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Welcome to Hot Thai Kitchen. So KFC did it again everyone. Last year when I went to Thailand, I got inspired by their super popular spicy wings and I came back figured out how to make it at home and I shared the recipe with you and many of you have made it and loved it. So this year I went back to Thailand, back to KFC, and I got reinspired to share yet another Thailand exclusive dish that has become my new favorite item at KFC. It is called cow yam sap. Cao is rice. Yum is Thai salad. Gai is chicken. And sap means spicy and delicious. So it is a rice bowl topped with popcorn chicken that's tossed in a lap seasoning. And if you've ever had lap, you know that you can just about
lap a piece of cardboard and it'll still taste good. So now imagine that on fried chicken. But you cannot just willy-nilly lap some fried chicken. There are actually many secrets to making this. Well, and in figuring out this recipe, I had some intel. I consulted a friend who used to work at KFC. And even though they could didn't have the exact recipe to share with me, they gave me many useful pointers about how this dish is put together. And I have to say that what I came up with is even better than the original. And I'll tell you why as I go. It is not hard. And there are ways to prep this in advance so that it becomes a weekn night friendly meal.
Let's get started. First, the popcorn chicken. I've got boneless, skinless chicken thighs here. I'm going to trim off any big chunks of fat. Then flip the chicken and see if there's a chunky piece of meat sitting on the back. And I like to cut that off as our first piece. And this will make this part a little less thick and even it out a bit. Then cut it into 1 in pieces. This is one reason why ours will be better than the original because our chicken pieces are more substantial to make sure that once they're fried, they won't be just chunks of crust with itty bitty chicken inside.
Once that's done, I'm going to marinate it simply with fish sauce. Soy sauce will also work here. A little sugar and some water. The water will absorb into the chicken like a brine, making sure the pieces remain juicy after frying, which is important, especially cuz these are small pieces. Marinate for at least 20 minutes or up to 1 day. While we wait, let's make the seasoned flour dredge. I've got some allpurpose flour here, and I'm going to add some cornstarch to lower the gluten and make the coating lighter. and crispier. Then in goes some paprika, some cayenne pepper or any kind of chili powder, granulated garlic, white pepper, and some baking powder to airate and lighten
our coating. And it'll also help with browning. Whisk everything together. Once the chicken has marinated, you'll notice it still has some liquid pooling. This is exactly what we want. We're going to pour all of the chicken into the flour and that extra liquid will help clump up the flour which will create that craggy crust. Mix it very well. Make sure the pieces are not stuck together. And if you want an extra thick crust at this point, you can just spray a little bit of water into the flour and get more of it to stick to the chicken. Once you're done, grab the chicken out of the flour one by one and
lay them in a single layer. And I do this because despite your best efforts, there are always pieces that got stuck together. So this way we make sure that every piece is properly coated. So once your chicken is fled, you can theoretically fry them right away. But what I like to do is let them sit for about 15 20 minutes because as you can see, the flour is mostly dry on the chicken right now. If you fry them immediately after dredging, a lot of that flour will just fall off into the oil. So if you let it sit, the moisture from the chicken will slowly hydrate the flour and it will hold on to more of it. So when you fry it, you end up with a nicer crust. And I learned this just
from experience cuz whenever I fry meat in batches, I always notice that the last batch always has a bit of a nicer coating because more of the coating is on the meat. So, in order to not have to sit around and wait for it, I always plan it so that I dress the chicken first and then I go prepare all of my seasonings. Speaking of seasonings, let's do that. Now, first and most important part of a lap is the toasted rice powder. I've got some raw jasmine rice here. This can also be Thai glutenous rice. And then I'm going to add one or two mrut lime leaves for extra aroma. And stir that constantly over high heat. The lime leaves are optional, but it's the second reason why ours is going to be better than the
original because we can juzj ours up with extra ingredients because we don't have to worry about cost like they do. Once the lime leaf is dry and crisp, you want to remove it and continue toasting the rice until it's deeply browned. Let that cool for a bit. And then I'm going to blitz the rice and the lime leaves into a powder in a coffee grinder. You can also use a mortar and pestle here, but make sure it's not too powderized because you do want it to have a little texture. So once it's done, shake the grinder and the big bits will float to the top. And if it looks like this, those are a bit too big. So grind it a little bit more. And if the largest bits look like these, you're good to go. Now,
with our toasted rice powder, I'm going to make a dry seasoning mix by adding to it some roasted chili flakes. Really, as much as you want here. and optionally some chicken buong powder for extra umami. You can make this dry seasoning mix in advance. Keep it in a jar so it's ready to go on a week night. Finally, our liquid seasoning. Very simple. I've got fish sauce, lime juice, and a little sugar. And I'm going to stir this up just until the sugar is completely dissolved. And that is it. All right, we've got our chicken dry seasoning, wet seasoning. We're almost there. And by the way, as always, the full written recipe with all the amounts and all the tips are going to be on hot
thaiikitchen.com, and I'll link to that below. And the last thing we need is fresh herbs. Now, lab is typically a dish that is full of green fresh herbs. At the very least, it will contain cilantro, mint, and green onions. And in addition to that, you're going to need some red onions cut into these short julian here, which you can do that by first taking half of an onion and cut it into three sections along the latitude. Then take each section and slice radially like spokes of a bicycle until you have these nice little pieces. This is a super useful cut for salads for when like a full julian would be too much for one bite. There is no official name for this cut, but I call it the
Margaret's cut because that's how my old chef used to call it, and her name was Margaret. And now we're ready to fry the chicken and assemble. So, I've got an inch of oil here that I'm going to bring up to 350 Fahrenheit. That's 175 C. But take a look at our chicken. Um, you can visually see that much of the flour that was white and dry before now has moistened and absorbed sort of into the chicken. So that's what we're looking for. Doesn't have to be this extent. Any any time you can give it is better than no time at all. All right. So we're going to go in with the chicken one by one. And don't crowd the pot. So we're definitely going to need to do this in batches. So once you've got a batch, once all the
pieces of the current batch goes in, set a timer for 2 minutes. And that should do it. And you want to maintain frying temperature to something between 325 to 350. Don't let it drop too low. Don't let it go up too high. I keep my heat around medium to medium high. But that if you have a small amount of oil, it's going to drop really quickly. So you're going to need higher heat. If your chicken is cold, it's going to drop more. So there's a lot of factors that go into that. So, you're having an instant read thermometer is highly, highly recommended for just cooking in general. And you don't really have to stir it.
I'm just stirring it cuz I need something to do. Okay, there's our timer. So, these are going to come up. Wow, look how pretty they are. And on to this paper or you can use a rack. Now, leave that there because they are not done. We're going to double fry them. That's right. For extra crispiness, before you drop your second batch of chicken, make sure you double check your oil temperature that it has gone back up to 350 before you drop them. By how weak the bubbling was, I realized, oh no, I didn't wait for the oil temp to come up. All
right, all of our chicken has been fried once. And if you're going to prep this in advance, you can actually stop right here, put all of your chicken in the fridge, and on the day that you're going to eat, you can fry them for the second time, or you can even air fry them. The first fry has to be deep fried if you want this result, but the second fry can be an air fryer. And the result, in my experience, you can't tell the difference. So, it's really, really convenient. If you're going to eat them today though, before you drop them in for the second fry, make sure they have had at least five minutes to cool down, ideally a little bit more, just to make sure they don't overcook during the
second fry. And the reason we second fry is we need this to be extra crispy because we're going to be tossing it in a dressing. All right, so for the second fry, we also need the oil to be back at 350. All right, in goes for the second fry. And the bubbling is going to be less aggressive because the chicken is much drier this time than the first time around. 1 minute. Okay, that was 1 minute. Wow, look how beautifully golden they look. And the color is going to darken a little bit. It's perfect. Now, it's like we're in a KFC kitchen. We've got our mislass. And hey, we just got an order for Coyang
Kais. So, I'm going to mix up only half of our chicken because you do not want to mix any more than you're going to eat because the leftovers will not reheat well after it's been tossed in the dressing. Okay. Now, step one, this is very important. We're going to mix together our dry seasoning and the wet seasoning. and you'll end up with something that's kind of like a slurry. Now, this is the most important secret that I learned from my intel right here. Okay? And I'll tell you why in a minute. Then, after you've got that, in goes the red onions. As much as you want, really. And then all of the chicken goes in. And we're going to mix passionately.
Oh, no. not too passionately until all of the chicken is coated with our seasoning. And it's going to take the more you do, the longer it takes. I feel like when I do single portions, it doesn't take too long. But when you've got two portions in here, you have to take your time. Scrape down the sides every once in a while. And then once it looks like everything is nice and even, then you can go in with all your greenery, your green onions, cilantro, and mint. Give that a quick mixoo. And that is that. Now, the reason why you absolutely have to mix your dry and your wet seasoning before you put in the chicken is because if we were to pour our watery seasoning over the chicken, wherever it
lands, it's going to immediately absorb into the chicken and the chicken is going to be wet in that spot and we won't be able to distribute it evenly throughout. And then if we go to put the dry powder on the mostly dry chicken, the dry powder is not going to be able to stick. And if you remember my KFC wings recipe where in fact I had to put dry seasoning onto a dry chicken, I had to do all kinds of things to make sure that its stock and was evenly distributed. Most importantly, making sure the chicken was fresh out of the fryer, still wet with the oil, and the seasoning had to go on immediately.
Right. But for this recipe, because we have a wet and a dry component, if we mix it together first, the toasted rice powder is going to absorb much of that liquid, creating a thicker sauce, so that it will stick to the chicken, but not immediately absorb into the chicken. So, we have time to toss and get all that seasoning to distribute. The first time I had cowam gais, I was trying to figure out how to make this recipe. That was the biggest mystery to me because it was like, how is the chicken not soggy from the dressing? But it's also not dry. Like, it's clear that they didn't just use a dry seasoning on it.
It's got this like moist texture. I was kind of racking my brains trying to figure out how they achieved this. And once I talked to my friend, it all made sense. All right, now all we have to do is plate it up and eat. And you got to have some good jasmine rice for this. And the rice that KFC provides was actually surprisingly good. We can jush it up a little bit because we can with extra red onions, extra mint leaf, and look how pretty that is. very excited. It's so good. I hope you could still hear that it was still crunchy. That's both the double frying and also making sure that we make a slurry of the dressing before we mix everything together.
The flavor of this, it's like it's sour and spicy and umami and it's it's all just so good. And the first time I had it at KFC, I was like, man, for a fast food chain, like this is a really good meal. You know, the KFC one, I would say, is a little saltier than this. At KFC Thailand tends to make things saltier for my palette in general. So with this, I was able to adjust it so that it works for my preference. But I was really quite impressed that the KFC version was as good as it was. Cuz you know, my I wouldn't expect a fast food chain to come up with anything impressive, right? But that one was like, "Oh man, that is good." So if you're in Thailand, give that a go. But if you're not going to
Thailand anytime soon, this recipe will get you a result that's even better cuz our chicken is more substantial. We got more herbs in there. It's going to be fresh. Our ingredients are better. And visit hot thaiikitchen.com for all of the tips for how you can prep everything in advance. And trust me, if you've got everything made, it's like minutes of getting that on the dinner table. So, the recipe as always will be on hot thaiikitchen.com. A special thanks to all of our Patreon members who help support the show. And thank you as always for watching. And I will see you next time.
