Let’s learn to batter-fry the hell out of our chickens

Our whole family loves Bangkok. And we are crazy about the food.

But all of us like different aspects of the city’s food scene. When my wife and I are in Bangkok, we eat at mall restaurants, local Thai favourites and at roadside stalls. My son, however, goes off to Bangkok’s many Michelin starred restaurants, is friends with all the top chefs and has very fancy meals.

 

But even my son forgets all about Michelin stars and top chefs for at least one meal every trip. That’s when he goes to a food court and queues up at a stall for a portion of Khao Man Tod.

 

   Khao Man Gai is the more famous version of the dish. It come from Hainan in China and has been carried all over East Asia by Hainanese chefs. In Singapore it is so popular that they sometimes drop the ‘Hainanese’ and just call it Singapore Chicken Rice.

 

   If it is made properly (and quite often it is not: many cooks use short-cuts), then the chicken should be gently poached with herbs and the stock then used to cook the rice. All over Asia it is served with different sauces but Khao Man Gai, the Thai version, has the best (i.e. spiciest) sauce.

 

   The Thais have also done something that the Hainanese do not do in Singapore, Malaysia and the other countries they have taken their chicken rice to. In Thailand they sometimes fry the chicken. That is the version we eat in Bangkok and it’s called Khao Man Tod. (Tod just means fried in Thai.)

 

   If you give me a choice between the best Hainanese Chicken Rice and a mediocre Khao Man Tod, I will always choose the Khao Man Tod. That’s not because I don’t like poached chicken or the other versions. It is because I think chickens were born to be fried.

 

   I am not alone in thinking this. The idea of frying chicken that has first been battered or breaded turns up in most food cultures. The most famous, of course, is Southern Fried Chicken from the US. Before Col. Sanders and his franchises made it globally popular, it was treated as a signifier of Southern Pride and each state had its own version. Chicken Maryland was served with pineapple or banana fritters, the Kentucky version was made in a pressure cooker (as fans of KFC will know) and so on.

 

   The whole Southern pride thing eventually took a knock when people began associating the Fried Chicken tradition with slavery. Then it was suggested that it was actually an African dish that white people stole from blacks. And the current wisdom is that it was actually invented in Scotland because a medieval recipe has been discovered.

 

   But forget about white people for a moment. Fried chicken is also an Asian thing. Korean Fried Chicken is now a global craze. Japan has Karaage which is battered chunks of fried chicken. There is a version in the Philippines, another in Indonesia and variations all over East Asia. And more people probably eat Sichuan’s La Zi Ji chicken (now globally known as Chongqing Chicken) than eat all the South East Asian fried chicken dishes because the population of Sichuan is so massive.

 

"It is interesting that most of the better Indian fried chickens I have tasted have been made by chefs working abroad, including, of course, Chintan’s masterly Rowdy Rooster chicken."

   Some years ago when New York restaurateurs Roni Mazumdar and Chintan Pandya were researching fried chicken, they looked around for an Indian version. They couldn’t find one, though you could argue that Chicken 65 is fried even if it is not battered and you do get a thinly battered chicken in old Delhi. (But then, even Chongqing Chicken is not breaded; it has a cornflour crust.)

 

   Eventually, Chintan Pandya invented his own version using Indian spices and Roni and he served it at Rowdy Rooster, a small restaurant (the first of a proposed series of Rowdy Roosters) in New York’s East Village. I had it there and loved it so much that I later wrote that it was the best thing I ate on that trip to America.

 

   One of the dishes that Chintan and Roni make with their fried chicken is a sandwich. Of course it is not exactly a Western-style sandwich. They use pav that is specially made for them so it owes as much to vada-pav as it does to the version popularised by Col. Sanders.

 

   The idea of a fried chicken sandwich has been around for a while. There is a fierce rivalry in the US between various fast food chains over the invention of the sandwich, but the consensus is that KFC which now sells more fried chicken sandwiches worldwide than any other chain, did not have the idea first but latched on to it after others made it popular.

 

   The fried chicken sandwich becomes a Chicken Burger if you just change the bread. And nearly every burger chain now sells some variant of a chicken burger.

 

   My views on chicken burgers are complicated. A burger needs real meat for taste and texture. If you make a flat cutlet out of minced chicken and use it instead of the beef/buffalo/pork/mutton patty, it simply is not going to work. Chicken just doesn’t have the oomph of red meat.

 

   On the other hand, a normal hamburger patty is grilled or pan-fried. So it gets its texture from the ground meat. If the chicken burger guys stop trying to make a faux-meat patty using bland chicken keema and properly embrace deep fried chicken, then they will have a huge advantage. The reason I prefer Khao Man Tod to Khao Man Gai, the reason why Japanese people love Karaage and the reason why Korean Fried Chicken is now a global craze is not because of the chicken. It is because of the frying. If you fry the chicken so that it is crispy and then put it inside a bun, you have added something a normal burger does not have: crunchiness.

 

   You can’t deep-fry a meat patty (well, you probably can but it won't taste very special) in the way you can a chicken patty.That’s one of the qualities chicken shares with such fish as shrimps: it takes on an added dimension when you deep fry it.

 

   Unfortunately too many of us in India don’t see the power of crispy fried chicken. Just take the example of the chicken pakora. This is not a traditional dish and probably dates to the 1950s and 1960s when chefs began looking for things to do with chicken tikka. If you order a chicken pakora at one of the many Punjabi restaurants that serve it, you will get a rubbery chunk of broiler chicken encased in oily, flabby pakora batter. It will have none of the crunch or oomph of say, Korean Fried Chicken.

 

   Could this be because Indians have never really learned how to batter-fry chicken? It is interesting that most of the better Indian fried chickens I have tasted have been made by chefs working abroad, including, of course, Chintan’s masterly Rowdy Rooster chicken. The Kerala-spiced version I had at Kricket in London was among the best and the chef is not even Indian. (Or maybe that’s why he thought of it!)

 

   So, here’s my conclusion. Given that each year India turns more and more into a nation of chicken-eaters and given that deep-frying is a traditional Indian skill, let’s learn to batter-fry the hell out of our chickens. It is time for a great Indian fried chicken which will eclipse Khao Man Tod, which will put Col Sanders to shame and which will have the one advantage that India brings to all its dishes: the magic of our spices.

 

   Can’t you just see it: “Col Singh’s Masala Fried Chicken. It’s finger-licking spicy!”