Tim Chin is a professional cook and writer who has contributed to Serious Eats and America’s Test Kitchen. A graduate of The International Culinary Center, Tim has cooked at restaurants in New York and Boston, working at Rouge Tomate, Northern Spy, and BiSq.

Tim Chin

Walk around in Taiwan’s famous night markets, and you’ll see people chowing down on hulking, bigger-than-your face cutlets of hot, crispy fried chicken. Bubbly, craggy, fragrantly spiced and super juicy, dà jī pái (which literally translates to “big chicken cutlet”) is <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/recipes/taiwanese-popcorn-chicken">Taiwanese popcorn chicken</a>, super-sized.The shops that specialize in dà jī pái—like <a href="http://www.hotstar.com.tw/EN/home/">Hot Star</a>, for instance—use massive deep fryers to serve up dozens of XXL cutlets at a time. And while we hardly have that capability at home, we developed a method that doesn’t compromise the size of the cutlets.Some careful butchery gets us that iconic, colossal cutlet, and we thicken the punchy, five-spice-heavy marinade to help the key ingredient for crunch—coarse sweet potato starch—adhere to the chicken. After a double fry, the result is BIG in every way—crispiness, crunch, seasoning, and most importantly, size. We’d recommend sharing but also wouldn’t blame you for housing one of these on your own.

Taiwanese Fried Chicken Cutlet (Dà Jī Pái)