Fried Chicken

Juicy chicken inside a flavourful golden crust; this one’s a real treat.

Serves: 3-4

Ingredients:

• ½ small onion
• 4 garlic cloves
• 1 inch piece of ginger
• 1 tsp. salt (or to taste)
• ½ tsp. ground cumin
• ½ tsp. turmeric powder
• 2 tsp. chilli powder (or to taste)
• ¼ tsp. ground black pepper
• 900 grams chicken drumsticks
• 1 egg
• ½ cup corn flour
• ½ cup plain flour
• 3 cups oil

Instructions:

1. Roughly chop up the onion, garlic and ginger and add to your grinder along with the salt, cumin, turmeric, chilli and pepper. Run the grinder until you get a paste like consistency. Doesn’t have to be smooth all the way. You can add a teaspoon of water if you find it to be too dry.
2. Make deep gashes on both sides of the chicken drumsticks (skin on).
3. Rub the spice mix all over the chicken drumsticks, paying attention to get the spices into the gashes. Then cover and let the chicken marinate for at least 30 minutes. If you’ll be marinating the chicken for longer, do it in the fridge.
4. When you are done with marinating, add the egg to the chicken and mix well.
5. Mix the cornfour and plain flour in a large plate. Add the chicken and keep gently mixing until you get a sort of yellow coloured flour coating on the chicken pieces; there are going to be some white bits of flour as well and these are going to become the extra crispy bits on your fried chicken. When done, give your chicken pieces a gentle pat on both sides. This ensures the flour coating doesn’t drop off the chicken when frying.
6. Heat the oil in a large pot. The oil need to fill a third of the pot, so you might have to adjust the quantity of oil according to the size of pot you are using.
7. Drop a little bit of batter into the oil and when it floats and you see bubbles forming around it, add your first batch of chicken to the oil. Do not crowd the pot.
8. Fry the chicken until they look golden brown and cooked through; you’ll have to flip the chicken halfway through to get both sides cooked. Our chicken was cooked in around 15 minutes. We kept the oil temperature at medium.
9. When fried, drain them on some paper towels to get the excess oil off.