When my foodie friends and I get together for a home-cooked dinner, one of the dishes they request most often - coming in a close second to my kouign-amann (an excellent pastry from Brittany, France) - is that of the Thai chicken wings that grace the cover of my cookbook A Celebration of Food.
They really are delicious - the wings are marinated in a mixture of fish sauce, garlic, lemongrass and chillies before being deep-fried.
We wondered how the Thai wings would be if I marinated them as usual but, instead of putting them directly into the hot oil, we used the Lopez-Alt method of coating, air-drying and battering before frying. Having tasted them, we all agreed the results were even better than my regular wings.
A few weeks ago, curious about yet another recipe, we held a fried chicken cook-off. I marinated the chicken wings as usual. We used the Lopez-Alt method of coating and battering before frying for some wings, and with the rest we tried a formula out of the Modernist Cuisine at Home cookbook. This technique involves adding Wondra flour and potato starch to the liquid used to marinate the wings. After frying both batches and tasting the results side by side, we decided that while we preferred the crust on the Lopez-Alt wings, the Modernist Cuisine version yielded more flavour.
The results lead to yet another hybrid recipe, which we're calling the SJ-LA-MC (Susan Jung Lopez-Alt Modernist Cuisine) wings. The recipe is a mouthful (ouch!) that we've yet to try, but we know it's going to be excellent.