Fried Chicken, Japanese Style: Karaage
Normally in the winter, the good farmers who give us our monthly meat allotment (we don’t get to choose what’s in it) give us hearty, stewy things. Things with bones and skin and the promise of ballast. Things you can cook overnight and eat the next day, or the next three days.
And then comes March, and the items in the box start to change. There’s still plenty of roasts, quartered chickens, and sausages — but we start to see more delicate things, more ethereal cuts, stuff that’s meant to be cooked fast and eaten while hot.
Since we don’t get to pick what’s in the box, we crow and celebrate when we get treats like boneless skinless chicken thighs. Once a regular stable of our diet, it means basically one thing now: karaage: Japanese fried chicken, marinated in mirin, soy sauce, ginger, garlic and hot sauce, served with scallions and cilantro, lime and a well-seasoned mayo.
You want to eat karaage while it’s hot and crispy. Making it is a small production, but a production nonetheless, with a deep pan of hot oil, and an assembly line, a pan lined with paper grocery bags to soak up the grease, cornstarch streaks on your pants, fingers gooey with batter. It takes a dance to pull off, and it helps a lot if someone else can prepare the…
