닭도리탕 - Spicy Braised Chicken
One of my favorite dishes to make (ate this throughout my childhood)
One of my favorite dishes to make (which somehow I’ve made three times in the past few weeks…) is 닭도리탕, which I think can be translated to Spicy Braised Chicken 🍗. Our mom used to make this all the time when we were younger, and I remember the huge pot of 닭도리탕 (which held close to 30-50 drumsticks at a time) that she would make in batches for us to enjoy the rest of the week.
I usually follow this recipe here: link, but I realized that whenever I want to share it with other people, it’s slightly more difficult to follow since it’s all in Korean… I’ve been telling my friends I’ll translate this for them sometime, so here it finally is!
So, here’s my version of this recipe and how to make it! This recipe for me definitely changes from time to time depending on the ingredients I have in the kitchen, but it’s really simple :D
Ingredients:
Chicken (1kg) - I use drumsticks, cause I mass buy them from costco
Potatos (1 big or 2 medium sized)
Onion (1/2 of a big one)
Green Onions (1 stalk)
Can kind of skip? but nice to add:
Carrot (a small handful) - I always skip this one but you can have it if you want
Mushrooms (a handful) - I sometimes throw this one in, around a handful
Cheongyang pepper (1-2) - if you want, it should be okay to skip if you want too
Sauce Ingredients & etc:
Soy Sauce - 1.5 soup ladles (usually slightly less)
Gochugaru, Korean Chili powder - 1 soup ladle (But you can do less for less spice)
Sugar (1-3 tablespoons)
Garlic (2 tablespoons minced)
a bit of milk to use when soaking the chicken
Prepping the Chicken 🧑🍳
I forgot to take photos for this, but make sure to defrost 🧊 your chicken if you've been freezing it for a while (I always end up freezing my chicken whenever I buy too many from Costco). Defrosting is just usually keeping it in the fridge for 24 hours, or running under cold water / putting inside a cold water bath for 1-3 hours.
Once your chicken is defrosted, or if it was just straight from the market, I would soak the chicken pieces in a bowl of water with some milk🥛 (a 3:1 ratio of water:milk) for 30 minutes to an hour. The longer it’s in there, it’ll make the chicken nice and tenderized. I hate eating rough chicken so I never skip this step.
Lots of Boiling… 🥘
Now, we can start the boiling process! I’d budget close to 1-2 hours for this, the longer you boil the better it tastes in my opinion…
First, after rinsing the chicken from the milk soak, throw those chicken pieces (for me it was drumsticks) into some water and boil-em
You want to wait for it to come to a boil, and some foam will come up at the top. Make sure to keep taking that foam off when it keeps bubbling, because it's not nice stuff to have in your dish later.
While that’s boiling, cut up your veggies (this is my group of things I put in: potatoes, onions, mushrooms, garlic, green onion)
After all of those are cut up, now it’s time to throw in the things that take the longest time to cook (potatoes, onions, carrots, etc). Check first to see if your chicken is mostly cooked at this point. I put in the potatoes, minced garlic, and onions here:
So while that does some bubbling, I ready-ied some of the sauce ingredients:
All you really need is some soy sauce, but I kind of threw these 3 things in (a splash of the dashi on the left and the two different soy sauces on the right)
You can already see a nice color coming up, and honestly, it might be good to eat now just as is :D Now, just throw in the chili flakes and last few ingredients (for me it was mushrooms and green onions)
And just wait… for like a solid hour (or 2 if you want it to be even more nice and thick for the sauce!) for the sauce to braise into the chicken…
It tastes great with a bowl of rice, or whatever you want to eat this with… I actually tried it with some avocados on the side for some reason the other day, that also was really niceee
But thanks for reading! Hope you guys get to try it out too sometime.