Singaporean RecipesMakan · The Singapore Kitchen
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Har Cheong Gai

虾酱鸡

Chicken wings marinated overnight in fermented prawn paste, then twice-fried until the crust shatters and your whole kitchen smells like the sea.

By The Singaporean Recipes Kitchen · World Cookbook Series · July 6, 2026

The HeartlandsIndependence & the HDB kitchen, 1965–1971

Har Cheong Gai06
Prep
20 min
Cook
20 min
Serves
4
Level
Intermediate

There is a smell that announces har cheong gai before the plate arrives, and it is not a polite one. Fermented prawn paste — har cheong, the grey shrimp sauce that lives in a jar and answers to no one — smells, raw, like a low tide with ambitions. Spread it on chicken, leave it overnight, drop it in hot oil, and it becomes the most compulsively edible fried chicken on the island. This is the whole trick of the southern-Chinese pantry, the same alchemy behind salted fish and fermented tofu: the ingredients that smell like a dare become, with heat, the flavors people build a craving around.

The dish is Cantonese by lineage and zi char by habitat — one of those orders you place at a stall with a wok roaring in the back, alongside the cereal prawns and the sambal kangkong. It also migrated, as good things do, straight into the HDB kitchen, because it asks for nothing exotic: wings, a spoon of paste, a bag of starch, and a wok deep enough to fry in. What it asks instead is patience at both ends. The marinade wants a night, not an hour, because the paste is slow and salty and needs time to walk into the meat. And the frying wants two passes, because one pass cooks the chicken and only the second dehydrates the crust into something that shatters.

Fair warning about your ventilation. The reason har cheong gai is a stall dish as much as a home dish is that stalls have extraction fans built for this and your kitchen does not. Open every window, turn the hood to maximum, and accept that the corridor will know what you cooked. That is not a flaw in the recipe. That is the recipe telling the truth about itself.

The prawn paste that clears a room raw is the same paste that makes people queue once it hits hot oil.

Shiok (when it's exactly right) · A word from the kitchen

Ingredientsbahan-bahan

Serves

4

The chicken and marinade

  • 800 gchicken wings, split into drumettes and mid-joints (about 1.75 lb)mid-joints — the two-bone middle section — are the zi char default; they fry most evenly and there is the most skin per bite
  • 2 tbspfermented prawn paste (har cheong)the grey-brown fine shrimp sauce in a jar, not belacan and not hae ko — the label often reads "fine shrimp sauce"
  • 1 tbspShaoxing wine
  • 2 tspsugar
  • 1 tspsesame oil
  • 1egg, beaten
  • 1/2 tspwhite pepper

The coating

  • 4 tbsppotato starchpotato or tapioca starch fries glassier and holds crisp far longer than plain flour alone
  • 2 tbspplain flour

To fry

  • 1 litreneutral oil, for deep-frying (about 4 cups)

Methodcara masak

  1. Step 1: Marinate long, not short

    Whisk the prawn paste, Shaoxing wine, sugar, sesame oil, white pepper and beaten egg into a loose slurry, then turn the wings through it until every piece is grey-glossed. Cover and refrigerate at least two hours, ideally overnight. Fermented prawn paste is aggressively salty and slow to penetrate — a short marinade seasons only the skin and leaves the meat blank. The egg is not incidental either; it is the glue the coating grips.

  2. Step 2: Dredge, then wait

    Toss the marinated wings in the combined potato starch and flour until each one wears a dry, craggy coat, then let them sit ten minutes on a rack. The coating goes from powdery to slightly tacky as it drinks up the surface marinade — that hydrated layer is what fries into shards instead of dusty flour. Skip the rest and the crust sheds in the oil.

  3. Step 3: First fry to cook through

    Heat the oil to 160C. Fry in batches you do not crowd — three or four wings at a time — for five to six minutes, until pale gold and cooked to the bone (75C at the joint). Crowding crashes the oil temperature, and cool oil steams the coating soft instead of setting it. The wings will float and the bubbling will slow when they are close.

  4. Step 4: Rest, then fry again hot

    Rest the wings five minutes off the heat, then raise the oil to 185C and fry a second time, sixty to ninety seconds, until deep amber and hard-crisp. The double fry is the whole technique — the first pass cooks the meat, the second drives the last water out of the crust so it shatters. Listen for the bubbling to go loud and fast, then quiet. Drain on a rack, never on paper, and eat while the crust still cracks.

Perkakas · The tools

Equipment

  • Carbon-steel wok

    chao

    Half this site happens in a wok, and carbon steel is the only honest choice at home — it heats fast, takes a season, and gets you the closest to wok hei your burner allows.

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  • Frying thermometer

    The difference between shattering har cheong gai and greasy har cheong gai is oil held at temperature — stop guessing.

    Shop on Amazon →

  • Spider strainer

    Lifts blanched noodles out of the pot in one pass and fried shallots out of the oil in the next. One tool, half the hawker canon.

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Equipment links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases, at no cost to you. Disclosure.

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Questions from the kitchen

Is har cheong gai actually a Singapore dish?

It is Cantonese by descent — prawn-paste marinades belong to the same southern-Chinese pantry as fermented tofu and salted fish — and it grew up on both sides of the causeway, in the zi char stalls of Singapore and Malaysia. What the island contributed is devotion and volume. It is one of the true tests of a serious zi char kitchen, and the marinade smell alone will tell you whether the cook committed to the real paste or hedged with something milder.

My crust fell off in the oil. What happened?

Three usual suspects. You skipped the ten-minute rest, so the coating was still loose powder when it hit the oil. Or you crowded the pot and the temperature crashed, so the coating soaked oil instead of setting. Or your first fry was too hot and seized the outside before the inside gripped. Give it the rest, fry in small batches, and hold 160C on the first pass.

Can I shallow-fry or air-fry instead of deep-frying?

You can, and it is an honest weeknight call, but know the trade. Shallow-frying works if you turn the wings so both sides get their two passes; the crust is a touch less even. An air fryer gives you a lacquered, roasted result that is genuinely good but is not the shattering deep-fried crust — spray it, cook hot, and call it its own thing rather than a copy.

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