1. Cut the chicken into bite-size pieces and place them in a vacuum-pack cooking bag. Add the soy sauce, sake, mirin and powdered Japanese pepper seeds to the bag. Lightly squeeze the bag several times and vacuum pack it.

2. Heat 1. in a steam convection oven at 80�� for 10 minutes.

3. Rapidly chill to 3�� within 90 minutes, and store.

4. To serve, reheat the chicken in a steam convection oven at 80�� for approx. 6 minutes.

5. Grade the yam, add the egg white and salt, and mix well.

6. Remove the chicken from the bag, drain and coat the surface of each piece with potato starch. Dip each piece in the yam mixture and briefly fry in deep oil at 190�� until the surface turns slightly golden.

Tips:

• The conventional way is to deep fry raw chicken covered with a batter of graded yam. However, because the batter contains a lot of air, the heat does not transfer well, sometimes resulting in the center of the chicken being under cooked. It may be safer to employ the vacuum-pack,low-temperature cooking method when preparing large amounts of food for frying.