Sichuan Spicy Chicken Wings with Salted Egg Yolk

What it tastes like

Salted egg yolk is deeply savoury and rich, somewhere between a very concentrated custard and a hard cheese, with the salt behind it. Fried into a crumb it goes light and slightly grainy, and it coats the wing rather than sitting on it in a sauce. It gets on your fingers.

Underneath, the skin is crisp. The potato starch coating fries harder than flour does and stays crisp under the yolk instead of going soft. The chilli comes in at the end, after the richness, so it lifts the dish rather than leading it.

Someone stands at the wok and catches the moment the paste turns to crumb.

Where the coating comes from

Duck egg yolks are packed in salt and left for weeks. They go firm and deep orange and stop tasting of egg. This is an old way of preserving eggs in China and there is no way to speed it up.

We crush the cured yolks and fry them on their own, without the wings. Given the right amount of time they turn from a paste into a loose crumb. Too little and the paste slides straight off the wing. Too long and it burns and goes bitter. The wings are fried separately and the two only go into the wok together at the end.

Where the dish comes from

This one is not a traditional Sichuan dish. Our chef worked it out here, including the chilli and what goes into the batter. Chicken wings are popular in Scotland, so it made sense to put ours on the menu.

More of the same coating

Salted egg yolk is 黄金 in Chinese, which means gold. If you like it, we do three more: with king prawn at £21.80, with Chinese long beans at £15.80, and with sweetcorn at £14.80.

Ordering them

Good at the start while you wait for the bigger dishes, and easy to share. They are rich, so a few between people goes further than you would think.