The Omnivore's Cookbook Blog Tackles Korean Fried Chicken Wings

Learn to cook with America’s Test Kitchen’s Cooking School. With our experienced teachers and Test Kitchen-developed methods, you can become a better cook and learn new techniques along the way. Our course catalog is comprised of over 200 courses and lessons (and counting!), all broken down step-by-step, covering everything from foundational skills—including how to use your knife and how to measure ingredients—to advanced recipes for bread baking, working with chocolate, making fresh pasta, and more.

We love fried chicken in the test kitchen—there’s just something irresistible about the deep, golden brown crackly crust and contrasting juicy, moist interior that comes from cooking chicken in hot oil. Our Cooking School course, Focus on Fried Chicken, offers tips and techniques on how to make better fried chicken at home, along with recipes for three different variations. 

Maggie Zhu from the Omnivore's Cookbook blog, recently took our course and made our recipe for Korean Fried Chicken Wings. 

“When I saw the fried chicken lesson on America’s Test Kitchen Cooking School, I rushed to Trader Joe’s immediately and bought 3 pounds of wings,” Maggie writes. “The cooking results exceeded my expectations!”

After one bite of the Korean Fried Chicken Wings—an exceptionally crunchy, sweet-spicy style of fried chicken—Maggie was sold.

Each course in the Cooking School includes step-by-step recipe guides with video lessons you can’t find anywhere else on our websites. There are more than 5,000 photos and 200+ video-based lessons in our catalog you can watch on any device in your kitchen or on-the-go. A new interactive community feature also allows Cooking School participants to share photos with other users and connect on discussion boards.

By the end of the Focus on Fried Chicken course, Cooking School students will have learned how to identify the difference between shallow-frying and deep-frying, and how each method works. More importantly, our students will learn how to cook Korean Fried Chicken Wings, Nashville Hot Fried Chicken, and Picnic Fried Chicken.

“The cooking process was such a breeze due to the clear instructions from the course that I’ve actually started enjoying deep frying,” Maggie writes. 

A thin, crispy exterior and a spicy-sweet and salty sauce are the hallmarks of Korean fried chicken.

“Triple-crunch, crispy fried chicken wings tossed in a sticky-sweet spicy sauce—the wings stay crispy even when they’re no longer hot!” Maggie writes.

To help the coating withstand a wet sauce, we double-fry the wings, which removes more water from the skin than a single fry does, making the coating extra-crispy. The Korean chile paste known as gochujang gives our sauce the proper spicy, fermented notes, while sugar tempers the heat. Garlic and ginger—cooked briefly with sesame oil—provide depth.

“Not only did my biggest fear about deep-frying completely vanish, now I’m confident to say that I can create perfect crispy hot wings in my kitchen!" writes Maggie. “If you love cooking and appreciate good food, check out the America’s Test Kitchen Cooking School. It has more than 200 lessons with videos and pictures to guide you through each cooking process.”

What's your favorite fried chicken variation? Let us know in the comments! And for the recipe and the original blog post, go here!