Recipe: Stuffed chicken wings

I have always loved the deep fried stuffed chicken wings found in the many Vietnamese restaurants back in Perth, Western Australia. My personal favourites are found in the long time establishment Viet Hoa on William Street and more recently Phi Yen located on Brisbane Street which serves up a much better bowl of Pho (Vietnamese beef noodles). Having been away from Perth for the past 5 months, I suddenly craved for these today and so after consulting a few recipe books and making a few tweaks of my own - made some of these deep fried morsels for dinner tonight.

Ingredients

12 large chicken wings (winglet only - drumette can be reserved for another dish)

Stuffing

250 grams pork mince

100g diced water chestnuts (canned ones are fine)

chopped spring onions

chopped coriander roots

diced red chilli

approx 1 soup bowl of rehydrated mung bean vermicelli

1 teaspoon white pepper

pinch of sea salt

2 tablespoons light soya sauce

splash of sesame oil

For deep frying

1/2 and 1/2 mixture of corn and tapioca flour

1 egg

Sunflower or canola oil

Steps

1. Carefully (without piercing the chicken skin) run a paring knife around the two little bones in the winglet - remove these once you have dislodged it from the encasing meat.

2. Mix the ingredients for the stuffing thoroughly. Use one hand to hold the winglet (as if you were holding a cup) and the other to tightly stuff it with the stuffing mixture. At this stage, it should look something like this:

3. Steam the stuffed wings for approximately 7 minutes.

4. Very lightly (my first batch suffered from too much flour) dip the prepared winglets into the beaten egg and then dust sparingly with the flour mixture.

5. Heat a wok with oil (enough to cover approx 4 wing) until wooden chopsticks sizzle upon contact. Deep fry in batches of 4 until golden brown.

6. Serve on a bed of shredded ice berg lettuce and sweet chilli dipping sauce.