‘Like biting into a wafer biscuit’: Chinese fried chicken in Hong Kong (2024)

Nowadays, crispy chicken is one of the most popular dishes for family gatherings in Hong Kong.

Chicken itself has long been a must-have dish for major Chinese holidays, from Mid-Autumn Festival to Winter Solstice and Lunar New Year.

Back in feudal China, chicken was common livestock kept by the average family as the birds could provide eggs as well as meat for sustenance. There is also a saying in Chinese that it is not a feast without chicken.

While chicken might be prepared differently across China, the southern provinces are big on fried, crispy chicken. One local saying, which roughly translates as “red-hot, popular crispy chicken”, is used to facetiously describe someone who is having their 15 minutes of fame.

Since red also symbolises luck and prosperity in Chinese culture, deeply burnished crispy chicken is a popular item at feasts, especially in Hong Kong.

“Hong Kong people prefer crispy chicken because it means popularity and luck,” explains Jayson Tang, executive Chinese chef at JW Marriott Hong Kong, which houses the one-Michelin-star Man Ho Chinese Restaurant.

Tang says crispy chicken should have “crunchy skin, tender and juicy meat, [and] the bones are supposed to be just cooked and often pink. When sampling the chicken’s thinner back area, the diner should be able to taste the cloves and five spices, as a sign of how thorough the marinade was rubbed through.”

Crispy chicken is one of the basic dishes that all students are taught when training as a Chinese chef, Tang says.

After washing and marinating the chicken inside and out, chefs quickly scald the chicken to clean any excess grease from the skin.

The next step is to douse the chicken in what is called the “vinegar bath”, made up of sesame candy and red vinegar, which prepares the skin for its crunch. The chicken is then air-dried for 10 to 12 hours before being flash-fried, then oil-poached.

The skin gets its signature crispiness from 10 to 12 minutes of basting with scalding hot oil right before serving.

Because most Chinese chefs are trained in how to make the perfect crispy chicken, all sorts of methods are employed to give one version the edge over another.

Tang chooses to make his version with “princeling roosters”, or virgin roosters that haven’t been used for breeding.

“The meat is firmer and there is less fat under the skin, so the bite is less greasy,” he says.

“I commissioned an agricultural company called Kelang to breed these roosters for me. They must be kept in individual cages to prevent them fighting and I have specified that the chickens are raised for 120 days before slaughter – this makes them the perfect size for crispy chicken.

“Kelang is a local farm and they won’t use hormones in the breeding process. It’s important to me to support local Hong Kong enterprises and I feel that it’s a responsibility as a chef to provide quality ingredients to my diners.”

At Hong Kong Cuisine 1983 in Happy Valley, executive chef Silas Li’s crispy chicken has a darker hue and more of a crunch compared with other versions I’ve sampled.

Li’s method varies from the standard method for crispy chicken in that he adds baking soda to his vinegar bath, and air dries his chicken for only five to six hours – but the biggest difference is that he oil bastes the chicken three times instead of once.

“We also make sure that the boiling hot oil gets inside the ‘cage’, so you have the nice roasty aroma from the bone,” he says.

“We deep-fry the chicken with the pour-over method for around 10 to 15 minutes and then we hang dry the bird. We then deep-fry the chicken with the pour-over method again for around 10 to 12 minutes, before presenting [the whole chicken] to the guests.”

At this point, diners are invited to take photos of the whole burnished bird before it goes back to the kitchen for final preparation.

“This is a good time to let the chicken rest, where the juices return to the flesh of the chicken. Then we baste the whole thing in boiling oil for a third time [before serving].”

A similar level of fastidiousness can be found at Yong Fu, a one-Michelin-starred restaurant in Wan Chai that has turned the idea of crispy chicken on its head.

Instead of chopping up the bird as is done in other Chinese restaurants, staff make a show of separating the crispy skin from the bird, to be served Peking duck style.

“We wanted to create something different from the traditional dish,” explains head chef Liu Zhen. “What makes Yong Fu’s chicken so unique is that other restaurants only focus on making the skin crispy. But ours is not only crispy, it’s layered – just like biting into a wafer biscuit.”

After separating the skin, the rest of the chicken meat is prepared in the style of Chinese hand-shredded chicken. Additional seasonings are added, such as onion and Japanese sansho pepper, which give the dish a spicy, floral bouquet.

The combination of onion and spices on the chicken is unexpected, as is the texture of the skin, which is thicker but has a wafer-like crispness. The dish is served with thin pancakes to wrap the chicken skin with the meat, and is to be eaten with your hands.

“We have incorporated multiple methods of cooking chicken into one dish,” Liu says, adding that the dish is so labour-intensive that only three are available a day and that the recipe and process are closely guarded secrets.

Li from Hong Kong Cuisine 1983 also says that his team are only capable of making five of his special crispy chickens a day.

Fierce competition in Hong Kong has prompted these chefs to take a ubiquitous dish to new heights, each vying to create the most innovative version of crispy chicken in the city. Needless to say, for patrons who want to be the judge of these, advance ordering is highly recommended.