause the dressing to be too thin to this we're going to add one tablespoon of brown sugar and then two teaspoons of black pepper and then this is half a teaspoon of salt and we're going to mix this until it's thoroughly combined and then we're going to reserve one cup of this dressing so now that our dressing is made we're just going to wait until our pasta is cooked all right so it's been about 15 minutes and our pasta looks pretty cooked but we should try it to make sure it's good to go oh yeah so we're just going to turn this off and we're going to drain it so while this is cooling we're going to add half a cup of cider vinegar instead of adding it to the dressing we're adding it to the pasta so it gets soaked up but also the vinegar caused the dressing to curdle and that was just not pretty that sounds gross it does so we're mixing in the cider vinegar and we're just gonna stir it in until it's all the way absorbed while this cools we're going to prep our vegetables so we're going to start with four scallions and we're just going to take off the tips not take off a lot of the white and we're going to slice these pretty thin so those are four scallions so i'm just gonna add these scallions to the bowl that already has a grated carrot in it just one carrot just one carrot and then this is one celery rib so i'm going to cut it in half for a little bit of ease and then i'm going to cut these guys into planks and then cut these this way we want more of a finer chop so one large celery rib chopped fine so that's celery scallions and the carrot and of course the carrot is what's traditional in a hawaiian macaroni salad all right so the pasta is cool now it's been about 10 minutes and to this we're going to add our dressing and our vegetables and we want it to be cool enough to handle so the vegetables don't cook in the pasta and then we're going to add our vegetables as well very pretty i actually really love the colors of the scallions and the carrots in there it's a looker we're just going to mix this until it's fully incorporated this is good to go we're gonna refrigerate this for at least one hour but it can be made up to two days in advance [Music] all right so this is our macaroni salad it's been cooling for about an hour and this is the cup of dressing that we had reserved earlier so one cup goes in here and just stir until it's fully incorporated all right now that it's fully incorporated we're just gonna season it to taste so the dressing was very thoroughly seasoned so we're just gonna add a little bit of pepper it doesn't really need salt all right this is good to go we can just put it in our serving bowl that is gorgeous all right now it's time to eat don't hold back on my portion oh no i won't it really is a good-looking macaroni salad and i don't think i've ever said that before yeah it's not like the typical ones that you see where it's just kind of like mushy looking not really appetizing this is creamy and decadent and it has some color that's right hmm wow natalie this is delicious that tablespoon of brown sugar in there it actually just brings out some of the vegetable flavors like the carrot that's right it balances everything out it's really acidic it's creamy you need that little bit of sugar yeah and you know most macaroni salads are pretty bland all you get is a little mayonnaise this i get the pepper i got the vinegar i love the scallions that little sweetness goes a long way and i think adding that dosage of fresh dressing right before serving really enlivened all the flavors it made a big difference natalie this is delicious thank you i'm glad you like it julia so if you want to make this delicious hawaiian macaroni salad start by cooking the macaroni until it's fat make a simple dressing using milk and mayonnaise and reserve some of it separately for serving once the pasta is cooked and drained toss it with some vinegar and let it cool before adding the dressing and the vegetables including celery scallions and carrots finally let that salad chill in the refrigerator for at least an hour before serving with that remaining dressing and there you have it from cook's country a really great recipe for hawaiian macaroni salad this is really good thanks for watching cook's country from america's test kitchen so what'd you think leave a comment and let us know which recipes you're excited to make or just say hi now you can find links to today's recipes and reviews in the video description and don't forget to subscribe to our channel see you later alligator

Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 567,094

Keywords: hawaiian food, fried chicken, macaroni salad, hawaiian macaroni salad, frying, how to fry chicken, cooks country, cooks illustrated, americas test kitchen

Id: wTVjY-oKgDE

Length: 23min 48sec (1428 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2020