Extra-Crispy Karaage with Rice Flour Coating

Cut the chicken into pieces of your preferred size. Keep the skin and meat together, smoothing out any curled-up skin so the skin and meat stay as one.

Cut the pieces with the varying thickness of each part in mind. The chicken shrinks a little as it fries, so cut it slightly larger to account for that.

Put the cut chicken in a bowl and grate in 1 clove of garlic.

Add the soy sauce. Too much mixing or too much soy sauce makes it salty, so keep the amount modest.

Grate in the ginger and mix everything together well.

Add about 1 teaspoon of potato starch and mix so the marinade clings firmly to the meat.

Let it rest in the refrigerator as is. A few hours, if possible, lets the flavor soak all the way through.

Prepare the coating. Combine rice flour and potato starch in a rough 2:1 ratio. Rice flour makes it toasty and crisp while potato starch makes it light, so you get both textures.

Dredge the marinated chicken in the combined flour. Don't overthink it — just coat it roughly all over. Even a layer so thin you think it isn't coated is fine.

Leave the floured chicken in the refrigerator. Half a day if possible, at least 30 minutes to 1 hour. The flour absorbs the surface moisture so the meat and coating become one, and the surface turns from a white, powdery look to beige.

Heat the rice oil to 170–180°C and add the chicken. It tends to stick to the bottom at first, so stir gently right after adding it. Don't turn the heat up too high.

Judge doneness by the bubbles. At first the meat sinks and fine bubbles form; as the moisture inside cooks off, it floats up and the bubbles grow larger. Lift the pieces out of the oil in the order they float up.