-I always say this
in the kitchen -- I'm not always right,
I'm just never wrong. Aw, that could've been... ♪♪ Hi, I'm Eric Sze, the owner
and chef of 886 and Wenwen, two overrated Taiwanese
restaurants in New York City. Today, I'm going to show
you guys how to make our pretty oddly famous
BDSM fried chicken. Stands for Brined, Deboned,
Soy, Milk chicken. Nothing else. Recipe is inspired by
a dish called Yan Su Ji, which is commonly found
in Southern China and also in Taiwan. It's normally served
as a popcorn chicken. It's the marinade that really
makes a difference. As the old saying goes, your dish is only as good
as your ingredients. For this dish,
we are pretty adamant on using the Chinese pullet. Pullet is a breed of chicken
that is leaner in meat, but so much more flavorful. And the fat is yellow. What we're going to do --
Oh, my bad. Some guts fell out. This is what
a chicken looks like. Oh, more guts fell out. Anyways... First thing you got to do
is kind of dislocate the feet, just so it's
a little more flexible. So we're going to trim the
nails, give it a nice pedicure. It just makes the entire thing
more presentable later. Flushing Live Poultry
raise these pullets, slaughter the birds fresh
in the morning, and then deliver it to our
restaurant in the afternoon. Freshness is the key. Give it a nice, gentle press. This will kind of release
the chicken from the ribcage. Take off the chicken ass.
It's got a lot of fat in it. Some people would think
fat has flavor, but I've tried to keep it on
before, and it's super bitter. Then I'm going to flip it over. One line down the spine so we can start splitting open
the chicken from its back. Sharp knife, super important. Keep the oysters. The oysters are niblets
of dark meat right here. So what we want to do
is kind of carve around it, and now we're going
to release the thigh. So, my technique is
to just pull on the skin and then slowly graze where
the meat and the bones meet. Stick your knife in
and then twist it a little bit, and then it'll release it, and then you got to find
the tendon that's connecting it and then release that. And boom. Now we've just got
to separate the wing. This wing bone is going to guide
you to where the wing connects. And we're just going to find,
again, where the bones meet. It is very important to use a
boning knife because it's nimble and it's thin.
You can get into the crevices. This way
you're guaranteed to have as much meat on the skin
as possible. So we have the legs
and the wings both separated from the ribcage. What we got to do now
is to decapitate this guy. What you want to do
is just to release the skin, I also want to release
these connective tissues. And this is the fun part,
really. You want to take your finger,
go right into the esophagus, and what you want to do is pull. And the entire chicken head
and ribcage comes off, Mortal Kombat style. So now separate the breast
from the ribcage itself. The breast is a concave.
It looks like this. You want to bring your knife
down at an angle like this and at an angle like this. Slowly pull, slowly pull. And what I like to do
at the restaurant is I like to keep
this cartilage on because it provides like
a little snap in texture. Take two fingers,
press down on the tenders, and then pull... your ribcage. Your breasts are now boneless. What are we doing now?
Oh, we're deboning the legs. Follow the bone.
This will guide you. Use your fingers
and pinch the bones, and it'll sort of release itself
from the meat as well. You want to also break
this skin right here. Release the bone from the flesh and just kind of place
your knife below the drum joint, and then, boom,
you samurai that shit. Release, release,
and twist and pull. And the final step is
to use your kitchen scissors and snip the tendons. Any sort of like silver skin-y
white things running through the muscle, give it a little cut
and a snip-snap. If you don't snip it,
when you cook it, the entire chicken
is going to kind of tense up, and the tendons,
if they're not disconnected is going to curl your chicken up
like into a ball. And then your starch
is going to steam, and then you'd have to throw
the chicken away. This chicken gave its life
for us to enjoy, so you don't want to fuck it up. Snip your goddamn tendons. Snip, snip, and you're done. So this is ready to go. We're going to start
making the marinade. We're going to start off with
a red fermented soybean, known as furu. What we're going to do is loosen
it up a little bit like this. Soy milk.
This is a soy milk chicken. Add the soy milk in until
it's like nicely incorporated. The beautiful thing about this
marinade is it's so universal. I think it would do
really well with pork. Vinegar,
white distilled vinegar. Adds acid, tenderizes the meat. Red vinegar -- basically white
vinegar with a little molasses. It's a little bit sweeter. It's getting thicker. Because you added acid
to soy milk, it's curdling a little bit, so you want to keep stirring
and stirring and stirring. This is white pepper. It's not Taiwanese food
if there's no white pepper. That's a fact. Look it up. Garlic powder. It's not fried
chicken without garlic powder. Onion powder.
Same as the above. Turmeric, paprika.
That light hint of spice. Curry powder, because why not? MSG. Use MSG, guys. Salt. We have already
a lot of salinity from the furu, so you don't need a ton of salt. Sugar. It's not Taiwanese food
without five-spice. Sesame oil. Shaoxing wine. It provides
a nice fragrance, subtle notes. Again, cooking is about putting all these
building blocks together and building a flavor house. You're welcome. So we have our chicken, the one that we just deboned,
right here. Pour it in.
Pop it in the fridge. At the restaurant,
we do a minimum of two days. Batter time.
Sweet potato starch. American cuisine, at least,
fried chicken is -- almost mostly use flour. The good thing about flour is
it has a lot of protein, so it yields a crispy crust. But the problem with flour
is that it has gluten, which if you try to do
a wet batter, next thing you know, you have
fucking noodles for batter. Soy milk instead of water,
which like the normal Taiwanese recipe uses,
we add soy milk. Soy milk has protein. And your block of silken tofu. Silken tofu has
the most water content, so for this recipe,
we chose silken tofu just so it can moisturize the
whole thing a little bit more. It adds more protein. It actually gives the batter
a little more body. And nobody's ever fucking
done it, so why not? So all we got to do --
blend it for like 30 seconds. ♪♪ Okay. Well incorporated. As you can see,
lots of fucking air bubbles. If you use it right now,
the batter's going to fall off of the chicken
when you're frying it. You want to chill it
for about five hours. So we are going to make
the chive slaw, which is sort of like
the garnish that goes with the chicken
to refresh your palate. Take off the butts
of the scallions. So we have chives,
yellow chives, scallion, shallots. While that chars, we're going
to slice our shallots. Medium slices. So, we're going to wok hei
this motherfucker. So, we're going to torch it, just so it speeds up
the process. ♪♪ I always tell people that I got
into the restaurant business because my grades sucked
and I couldn't get a job. And they're like,
"Ha ha ha, so funny." No, it's true. I was born and raised in Taiwan,
came here. I was like, "What the fuck?
No Taiwanese food." Good Taiwanese food,
boom, bam, here. I just like cooking,
like making food. Adequately charred. All we got to do is
incorporate this, this, into this, with that. That's cooking 101. And we're just going to add
our shallots in here. It's not really a lot of
shallots, it's sha-little. Bean sprouts. Bean sprouts exist in the slaw
for the purpose of texture. It'll squirt juice
in your mouth. Because we charred it,
it's a little bit bitter, so we're going to need to add
a lot of sugar to balance. A little salt for savoriness.
Gochugaru, ode to Korea. This is soy sauce, because,
again, we're Asian. Chili oil,
generous amounts of it. This is black vinegar. Sesame oil. Simple as that. Seriously, so easy. Give it a mix, and because
your alliums are really hot, it's going to help
melt the sugar, and so you don't really even
have to do much mixing. And ideally,
we let this sit overnight, but honestly,
30 minutes is fine. So we're going to make
the dusting for the chicken. First things first.
Salt, sugar, MSG. One to one to one. Turmeric,
and we have smoked paprika. Garlic powder, onion powder,
white pepper. Mix it up. So this is going to be
our BDSM dusting. I'm going to sneeze.
I'll try to hold it in. Ah-- I'm good. What we're going to do now is
dry the shit out of the chicken. It's very important. If you don't dry
the chicken properly, the batter will not adhere
to your chicken as well, therefore you will not get
a good crust. This chicken's been marinating
for like two days. Soak it up real well,
every crevice. So, this chicken
is pretty well dried. So I'm going to put this chicken
into the mixing bowl, and then I'm going to pour
the batter into the mixing bowl. You can tell,
the texture is really thick. Batter it well,
same like marinating it. You don't want any bald spots, because then you'll get
bald chicken. The fry temp we do is 350. Fry it for five minutes,
take it out, let it rest for two minutes, and then we fry it again
for two minutes. You want the crust to form
before you agitate it. It'll go from a liquid,
to soft, to hard. Right now it's at soft,
and if you touch it, you're going to break
the integrity of the batter. And part of the reason why
we rest it for two minutes is because then we get a chance
to separate it. Then your second fry,
you're going to crisp up every single edge
that was like stuck to itself. So time's up. We're going to remove
this chicken for its rest. It's not crispy just yet. We're going to let it sit. While it's resting
it's going to dry out, it's going to become
a little bit crispier, and when we pop it back in, it's going to crisp up
like nothing. So the chicken's been rested, and we are ready
for our second fry. Going back in. Grizzle gozzle, the sound of
water leaving the crust. We're going to let it fry for another like
three minutes or so, and then we're going to
let it rest again. ♪♪ Pretty much ready.
We're going to fish it out. Because the crust is formed,
we can feasibly, theoretically, fish it out in one piece
with a spider. Pretty crispy, I would say. So we're going to dust it,
very liberal, and just let it
kind of sit and chill for another two minutes or so. Rested, dusted. This part right here
is the breast, and this is the thigh. So if we slice it horizontally, for each slice, we can get
both white meat and dark meat. ♪♪ It's nice and juicy. Ooh! So the foot
isn't exactly edible. It's there for mostly
presentation purposes. If you eat it right now,
it's going to be really stiff, but it looks fucking awesome. Separate the chicken like Moses. This little crevice is where
we're going to stuff the slaw. Be generous. This is going to
keep people coming back. Sesame seeds. A few slices of peppers,
optional. Here you got it -- BDSM chicken. [ Crunch ] ♪♪ Yeah, not bad. No, it's pretty good. The chicken, though --
like, you can really taste the flavor of the chicken,
and that's the whole point of the recipe, honestly,
to let the chicken shine. Because this is well-balanced,
but it also allows the original flavor
of the pullet to come through. ♪♪ Mmm, so good. Eh, it's okay. For the recipe, click below, and come visit me
at 886 and Wenwen. Cheers. ♪♪ Like I always say in my kitchen, I'm not always right,
I'm just never wrong. -Hey!
-[ Laughing ] [ Torch hissing ]
