The Chef: Doug Sohn (Hot Doug’s)
They look strange, too. “They have this sort of human element because they have little fingernails on them, so they look like shriveled-up, deformed hands,” Sohn says. One of the most common uses for chicken feet is stock. He’s also eaten them at Asian restaurants, both deep-fried and stir-fried.
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What to do with the feet was fairly obvious to Sohn—he is, after all, Hot Doug. So onto a hot dog they would go. Exactly how to prepare them was slightly trickier. He chose to simmer the chicken feet for a few hours until they were tender, then peeled off the skin and deep-fried it—or, more accurately, Chef Vee did. Sohn unabashedly admits that he doesn’t spend much time in his restaurant’s kitchen. In fact, he purposely set up the restaurant so that he can’t get into the kitchen from behind the front counter, where he spends most of his time. His chefs prefer it that way, according to Sohn: “They don’t like it when I’m back here. I don’t like it when I’m back here. I stay out of their way.”
The chicken skin, Sohn said, “actually adds a really nice element. You get some crunch with the seaweed salad, but even more so with the chicken skin, and you get a little bit of that nice, sort of fatty, a little bit gelatinous effect with the skin.” He liked it, and said he’d even put it on the menu, except that “I think my staff would quit, based on the volume that we do, the amount of chicken feet we’d have to prepare . . . there might be a small mutiny. But at some point we might put them on there.”
2 pounds chicken feet
Chicken Feet
2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil
