Homemade Taiwanese version of Chicken Wings & Noodles

Okay, first and foremost I’d like to personally thank Food for Buddha once again for the incredible meal Colleen and I  had at their head quarters a while ago. And you know its a good meal because I still think about it.  No lie.  So this is my take on the similar recipe for the chicken but my version of course.

Wings marinade ingredients:

about 3lbs of wings

2 Tbspn of soy sauce

2 Tbspn of chinese wine

1 Tbspn of the 5spice powder

1 Tbspn of black pepper

Mix up all the ingredients into a big zip lock bag and massage away, lmao. Let it sit overnight and flip the bag a couple of times when you can.

I don’t ever really measure what I put into marinades, just visually gauging is good enough for me. lol

Once the marinated wings are ready, it’s time to prep the coating mixture for frying. I like using potato starch because I can really notice a crunchier texture on the outside.

Simply scoop out a few spoons worth of the potato starch and mix it with some more of that 5 spice powder. Such a flavourful concoction.

Start dredging a few pieces at a time, and make sure they are very well coated. And you can continue dredging while your frying them up.

So I cooked them for about 7-8mins but depending on your stove, look for a golden colour. Then let them cool in a rack until you finish frying them all up.

And I was also playing around with the thai basil leaves and here’s one thing I learned, the sucker splatters! Like for some reason, the water from the leaf when mixed with the oil, shoots out the hot oil at me. Jeesh. I jumped back a little but man, all that work and it didn’t do anything to add flavour, in fact, I think it dried out the leaf too much it became tasteless. So I opted to not fry up anymore and just use them to deco the wings with. And I ate them as is eventually.

NOODLES:

I’m using a combination of noodles for the dish. Knife cut noodle, which is like home made noodles and udon! Because Colleen loves udon. As for the soup base, this ready made mixture is good enough for my taste buds. And also, I’m not going to be boiling up a whole chicken from scratch just to make a stock. Jeesh, who has the time?

They look like tadpoles BG, tadpoles! lol Let the congealed stock boil and simmer while your doing everything else.

Here’s a twist in my soup taste factor. I like spicy and this was no exception. Slice up a few garlic cloves, jalapeño peppers and a shallot. Put them all in a frying pan and sautée them till golden brown.

So I also took the liberty and sliced up some leftover cabbage to add into the soup and some watercress to add colour. Boil the frozen noodles separately, they boil for about 5mins or so. Don’t over cook it!!

So here’s the finish product. Notice something extra?? I added pork balls too, lol I cooked them in the soup broth but I forgot to take a picture of it. But very basic stuff, let the pork balls cook for as long as you need to get the rest of the noodles and vegetables ready. So here we have 2 versions of how you can serve up the noodles, 1 with the spicy topping and another without …. LMAO

And at the table you would serve both the noodles and the wings together. Enjoy!