Carefree Cooking

Chicken Wonton

It's getting harder and harder for me to find interesting ways to cook chicken. Whenever I buy chicken wings, I almost always grill them using my George Foreman grill. When I buy chicken legs, it's usually baked or braised with some sauce. When I buy chicken breast, it's usually fried like chicken strips.

This dish is no exception to the rule. But instead of the usual slicing the chicken breast and coating it with some spiced up flour mixture, I thought of wrapping it with some wonton wrapper. Why wonton wrapper? When deep fried, wonton wrappers become very crispy. So it's kind of like eating chicken strips, with the outer batter being extremely crispy.

To make this dish, I started off with some chicken breast. I used the cleaver to mush it up so that it becomes a paste. Note: An easier way to do this would be to buy ground chicken. For the flavour, I added lots of paprika, salt, pepper, chili powder, curry powder, and some crushed basil. Mix all the ingredients in a bowl. To assemble the Chicken Wonton, take a small spoon of the chicken mixture and apply thinly on top of a wonton wrapper. Just like making a ravioli, leave the outer edge clean. Apply some water on the edges and put another wonton wrapper on top to seal it. Fold in half and set aside.

On a deep pot or deep fryer, heat up some oil to around 350 degrees. That's what everyone says when deep frying, but since I don't have a thermometer at home, I just estimate. If you have a wooden chopstick, you can deep it in the oil. If you see bubbles coming out of the chopstick, you're good. You can also drop a small piece of wonton wrapper and if there's a lot of bubbles coming out, you're in business. But if it seems that it's just floating in the oil, wait for a while longer.

One note about wonton wrappers is that they brown very quickly when deep fried. So make sure you take it out of the fryer slightly before the desired golden brown color is reached. One other note (very important) is that the layer of chicken applied on the wrapper should be as thin as possible. This way, the chicken cooks at the same time as the wonton wrappers.

You can wrap the wonton in numerous ways. I've tried just using one wrapper and folding it in half, and I've also tried rolling it like a spring roll. What I've found is that you get the most "crunch" when placing two wrappers together and folding it in half.

The dish is good on its own, but it's even better when dipped into something. I like the Thai Chicken sauce (sweet and spicy sauce) but other favourites like Honey Mustard, BBQ, Ranch, or even Ketchup would work well. Feel free to experiment. This makes an excellent snack when you have friends over watching the game. Let me know if you try it out. I want to hear some feedbacks. Enjoy!

posted by carefreecooking @ 11:10 PM