Guy Does Bento no. 7: Chicken karaage bento
The Guy Does Bento is back! This is one he made just for himself on a day I was feeling too sick [1] to eat much of anything. Now that I am slowly getting my appetite back, just looking at it makes my mouth water.
The bento features two of our favorite bento items: Chicken Karaage [2] (leftovers - he made them himself the night before) and 1-egg tamagoyaki [3]. The tamagoyaki here turned out a bit on the brown side, but The Guy says it was still very good. He’s filled out the rest of the bento with boiled broccoli and plain rice. He put a a bit of peeled broccoli stalk on top of the rice to add color. Notice he put in only one section’s worth of rice, packed in a bit loosely, to compensate a bit for the fried chicken. Overall this bento is probably around 700 calories, even though he did smoosh in as many pieces of chicken as he could. (There’s a couple of pieces tucked under the tamagoyaki too!)
Here’s a dramatic closeup.
The box used is the LunchBots Quad [4]. The Guy likes bento boxes with compartments, like this one and the Idea box [5] (the latter one may be his favorite of them all) because it helps him to organize the food without thinking about it too much.
Tip: To keep chicken karaage as crispy as possible in a bento box, make sure it, and any other food packed in the box, has cooled down completely before you close the lid. The rice in particular needs to be completely cooled, to room temperature or less, otherwise the condensation from it will make your chicken a bit soggy. It will still taste good though! That’s the beauty of karaage over other deep fried chicken methods.