May This Be the Summer of Sambal-Smashed Fried Chicken

Ever since I saw Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters share a smushed Cup O’ Pizza in The Jerk, I’ve been convinced that most foods get better when you obliterate them first. This conviction primed me perfectly for sambal-smashed fried chicken, which I first saw on an Instagram reel—a rare moment of instant buy-in for me, given that my usual response to social media food content is knee-jerk skepticism.

The Instagram reel came from an Australian restaurant that was doing its own creative spin on ayam geprek, a trendy Indonesian street food of crisp fried chicken pulverized with sambal. “Pulverized with sambal” more or less sums up the whole concept—and all the unhinged potential it promises: You take boneless fried chicken, then you smash it with sauce. That's it. The sauce can be sambal, of course, but it can also be chili crisp, or anything else you can dream up. It's hard to think of what condiment wouldn't be good on this.

One thing I absolutely love about this dish is that while, yes, you can make it from scratch with homemade fried chicken cutlets and sambal, it is the perfect upgrade to your favorite fast-food fried chicken. Just buy some fried chicken, take it home, and smash it in a bowl or mortar and pestle with whatever condiments you have in the fridge or pantry. Pile it on fresh rice, maybe throw some leafy things on the side for your daily dose of vegetable fiber, and you have a meal that's as delicious as it is quick. No—more delicious than it is quick, because it's so delicious that it's delicious-er than the three minutes it takes to smash it.

How delicious, you ask? The chicken, once smashed, is both crispy and tender, every bite bathed in so much flavor. The sauce coats all the crunchy bits of batter and is pressed into the fibers of meat, sort of how sauce coats strands of spaghetti when a pasta is properly made...except this is chicken, not pasta, and not anything like pasta. Put another way, this is the ultimate late-night, munchies-scratching, snack-attacking food. I challenge anyone to name one better.

Anyway, I'm putting the recipe below, which is kind of ridiculous because you don't need a recipe. Smashing chicken with sauce isn't exactly advanced cookery on a technical level. But on a conceptual level, it's pure genius.