Ideas with Legs #7: Roasted Chicken Legs with Oyster Sauce and Chilli Crisp
A gentle start to the new year
The new year is beckoned in with light and fire, brightness and warmth. We ask so much of it, and act as if we aren’t aware that though each day grows a little longer than the last, the hardest, coldest months are just around the corner.
Last week, after eight months of house hunting, and half a year of working out the details on the home we had chosen, our mortgage fell out from beneath our feet. The same morning that Natwest’s chair, Howard Davies, told the BBC that it isn’t difficult for young people to buy their first home, his bank decided a tree was too close to our potential property, and killed our hopes dead in the water. And look, that’s not exactly what he was talking about, but I reserve the right to be a little pissed.
It is snowing in the south as I write this. That fresh blanket of white that reflects our hopes for a clean slate. A new start for the new year. Here at my parent’s home in Norfolk, I see no snow. Instead there is just bitter coldness and grey skies that stretch as far as any you’ll find in England.
But this, of course, is how the new year really works. There is no great wall that keeps out the spooks of the year just passed. January does not even mark a new season. It just drags the winter of December along with it. And, similarly, our fresh starts are not forged from the ticking of a clock, or the breaking out of a new calendar. We too are still building on everything that came before. Our flaws and our troubles still catch on our heels. Toilet paper from the public loo of our life.
If this is the case, it is up to us to ensure that we bring into the new year the very best of the last. Whatever vision we held on to for the twelve months just gone. The love and support we might have from our family and friends. The weighty comfort of a cat upon our lap. Our lingering hope, and our trembling resilience.
It is not easy to eat well when you are sad. It is very easy to eat - I could easily consume two or three sharing bags of Haribo when I’m really feeling shit - but eating well tends to mean cooking well, and all too often cooking well means a whole lot more effort than you’re willing to put in.
So here’s a comforting dish that’s full of flavour and, importantly, really bloody easy. One frying pan. One oven-proof dish. Maybe ten minutes of active work, and then you can sit back, chuck on some comforting television1, and look forward to something delicious. January is when comfort food tastes the best.
I’m genuinely surprised that I’ve not explored the simple joys of roasted chicken legs more frequently over my previous Ideas with Legs. It’s perhaps the easiest way to prepare the ingredient, and yields some of the best results. Cooking with spring onions and oyster sauce lifts the dish to a higher plain. Lao Gan Ma, China’s ubiquitous chili crisp, tips it over the edge, offering a little heat, a little added texture, and a bonus flavour pairing that has made this one of my favourite dishes to eat in recent weeks.
Lao Gan Ma, incidentally, feels like it is about to have a big moment in the culinary zeitgeist. The company’s sauces have been indispensable to Chinese home cooks for almost three decades now, but it feels like Westerners have finally cottoned on to the joys of chili crisp, just like we did with sriracha a decade ago. As if to ram this point home, last year saw the release of Chili Crisp, a cookbook devoted entirely to making the most of this corner of the condiment world. The recipe below, though, is as good a place as any to start exploring for yourself.
Roasted Chicken Legs with Oyster Sauce and Chili Crisp
Serves 2
1 tbsp neutral oil
2 chicken legs, skin on
a pinch of white pepper
3 tbsp Shaoxing cooking wine2
3 tbsp oyster sauce3
6 spring onions, cut into 5cm lengths
2 tbsp minced ginger4
Lao Gan Ma chili crisp, to serve
Let’s get cooking:
Preheat your over to 180°c.
Put the oil in a frying pan over a medium-high heat. Season each chicken leg with salt and a little white pepper. Place the legs skin-down into the hot pan, reduce the heat to medium, and cook for a few minutes until the skin has browned.
Meanwhile, combine the Shaoxing cooking wine and oyster sauce in a small bowl, and set aside.
Flip the legs and cook the underside for a couple more minutes, then remove to a plate.
Turn the heat up and add the chopped spring onions and minced ginger into the fat in the pan. Fry for a minute, until the ginger is fragrant.
Pour the spring onion and ginger mixture into a small baking dish, and place the legs on top. Pour the oyster sauce mixture over everything, and then bake in the oven for 40 minutes, or until the juices run clear when the leg is pierced with a skewer. Halfway through cooking, baste the legs with the sauce.
Serve topped with a teaspoon or so of chili crisp atop each leg.
Eat.
I’m a firm believer in the finishing touch that chili crisp offers this dish, but if you’re spice averse, you’ll be pleased to hear everything remains fundamentally delicious even without it.
If you want to play around with the idea a little, though, I’d suggest toying with other options from Lao Gan Ma’s pantry. I’m a huge fan of their Preserved Black Beans in Chili Oil, and have had my eye on their Chinese Mushroom in Chili Oil for a while now too.
As for accompaniments, rice has been my personal preference. I can see a very strong argument for mashed potato, too. Hell, extend the spring onion usage and lean in with a full colcannon. Who am I to shut down Irish/Chinese fusion food?
I caught the latest Studio Ghibli film, The Boy and the Heron, at the cinema last week, and while I think I’ll need another viewing to fully get my head around it, I am very glad to have some new music I can add to one of my favourite playlists, which I’ve called Miyazaki’s Work Ethic. Consider this your go-to soundtrack when you need to focus on getting shit done. After all, if there’s one thing millennials and Gen Z share with the studio’s most famous director, it’s this: none of us are ever retiring, whether we like it or not.
It’s a good sign if I’m buying a book as a gift for others before I’ve even finished reading it myself, and that’s what happened with Polly Atkins’ Some of Us Just Fall. Atkins was diagnosed with chronic illness in her mid-thirties - though, as anyone with chronic illness will attest, that wasn’t the start of the story, but merely a shift between chapters. I’ve been enjoying the book both as a story I can personally relate to but also, importantly, because it’s terrifically well-written. I’m constantly reminded of Olivia Laing by the way she draws the world together through direct yet beautiful prose.
On the other end of the scale, as I begin the search for a home all over again, here are the worst things that I keep on seeing in British houses. If you have any of these in your home, I’ll be very curious to understand why:
Vivid red kitchens. In fact, any room that’s vividly red is baffling to me. But for some reason it is the kitchen that we are collectively most content to dress up like the weirdest fucking room in Twin Peaks. Do I like to talk and dance in the kitchen? Yes. Do I like to talk and dance in reverse in my kitchen? No thank you.
Grey everything. Look, I’m glad that this trend is starting to fade into memory now, but here’s the problem: when every square inch of your house is grey - the floors, the walls, the soft furnishings, the tiling - two things happen. First, a single pop of colour is enough to trigger a stroke. You’ve never seen a spice rack so bright as the one that’s currently sitting in an aggressively grey kitchen in Bulwell, Nottingham. And second: it’s such a phenomenal faff to remove all the grey that eventually it becomes easier to just move out instead. Which is why, I’m hazarding a guess, half of Rightmove currently looks like it was directed by Cecil B. DeMille.
Astroturf gardens. It’s one thing to add a little ill-advised greenery to a small courtyard garden, but I swear I saw one this week that could have landed a light aircraft. An aching stretch of lawn that looked like it belonged not to Barbie, but perhaps to one of her budget counterparts that are sold in packs of ten in the middle of Lidl. If you’re that keen to live a life without nature, might I suggest you look into renting out the middle floor of your local NCP car park?
Comfort television is an incredibly personal thing, but I’m a big fan of gentle dramas with relatively low stakes and a warm autumnal colour palette. The obvious choice here is Gilmore Girls, but may I recommend Netflix’s sublimely low-key Anne of Green Gables adaptation, Anne with an E. It has all the edge of an egg, and is perfect for low-ebb television watching.
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: most Shaoxing cooking wines are not gluten free. I used the Golden Swan brand, which most definitely is. If you can’t find that, though, a dry sherry will do.
Oyster sauce is also not gluten free, generally speaking, but any good Asian supermarket (and lots of the bad ones too) will have gluten-free versions that are so delicious you’ll wonder why everyone else can’t just give over and let ours be the bog-standard version.
Ginger is an absolute nightmare to mince. Buy it jarred. Supermarkets sell poxy little jars for a ridiculous price, but most world supermarkets sell something three times the size for half as much.