Fried Chicken with Salted Egg Sauce ‘Eggs Benedict’

May 20, 2018 amcarmenLeave a comment

Hello Everyone! I hope everyone has had a good week, and yes I am aware it is only a Sunday night, but I want to be able to share with you guys all the delicious dishes that I’ve whipped up in for the month of May. I do plan out all my recipes so that I know whether to cook 4 or 5 dishes depending how many Wednesdays there are in a month. Because I missed a post last month which is why everything got pushed forward by a week. So I plan to wrap up Eggs Benny month by posting on an extra day so that you’ll get to see everything I prepared for you guys!

Tonight I’ll be tackling a classic combination of fried chicken and waffles with a hit of a Bruneian favourite twist to it. Over the recent year there has been a craze to add salted egg sauce to pretty much every dish possible – salted egg sauce carbonara, salted egg sauce fried chicken, salted egg sauce nasi lemak, salted egg sauce kolo mee, and the list goes on as imaginable! Oh, and let’s not forget those highly overrated and overpriced Salted Egg Potato Chips from Irvins! At the hype of its time, I caved into these overpriced potato chips because they were indeed, as marketed, dangerously addictive. Thank goodness I’ve fallen out of the craze of it all – or have I really? I’m sure when the craving kicks in, I’ll be in trouble *cheeky grin*

The recipe I’ll be sharing with you guys is not something new, in Brunei that is – I guess? Please do share in the comments below if you’ve seen this dish, or something similar, outside of Brunei. Basically, the waffles substitute the classic English muffin while a salted duck egg sauce is made instead of a traditional hollandaise sauce that makes an Eggs Benny. The sweetness of the Belgian waffles pair perfectly with a savoury spicy crispy fried chicken and salty egg sauce – definitely an explosion of taste and texture in your mouth, exciting your palette. Sweet. Spice. Salty. Boom!

PREP TIME 1 HOUR* | COOKING TIME 30 MINS | SERVES 3

*Includes the 1 hour marinating time for the chicken

INGREDIENTS

For the tom yum fried chicken

3 pcs boneless whole leg chicken
8 tbsp water
6 tbsp cornflour
6 tbsp plain flour
3 tsp sesame oil
1 & 1/2 tsp salt
1-2 tsp homemade tom yum paste
Dash of ground black pepper

For the salted duck egg sauce

3 salted duck egg yolks, steamed and smashed
2 sprigs fresh curry leaves (dried leaves can be used as well if not available)
3-4 red bird’s eye chillies, chopped
1 can (350ml) evaporated milk

6 belgian waffles**
3 large free range eggs
Micro-herbs, to garnish

**You can either make your own waffles or buy them in the store – I opted for the latter just because I don’t have a waffle maker to be able to make them myself.

METHOD

Tom Yum Fried Chicken: Combine all the marinade ingredients in a medium-sided bowl and mix the chicken around until well coated. Cover the bowl with cling wrap and leave to marinate for at least an hour to let all the tom yum flavours infuse into the chicken.
Preheat oven to 180C. Heat up oil in a large frying pan and shallow fry the chicken until skin is crispy and golden (about 5-6 minutes per side).
Remove from the heat and place on a baking tray lined with aluminium foil. Place the wings in the oven for a further 8-10 minutes to finish off in the oven.
Salted Duck Egg Sauce: While your chicken is on the go, sauté the egg yolks, curry leaves and half of bird’s eye chillies until fragrant. Reserve some of the fried curry leaves to garnish your dish later. Add the evaporated milk and bring to a boil until the sauce has thickened.
Poached Eggs: Bring small saucepan of water to the boil over medium-high heat, then reduce the heat to low-medium – the water should be just simmering. Add in the vinegar and stir. Crack one egg into a small bowl and quickly, but gently pour it into the water. Repeat with the other egg. A really soft poached egg should take around 2 minutes, but if you want it a bit more firm, it will take about 4 minutes. To check if they’re cooked right, carefully remove the egg from the pan with a slotted spoon and give the yolk a gentle push (you can tell just by your instincts if it is under or over – or perfect)!
Assembly: Top the waffles with the tom yum fried chicken followed by the poached egg. Drizzle a generous amount of salted duck egg sauce and garnish with the remaining chopped chillies, fried curry leaves, and micro-herbs. Serve and enjoy!

BON APPÉTIT

– Ally xx

Prawns with Salted Duck Egg Sauce

May 27, 2014December 28, 2018 amcarmen5 Comments

Hello everyone! Apologies for the lack of posts over the week. I assure you all that I am still eating well and I have not gone back to consuming instant noodles 🙂 The lack of posts is usually because I’ve already uploaded the recipe for it, or that what I’ve made is just a simple lunch/dinner that wasn’t photo-ready, and even also because I use natural lighting for all my photos, so when the sun is down, no photo = no post. And yes, my friends can vouch for the existence of many other photos that I have been accumulating over the past 3 years from when I first started to cook. The reason why I don’t want to use old photos is because some of them are out of focus, not presented well, or not the correct lighting, and basically…all over the place? I’m not too sure how to word the last one, but what I’m trying to say is that I’ve kind of adapted to the whole white background scene for my photographs, and I want to keep it consistently like that (unless of course for food that is not my own). I’m a little bit OCD so I like all my photographs to have the same style…for now.

Anyway, enough of the rant, about my apparent perfectionism, today I decided to make one of my favourite dishes, Prawn with Salted Duck Egg Sauce. If you read my previous post last week, I posted a recipe similar to this but with fried chicken instead. I also mentioned that I first tried this dish with prawns but have never actually made it for myself with prawns. So last week Saturday when I went to Paddy’s Market with Lina and Marissa, I bought myself some fresh tiger prawns to make this dish.

I must admit, I love prawns, but I barely cook with it only because I always have this tendency to overcook them. I always end up with dry and tough prawns which is a shame because, when cooked right, they’re just melt in your mouth delicious. I can never cook them to perfection as well because I’m always scared of them actually being undercooked. I am proud to say though that I was able to cook these prawns to melt-in-the-mouth perfection. I have never been happier. Plump, firm but tender, succulent, fresh prawns. Truly foodgasmic. Also a quick and simple dish that requires probably less than 10 minutes to cook. The only down side is that prawns are never cheap. Here at least that is…the ones I used here were almost $30 per kilo while I know I can get even fresher prawns back home for less than $10 per kilo.

PREP TIME 5 MINS | COOKING TIME 20-25 MINS | SERVES 2-3

INGREDIENTS

400g fresh tiger prawns, shelled and deveined (to save time, you can buy prawns that have already been shelled and deveined)
2 salted duck egg yolks, steamed and smashed
2 sprigs fresh curry leaves (dried leaves can be used as well if not available)
2 red bird’s eye chillies, chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely diced
1 can (350ml) evaporated milk
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
Ground salt and pepper

METHOD

Heat oil in a large frying pan over high heat. Sauté the garlic, curry leaves and half of bird’s eye chillies until fragrant. Stir in the egg yolks until they start to foam. Add the evaporated milk and bring to a boil until the sauce has slightly thickened. *This recipe calls for 350ml of evaporated milk, if you want a drier dish, then use less milk
Season the prawns with salt and pepper and then add to the sauce mixture. Turn the heat down to medium and let the prawns simmer for 3-4 minutes. Once the prawns have turned pink, remove from the heat and garnish with remaining chillies. Serve immediately with steamed rice.

BON APPÉTIT

-Ally xx

Fried Chicken with Salted Duck Egg Sauce

May 20, 2014December 28, 2018 amcarmen2 Comments

Hello Everyone! Today for lunch I decided to pull out an old recipe that I have been making for a while now. I first came across a similar dish back in 2009/2010 maybe, at a restaurant back home, Mangrove Paradise Restaurant, where one of the waiters recommended the stir fried prawns with salted egg sauce. I am so glad that they made that recommendation because the dish was simply divine! I never tried to recreate this dish at home because, if you read my story on My Kitchen Journey, I was never really into cooking until 2 years ago really.

I was looking up recipes online one day figuring out what to make, and then I remembered this dish. I searched and searched online but could not find the one that I specifically had. I came across variations of the dish, but it wasn’t what I wanted to make. I then came across this recipe from yummylittlecooks which was close enough. I tweaked the recipe and method a bit, but I actually haven’t tested this recipe out with prawns, which I should definitely do next time, with some fresh curry leaves (I couldn’t find any this week so I resulted to used dried ones). They go so well with fried chicken though!

PREP TIME 1 HOUR | COOKING TIME 20-25 MINS | SERVES 4-5

INGREDIENTS

1/2 cup canola oil for shallow frying

For the marinade

15 pcs chicken mid-wings, washed and cleaned
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp sesame oil
2 tbsp water
2 tbsp cornflour
2 tbsp plain flour
Dash of ground black pepper

For the sauce

3 salted duck egg yolks, steamed and smashed
2 sprigs fresh curry leaves (dried leaves can be used as well if not available)
3-4 red bird’s eye chillies, chopped
1 can (350ml) evaporated milk

METHOD

Combine all the marinade ingredients in a large bowl and mix the chicken around until well coated. Cover the bowl with cling wrap and leave to marinade for 1 hour. Do not refrigerate it to bring the meat down to room temperature before cooking.
Preheat oven to 180C. Heat up oil in a large frying pan an working in batches, shallow dry the chicken until skin is crispy and golden (about 4-5 minutes per side). Remove from the heat and place on a baking tray lined with aluminium foil.
Place the wings in the oven for a further 8-10 minutes to finish off in the oven. *In the past I have found that my wings were still a bit raw on the inside after frying, and frying them longer in the pan would either burn my wings or make it go dry, which is why I added this step in to finish cooking the wings without burning, and the wings remained crispy on the outside and juicy on the inside
Meanwhile, drain some on the oil from the pan and sauté the egg yolks, curry leaves and half of bird’s eye chillies until fragrant. Add the evaporated milk and bring to a boil until the sauce has slightly thickened. *This recipe calls for 350ml of evaporated milk, if you want a drier dish, then use less milk
Place the chicken wings on a shallow serving bowl and pour the sauce over the top. Garnish with the remaining chillies and curry leaves. Serve with steamed rice.