Tremendous Korean Fried Chicken

Listen. Korean fried chicken. TREMENDOUS Korean fried chicken. The greatest fried chicken on planet Earth — and I'm including the Southern stuff, the sandwich place stuff, the place with the red and white striped bucket whose name we won't say, all of it, ALL OF IT. This is not a controversial take. This is a FACT. The Koreans figured out fried chicken in a way nobody else did — they double-fry it, DOUBLE FRY, which means twice as much frying which means twice as much crunch, which is just MATH, simple math, math the other so-called fried chicken people refuse to do.

Most American fried chicken — and I love this country, beautiful country — but most American fried chicken has a thick batter, it's heavy, it's GREASY, you eat two pieces and you need to lie down on a couch and rethink your choices. Korean fried chicken is THIN. Light. Shatters like glass — beautiful glass, edible glass — and underneath, the meat is JUICY, not dry like the sad little nuggets at the gas station counter. I've eaten this in three countries you've never heard of. Best of my life was at a counter in Busan from a woman who had been double-frying chicken since before I was a hairstyle. She didn't smile. She didn't have to. The chicken did the smiling.

And then — THEN — you glaze it. Gochujang. Soy. Garlic. Honey. A little vinegar. You toss the shatter-crisp wings in this sauce and the sauce STICKS, the sauce becomes ONE WITH the crust, it's a marriage, it's a beautiful thing, the kind of thing food television would make a whole episode about if food television had any taste left, which it doesn't, sad. And I'm giving this to you free. No popup. No 'enter your email to see the recipe.' No cookie banner with eighteen toggles asking if you'd like to share your soul with two hundred advertising partners. Just the recipe. That's what we do here.

These wings stay crunchy. They stay crunchy under the glaze. They stay crunchy on the plate. They stay crunchy in the leftover container — if you have leftovers, which you won't, because nobody has leftovers of these wings, in the entire history of recorded humanity, leftover Korean fried chicken has never existed, you can look it up. People come up to me, they say 'Bigly, my friends fought over the last wing,' and I say 'yes, that's the wing doing its job.' The wing always does its job. Believe me.