A Series of Post on Korean Fried Chicken Brands You Should Eat : Norangtongdak
October 20th, 2022
Norangtongdak is one of the fried chicken brands Koreans love the most, because of its reasonable prices and amount. Above of all they promote they use low-sodium batter for health. In 2014 a Korean investigative TV report showed the result of studying sodium levels of 27 chicken brands in Korea that Norangtongdak won the top rank for using sodium the least among Korean chicken brands.
I am going to introduce you three most popular chickens on their menu and newly launched one. Mostly the base is the regular fried chicken, and various seasoning and sauce are added to it.
First, currently their best item is Tangy Garlic Chicken(alssahan maneul chicken, 알싸한 마늘 치킨). We Koreans love garlic so much that it is hard to find Korean food without garlic. You don’t like garlic that much? But no worries. They serve their regular fried chicken and garlic dipping sauce separately. Its garlic dipping sauce is a real thing. You can see and feel rushed garlic in your mouth. They supply honey mustard sauce and yangnyeom chicken sauce together for people who are not a fan of garlic.
And the second one I want to recommend is Very Big Fried Chicken. They made batter only with powdered curry and cornstarch, so their regular fried chicken is very savory and crispy, and healthy as well. They promote they are using only healthy ingredients including soybean oil and brown rice oil. And they launched the Very Big Fried Chicken. It is just a bigger amount of fried chicken, but so popular, because it is bang for the buck. The price of the Very Big Fried Chicken is 18,000 won as of October, 2022. When you order Very Big Fried Chicken, you can get yangnyeom sauce free. You can use yangnyeom sauce as dipping sauce.
Interestingly they fry chicken in a gamasot(가마솥) which is a Korean traditional huge pot made of cast iron. Long long time ago Koreans cooked rice and various food with a gamasot. Still many Korean restaurants use gamasot to make steamed rice, and soup. The gamasot can keep the temperature inside steady. And chunks of the sunsal(boneless) chicken of Norangtongdak are smaller then other brands, which makes it more crispy. Sometimes it is like finger foods. You could feel their chicken is quite different to other brands.
Before Tangy Garlic Chicken was launched, we usually enjoyed this set of three items — regular, yangnyeom and kkanpung(Chinese style seasoning) — called Sunsal Sam-jong Set. This is the third I want to introduce. It is a budget friendly option, most items of Norangtongdak are budget friendly though. Its amount is so big that it is enough for three of us, me, Alex and Min. Soo can’t bite crispy chicken chunks well. When we have fried chicken we make or order her food separately. Anyway the kkanpung is spicy a little, the regular one is mild, and the yangnyeom one is sweet. So you can share three things all together, or each person can pick what they want, like I pick kkanpung because I love spicy food and Alex and Min like the regular fried one and yangnhyeom one.
Norangtongdak also have side menu with various items like French fries, tteokbokki, cheese balls, fried shrimps, etc. I recommend French fries and tteokbokki. Recently Koreans have found out that fried chicken and tteokbokki are good partners. Tteokbokki sauce can be dipping sauce for fried chicken. So many chicken brands have started adding tteokbokki on their menu.
The current commercial actor of Norangtongdak is the Korean and Hollywood star, Don Lee, starring as Gilgamesh of the Marvel movie, Eternals. Before Eternals, in the movie Train to Busan, he fought against zombies to protect his pregnant wife. His latest movie is The Roundup(May, 2022) which is an action movie and has been a mega hit in Korea even in this pandemic era. I think Norangtongdak and Don Lee are a good match. Because in many movies he is a hero with super strong powers, but also he is kind and nice like as our ordinary good neighbors. I highly recommend his movies.
