Lazy Recipe: Barat Ako’s Easy Korean-Style Fried Chicken

April 16, 2015

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This is a very easy recipe for Korean-style Fried Chicken I just made up from ingredients we already had around the house. This is the easy, lazy version that uses regular ingredients. Even though this recipe is easy, it’s delicious. It’s a good way to dress up fried chicken, especially when your family is already getting sick of regular fried chicken. And bonus, you get to use up things in your refrigerator!

Sometimes I just make up recipes because:

I want to use things up
I don’t want to do the complicated version because: too lazy, don’t want to measure ingredients, don’t have original ingredients!

So here we made regular fried chicken the easy way, using a pack of Crispy Fry Original breading mix. There are times when I just don’t want to do anything too complicated and this was one of those times. We just pour the breading mix into the thawed and cleaned chicken, mix well, cover, and let it sit in the refrigerator for the rest of the day until we are ready to fry. The breading actually turns into a batter because of the wet chicken, but it will still fry beautifully.

You can make your fried chicken using any recipe you want, you don’t need to follow my example in using a breading mix. Your fried chicken just needs to have some sort of flour breading for the “korean-style” sauce to stick to.

The “korean-style” sauce is really easy. The ingredients I usually use are:

Dari Creme margarine or butter (I like using Dari Creme Buttermilk here because it imparts a “butter” smell to the sauce. I know it’s fake butter, but it just adds that fake but wonderful butter flavor that makes most people think it’s delicious. It’s kind of cheating, LOL, but anything to make picky eaters want to eat more, eh?)
chopped garlic
leftover spaghetti sauce (we usually buy the 1-kilo spaghetti sauce so we often have some unused spaghetti sauce left in the refrigerator), or you can use your choice of spaghetti sauce or tomato sauce; if you don’t have spaghetti sauce, you can use all those catsup packets from fast food chains, just add a little water because catsup is thicker than spaghetti sauce!
brown sugar
hot sauce (hot sauce packets, the ones that we get from pizza delivery. I’m sure you have a lot of those lying around, too)
salt & pepper to taste; use soy sauce if you want it to be a bit more “Asian”

The basic procedure is:

Melt the butter in a pan (medium heat). I use about 1/4- 1/3 of a stick of butter, that’s around 2-3 tablespoons.
Add the chopped garlic and let it cook until it’s very light brown (don’t let it get golden brown). I usually use 4 big cloves, but you can add more if you really like garlic.
Add tomato sauce, around 1 1/2 cup.
Add brown sugar to taste. I usually start with 2 heaping tablespoons and just keep adding more if I want it to be sweeter.
Add a small amount of salt and pepper, to taste. We will be cooking the sauce until it’s thicker, so that means the flavor will get more concentrated. If you put a lot of salt in at the beginning, it may become too salty at the end. Remember also that your fried chicken coating may already be a bit salty.
Add hot sauce. I usually put in 3 hot sauce packets because some of the picky eaters in the family don’t like very hot (maanghang) food. You can add more hot sauce if you want it hotter.
Increase the stove heat, let the sauce come to a boil. Keep tasting and adjusting the seasonings like sugar, salt, pepper, hot sauce… This is a sauce that you can keep tasting and adjusting to get it to taste the way you want it. There is no raw ingredient. Everything is edible so there’s nothing to worry about eating raw.
Once the sauce is to your liking, turn off the heat.
Fry the chicken.
Put the fried chicken in the sauce and make sure that it is coated with the sauce.
Serve!