Jung Susan - Kung Pao and Beyond: Fried Chicken Recipes from East and Southeast Asia

For my mother and father.

And with love and gratitude to Nigel, who is my most supportive fan.

Managing Director Sarah Lavelle

Commissioning Editor Stacey Cleworth

Designer Katy Everett

Photographer Yuki Sugiura

Photography Assistant Alexis Ko

Food Stylist Sam Dixon

Food Stylist Assistants Connie Simons and Kristine Jakobsson

Prop Stylist Max Robinson

Head of Production Stephen Lang

Senior Production Controller Martina Georgieva

Published in 2023 by Quadrille

an imprint of Hardie Grant Publishing

Quadrille

5254 Southwark Street

London SE1 1UN

quadrille.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders. The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

Cataloguing in Publication Data: a catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Text Susan Jung 2023

Photography Yuki Sugiura 2023

Design Quadrille 2023

eISBN 9781787139343

Is there any omnivore out there who doesnt like fried chicken?

When I was the food and wine editor for the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, a position I held for close to 25 years, I wrote about a wide variety of dishes for my weekly recipe column. Invariably, the recipes that received the most online clicks and feedback from the readers were the ones for fried chicken. My editors sent requests: More fried chicken recipes, please, but how many could I publish each month without being repetitious? However, as I talked to friends living in East and Southeast Asia and they reminisced about the fried chicken dishes they knew and loved, I began to realize that there are a vast number of dishes I could write about.

In this part of the world, fried chicken goes far beyond the 11 herbs and spices of the famous American fast food chain. Here, fried chicken can be flavoured with soy sauce, fish sauce, five-spice or Sichuan peppercorns seasonings that are now familiar to much of the world. But they can also use lesser known ingredients such as fermented shrimp paste, curry leaf, salted egg yolks, or myriad types of chilli pastes. I originally wanted this book to be representative of all of Asia, but due to the sheer volume of dishes, my culinary borders had to stop somewhere. I realized I couldnt include the fried chicken of Central, South, North and West Asia, or the book would have been twice as long. I also didnt include fried chicken recipes from East and Southeast Asian countries I havent visited, such as Myanmar, Mongolia and Cambodia.

My love for fried chicken started when I was young, when I was growing up in my parents home in Monterey Park, California. My mother made fried chicken wings that my brothers and I loved so much we would ask for them on our birthdays, or on the rare occasions she asked us what we wanted for dinner. My Ah Ma and Ah Yeh paternal grandmother and grandfather immigrated to the United States from the village of Kow Kong, in southern China. For all the big Chinese holidays, we, and other Los Angeles-based families who hailed from the same village, would gather for a celebration lunch at the Kow Kong Benevolent Association building in downtown LAs Chinatown. The menu never changed: chow mein, fried chicken and this bright pink artificial-tasting punch fancied-up with a block of raspberry sherbet that melted slowly in the warm liquid (even as a child I thought the concoction was disgusting). My father was in charge of the chow mein, while one uncle (the term we children used for all the older men, even if we were unrelated) made the fried chicken. He used only the drumsticks and thighs which all of us preferred over the chicken breast and the dish was similar to the ChineseAmerican fried chicken sold at the Chinese delis (cooked food shops) in Chinatown and other areas of California with large Chinese populations. Unfortunately for everyone, this uncle was secretive he kicked everyone (including my father) out of the kitchen when he was cooking, so nobody knew why his chicken deeply flavoured, and with a fantastically crunchy crust was so much better than all other versions.

My love for fried chicken never ceased. When at university, I often took a break from studying by cooking for friends, and they loved it when fried chicken was on the menu. I always made too much enough for plenty of leftovers because eating a midnight snack of cold fried chicken while studying for exams is one of lifes great joys. In Hong Kong, while living in a small flat with a kitchen so tiny there was no space for an oven (and even the fridge was in the living room), I served huge platters of fried chicken for Christmas, instead of the usual roast turkey. In my travels around East and Southeast Asia, I searched for new-to-me fried chicken dishes at hawker centres and food markets. I even love fast food fried chicken. My favourite is Jollibee a chain from the Philippines, but I am happy to eat McDonalds wings, or Popeyes spicy version.

I hope you love fried chicken as much as I do, and that in this book, you can find recipes that will satisfy your cravings.

The East and Southeast Asian section of a supermarket is no longer considered an exotic aisle filled with mysterious bottles and packages to examine and wonder about. Thanks to chefs who refuse to tone down their dishes in order to cater to palates unfamiliar with their cuisine, excellent cookbooks that focus not on entire countries but on specific regions of a country, and the publics willingness to taste new foods (new to them, anyway) and then attempt to make them in their own kitchens, open-minded cooks are seeking out ingredients from all over the world. Cooks dont have to settle for canned water chestnuts or canned bamboo shoots if the fresh vegetables arent sold in the supermarket, some intrepid farmer is growing them for the local farmers market. And what you cant find locally is often available online.

But even when ingredients overlap in cuisines, they are not necessarily the same. Fresh local chickens considered a special treat due to their price in other parts of the world are sold at wet markets and supermarkets in Hong Kong, and the price is fair about HK$70 for a bird (although certain breeds beloved by chefs can sell for more than four times that much). Those who are familiar only with the enormous chickens with oversized breasts that are mass produced by multinational corporations might think that Hong Kong chickens are scrawny. Its true that they are only about 1.2kg (2lb 9oz) each, but the meat is firmer and far more delicious than an oversized bird. Soy sauce and fish sauce are being used outside East and Southeast Asian kitchens as chefs realize that these ingredients can add a good dose of umami to even non-Asian dishes, but what is available to them in their parts of the world is nowhere near as varied as what we can buy in just about any local supermarket.