This karaage-inspired oven-fried chicken is a recipe adapted to be minimal effort, minimal cleanup and meal-prep friendly.

Time: 3/5
Chicken needs about an hour to cook, and you can get stuff done while it is in the oven

Effort: 3/5
Takes a pair of chopsticks, a bit of forethought and a dash of expectation management

Close, but cigarette

It took almost a month to move house and settle in, but Served With Rice now has a new kitchen! Besides some proper counter space and a dining table that isn’t in full view of the toilet, the new place also comes with a spanking new oven that I’m itching to try out. Which is how this oven-fried karaage chicken was born.

Karaage (ka-ra-ah-gei) is a Japanese term for a particular technique for coating foods in a light layer of flour and deep-frying. While it can be used to deep fry all sorts of food, karaage usually refers to chicken.

The term Karaage (唐揚) actually means Chinese-style. Whether or not it really originated from China, it is firmly rooted in Japanese cuisine. At any rate, I’m not aware of any Chinese recipe in common use nowadays that fries chicken like this. So, karaage might be another concept that the Japanese borrowed from the Chinese and then developed into something new and magnificent in its own right, like chashu or ramen.

I love fried chicken like anyone else, but I hate the cleanup even more. I’m also discouraged by the fact that it’s hard to make a lot of fried food in one go, which is kind of important to a home cook who relies on meal prepping to strike a balance between convenience and eating well.

However, I’ve dabbled in oven-fried wings before, and I found myself wondering if karaage can be adapted into an oven-fried recipe to make it more meal-prep friendly. Several train trips to work spent daydreaming, reading up and getting lost in Just One Cookbook’s beautiful website later, I was ready to try my hand.

The results were … okay. I’m not going to lie to you and say that oven-fried wings are just as good as deep-fried ones, because that just isn’t the case. However, I am going to tell you that this method lets you make a lot of chicken, which tastes pretty good, and gives you enough leftovers for lunch later in the week.

Which is fine. Most of the food I cook is going to end up in bento boxes that get refrigerated and microwaved. They’re not going to stay crispy for a few days, whether or not I deep-fry or even double fry them. Home cooking often involves compromises, and if baking my ersatz karaage lets me have something that tastes similar for much less effort and cleanup, I’m all for it.

If you have an air fryer, that would work very well for this recipe too. Or, if you have a weekend free and don’t need a half-ass solution, go the extra mile and fry some chicken the proper way – double fried and tossed in a sweet and sticky gochujang sauce in the Korean style, or with my other method involving a user friendly mayo-based batter.

Dramatis Personae

Chicken – 200g pax

I got a 1kg bag (a bit more than 2lbs) of drumettes which were on sale. It was a pleasant coincidence that there were exactly 20 drumettes in the packet, which allowed me to divide into five servings of four. Mid-joint wings would work well, as would boneless thighs.

Oven-fried chicken doesn’t work very well without the skin, however. Also, because we need much longer cooking times in the oven as opposed to frying in oil, white meat would dry out by the time a crispy crust forms.

Marinade

For the 1kg of drumettes I used a tablespoon of soy sauce, a teaspoon each of sake and mirin, and a tiny drizzle of sesame oil for the marinade. Except, I didn’t have sake so I used Chinese rice wine and hoped it was close enough. Please no bully.

Since I’m going to be covering them in starch later on, I didn’t want them to be sitting in too much liquid. I couldn’t rely completely on soy sauce for saltiness, so most of the seasoning came from salt and a bit of chicken bouillon powder. Allow for about half a teaspoon of those total, per portion.

Some white pepper is very nice. Finely minced ginger and garlic are also great additions, but you don’t need much. I had maybe two tablespoons in total for five portions, so roughly one teaspoon in total for each of those meals. That gave my chicken a very noticeable gingery, garlicky taste which I liked, but you may want to dial it back if you want them to stay in the background and be more subtle.

Starch coating

I had corn starch, but potato starch works too. Flour would probably also work, but I’ve never tried it with that. It took me about one tablespoon per portion to give all the chicken a thin coating.

Baking powder is the magical ingredient here. From what I understand, adding an alkali lowers the pH of the batter and the chicken skin, which helps encourage browning for science reasons, according to Kenji. I only used maybe a teaspoon at most for the 1kg of drumettes – my SO is pretty sensitive towards the slightly bitter taste that baking powder can have. I’ve read that it is due to some brands adding aluminium to their baking powder, so if that’s a problem for you get an aluminium-free brand.

Garnish

I thought I could make the chicken look fancy with a drizzle of kewpie mayo, some nori seaweed slivers and a sprinkle of sesame seeds. Unfortunately, my garnish had the effect of smothering everything and hiding the beautiful drumettes under a lot of visual noise.

Regardless, kewpie mayo is a solid serving suggestion as a dipping sauce for karaage. Maybe serve it in the side, if you don’t want your food to look like a crime scene.

Vegetables – 100-200g pax

Always eat your veggies! Cabbage and carrots are both vegetables with a low prep-to-yield ratio, and they also have a nice colour contrast when cooked together. I like to cut them up and throw them all into a big wok and stir until they’re done. Then, I have a neat little trick where I finish the vegetables with a bit of soy sauce and butter to mimic that Teppanyaki grill vibe. It keeps the Japanese theme we have going.

Executive summary

1. The day before, marinade the chicken.
2. Preheat oven to 225C/425F. Line a baking sheet with foil and baking paper.
3. Toss chicken in corn starch and baking powder mixture, until lightly coated.
4. Spread chicken out on the baking sheet and bake, turning every 20mins or so for 40-60mins until lightly browned.
5. While waiting for chicken to bake, cook rice and vegetables.
6. Assemble and serve.

Play by Play

Mincing garlic by hand because it builds character, but also because I didn’t want to dirty my food processor. This was more ginger than I intended to use, but oh well.

My chicken already comes in this nice ziplock bag, and I see no reason to dirty another bowl. Marinade ingredients go into the bag, and everything gets mixed up right inside.

As the oven pre-heats, I mix a tiny bit of baking powder in corn starch. Toss chicken to lightly coat.

All lined up and ready to go in the oven. I needed to cook in two batches, which was fine. The second batch can cook as I eat the first.

A trick to shredding cabbage with a knife is to quarter them and cut out the core that holds the leaves together first. Save the core for stock, or slice it very thinly and cook it as well.

I cut the carrots and garlic and goet them into the pan first because I like giving them a head start. The cabbage follows soon after.

Here’s the teppanyaki mimicry trick. The vegetables are done, the heat is off, and I mix in a bit of butter and some soy sauce.

This is 20 minutes in, before the drumettes get flipped.

A look into the new oven. It’s got lights so I can see what’s going on inside! It makes me feel so fancy.

This was 40 minutes in, after a flip at 20 minutes. I would let this batch go further, but I am a) hungry, and b) worried that the chicken will dry out if I let it go for longer. I let the second batch go for about 60 minutes, again flipping every 20 minutes, and that batch came out a bit crispier.

Kewpie mayo makes lots of things better, and ersatz-karaage is one of them. Itadakimasu~

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