Sweet and Sour Chicken | Kenji's Cooking Show

hey everyone it's kenji and we're going to make some sweet and sour chicken this is sort of a chinese american style sweet and sour chicken i learned this recipe well the original recipe i learned from i had a old colleague when i worked at a restaurant called uni in boston his name was chris chung and he was from macau but he used to work at a bunch of you know chinese restaurant in china hong kong style chinese restaurants as well as american chinese american restaurants and so for staff meal he would sometimes make this sweet and sour chicken the secret was actually pineapple juice and ketchup that's what sweet and sour chicken sauce mostly is made from this is chicken thigh works with chicken breast as well i'm modifying his recipe a little bit because what i'm doing is i'm going to velvet the chicken first whereas rather than just stir-frying it so velvety is a technique that you do you can do it for chicken thigh you can also do it for chicken breasts it's especially useful for chicken breast as well as sort of leaner cuts of pork because what it does is it keeps the meat really super tender and juicy and moist and it does that through a combination of corn starch and egg whites and baking soda the way it works is that well baking soda and egg whites are both um alkaline egg whites can actually be quite alkaline so as it depends how old they are but when they when eggs are first laid they're mildly out the whites are mildly alkaline as they get older and older they can get up to a ph of over nine which is actually even more alkaline than the maximum ph you can get by adding baking soda to water which i think is like 8.3 but either way um the alkalinity helps the meat um it prevents muscle fibers from tightening up as much and so they tend to remain more tender and hold more moisture and then cornstarch what that does is it also we're going to coat it in cornstarch and what that does is that as the meat exudes liquid that liquid gets kind of trapped and it also prevents the the meat from um it sort of adds like a protective barrier similar to how say like the batter on fried fish for fish and chips or fried chicken that creates sort of a protective barrier that prevents the meat from coming in direct contact with really high heat and so all that helps keep it a little more tender to keep the knife out all right so got my chicken i've got is about a pound of chicken thigh you can also use chicken breast and put it in a bowl here get rid of my meat cutting board all right so now we're going to go in with about a teaspoon and a half or so of cornstarch about a half teaspoon of baking soda this recipe by the way is going to be in my new book um which will be out next year not not this year but next year 2021 is when it should be on hopefully we'll see it's all about cooking in a wok we're going to add about two teaspoons of sugar about half a teaspoon of kosher salt teaspoon shaoxing wine you can also use dry sherry or white wine teaspoon of light soy sauce and then finally an egg white you can save this egg yolk for another use um egg yolk you can add add an extra egg yolk to your scrambled eggs um and they'll be excellent or to your um to your omelet all right so we're going to kind of vigorously massage this we really want to be rough with it that's going to help the marinade penetrate the chicken and it's also going to make the chicken a little bit more tender mechanical mechanical separation mechanical tenderization all right now we're just going to set that aside for about 15 minutes well ideally at least 15 minutes most likely it'll be less because i'm just gonna go straight start to finish right here without really taking the time to rest and meanwhile in that walk you saw on the stove i've just got some water in here that um we're going to use that to simmer the chicken but in the meantime i'm going to get the rest of my ingredients ready so vegetables for the stir-fry are an onion or half an onion or one small onion then we're gonna cut into kind of largest dice like that a green bell pepper we're going to cut into similar dice okay and a red bell pepper these peppers today my my daughter is now three and a half um we did a little test run today where she wanted to do the shopping by herself so i followed her around in the market but she went to the she went to the grocery store she picked out the peppers we were gonna buy she picked out the onion she put them all in a little shopping cart um i gave her some cash and she went up to the cashier by herself put the stuff on the conveyor belt um took the change said thank you it was all pretty much a great success i'd say she's a great career as a shopper lined up first um oh i don't know if you if you've seen my other videos you see me do peppers that way um i kind of hold them from the top and fillet them around the outside and then you're left with just the sort of pith and the seeds um and i think it's the easiest way to dice peppers all right sorry red pep a red bell pepper green bell pepper and an onion that's going to be our vegetables now we got our aromatics so i got four cloves of garlic that i've seen better days but they'll be all right for a dish like this just gonna cut the tops off bang it into my mortar and pestle uh ginger we're gonna use probably about say about this much um if you want you can do with the tip of a knife or if you've got a spoon you can also do ginger with a spoon skin comes right off with a spoon see easy peasy easy peasy japanesy okay good suppose this is easy peasy chinese american easy all right now we're just going to give this a pound i find um mortar and pestle is the easiest way to kind of break up garlic and ginger for stir-fry i find it to be much easier than chopping by hand because you can just kind of just get it all in there and pound until it's as fine as you like it the garlic doesn't stick to your knife it doesn't get into a cutting board sometimes it flies out like that that's okay and you also end up getting a little more flavor out of it that way all right we got our aromatics now the last thing is our sauce okay so for a sauce i got this is a 20 ounce can of pineapples that i've already used half of because i made this recipe earlier today um when i was testing some woks um so what you want is a 10 ounce can of pineapples and you want that juice that's going to form the base of your sauce and then separately we'll take those pineapple rings you can use rings or chunks it doesn't really matter but canned pineapple is kind of key here or at least canned pineapple juice you can use fresh pineapple plus canned pineapple juice but you need that juice for the sauce okay we'll cut this into chunky bits like that doesn't go in there all right so we got the juice from a 10 ounce can of pineapples then we're going to do about three tablespoons of ketchup and real ketchup please not not any of that fancy stuff that doesn't really taste like ketchup about three tablespoons of ketchup about two tablespoons of vinegar so those are your sweet and sour elements it does need a little bit of extra sweetness so we're gonna go in with about tablespoon maybe a little bit more of sugar teaspoon of soy sauce splash of sashing wine or dry sherry or white wine and last but not least a little cornstarch so about about two teaspoons of about uh sorry yeah that's about two teaspoons hey somewhere between one and two teaspoons of corn starch and we're going to whisk this all together always always want to whisk cornstarch into sauces cold if you try and whisk it into a hot sauce or you try and put it into the wok after the sauce is already in there it will not thicken properly and it'll turn into little clumpy bits okay now we're ready to go all right so uh velveting the technique is called velveting um you typically like in a chinese restaurant they would do this with oil what you do is you do something called passing through where you'd have about a couple cups of oil in your wok then you take your marinated meat and very briefly for about 20 30 seconds pass it through the oil um at home i generally don't do with the oil because i don't like having to use oil for 20-30 seconds and then strain it out and store it somewhere and reuse it etc at a restaurant it makes sense at home i do it with water and the good news is it actually works really well with water um it's actually to my taste it's almost indistinguishable so what we're doing is that chicken we're gonna slowly drop it in here you don't want to drop it in one big clump because then it'll stick together so you drop it in like a piece at a time okay just like that um that's that's probably about three cups of where sorry about a quart of water i had in there boiling which is enough for about a pound of chicken one of the nice things about this velveting technique is that normally when you stir fry um if you're making a dish where you're stir-frying raw meat from the start um you're very limited at home because your home burner is generally too weak to be able to maintain a good searing temperature once you add like a pound of meat to it so you have so you have to kind of cook in batches with this technique you don't have to worry about that because most of the cooking gets done um in the water and then later we're just going to very briefly stir fry it with the vegetables and the sauce just so it gets coated in the sauce so you want to do this for about between 30 seconds to a minute um depending on how how strong your burner is and how vigorous that boil was i'm gonna basically let this come back to a brief simmer and that's gonna tell me that it's done so you can see the chicken kind of ends up with this thin coating on it and that's going to help the sauce adhere and that's also what's going to give it that really tender texture if you've ever wondered why chicken in chinese restaurants and stir fries is so much more tender and sort of slippery almost than what you get at home when you stir fry velveting is the secret [Applause] all right i think we're done here so this is going to go straight out into a sheet tray spread it out in a single layer so that it can dry okay and the rest we're just gonna nope we got it all good all right real quick rinse on this walk get it back over the heat just gonna dry it out a little and now we're going to let this put a tiny bit of oil in there this is what i do so i get a little film of oil in the bottom of the wok and that's basically my temperature indicator so i'm going to let that heat up until it starts smoking because we really want smoking hot heat here so this chicken will spread out spread out into a single layer so that it can dry a little bit and get all my other ingredients ready in the meantime oh last thing we're going to do you don't have to do cashews in this but i am going to do cashews in it because my wife likes cashews so do i actually all right so we're smoking hot now [Music] oil in there swirl it this is called long gao which is basically what what you do at the beginning of every stir fry you swirl oil and the hot wok to give it a nice non-stick coating and our vegetables are going straight in [Music] let them cook without moving too much for a second [Music] let me get a serving plate out [Music] so a little seeds in there so that's what you're looking for see how there's a little bit of char on the outside of these vegetables that's what i want [Music] this flavor profile exact same technique in fact you can do it with pork what i would do is i would take pork loin or tenderloin um cut it into thin planks the same way i did with the chicken against the grain and then basically treat it exactly the same way as i did this chicken right now all right so the vegetables are sort of tender crisp which is where i want them so i'm going to push them to the side add a little bit more oil and get my aromatics in there so garlic and ginger in [Music] okay oh man it smells good all right so we do that for about let it stir fry for about 30 seconds just until it's nice and aromatic and sort of the raw punch of the garlic is a little bit tame all right then in goes everything else chicken pineapple cashews and our sauce and that's it now we just let it cook a tiny bit until it's as thick as we want it which i'd say we're just about there and of course if you like your if you like your um sweet and sour chicken if you like a little spicy you can stir fry some chilies into there as well some dried chilies or you could do some pepper flakes um i'm keeping it mild today because i think as i've explained on these videos my my daughter has been going through a sort of anti-spicy food kick recently um so instead we're just gonna serve this with chili oil at the table should have got a bigger we're gonna need a bigger plate all right there the heaping portion chinese-american sweet and sour chicken courtesy of my old friend chris chung hmm i don't care if it's authentic or not it is delicious you want some shabu yup good girl oh ammon's coming over for his bite too everybody vegetables are tender crisp as they should be [Applause] all right there you go the takeout classic at home guys gals guys gals non-binary pals i will see you next time bye you

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 276,279

Rating: 4.9275112 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: BNyVPQoCibg

Length: 19min 42sec (1182 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 20 2020