Taiwanese Popcorn Chicken Recipe

This flavorful fried chicken is made with boneless thigh meat for extra juiciness. You can certainly use boneless breast meat if you want but expect it to be a little less juicy. There are a few ingredients that might be hard to find if you don’t have access to an Asian grocery store. The sweet potato starch (sometimes called yam starch or occasionally mislabeled sweet potato flour) is probably the hardest to find. Asian grocery stores as well as some Latin or Mexican grocery stores carry it. If you find a bag of sweet potato flour, take a look at the color of the powder beforehand. If it’s white and has the texture and feel of cornstarch, it’s probably the starch and that’s what you want in this recipe – squeeze the bag if you can and if it squeaks, then it’s starch. If it’s more yellow or orange and feels more like regular all-purpose flour (no squeak, more soft and puffy in feel), than you actually have sweet potato flour, which will impart the sweet potato flavor and won’t fry up as crisp. Avoid it for this recipe. If you can’t find sweet potato starch, try substituting regular potato starch in its place. I wouldn’t recommend cornstarch though, as it gets kind of dense when fried.