Chicken with Red Pepper Shreds
I confess that I don’t put much thought into presentation, but I think this is a pretty attractive dish:
Still, I wouldn’t make it if it weren’t delicious, and I’ve made it over and over, because I love it, and it’s one of my wife’s favorites. Moist, resilient, oily chunks of chicken breast, livened up with plenty of garlic and ginger, and, this dish’s distinctive touch: thin strips of flavorful red pepper. The pepper shreds cook in the oil, so they’re softened, the raw-peppers bitterness goes away, and their subtle sweet flavor, and their chili-hot bite, suffuses the dish.
It matters a lot what sort of pepper you use. This is not a dish for red bell pepper — you want more character, and a denser texture, than that. One reasonable thing to do is use a small quantity of red serranos (if you can find them; I usually can’t without a trip to the city, and sometimes not even then), or little fiery hot red Thai peppers. Then you get a really spicy dish, but one in which the distinctive flavor of the peppers you chose comes through. I usually use a slightly hot pepper, the Fresno pepper, a 3″ or so long red pepper that’s easily available in my area. Their relative mildness means you can use a lot of them. But use whatever nice, fresh, unwrinkled hot red pepper you can find, and adjust the quantity for your spice tolerance.
As with most dishes I’ve made a lot, I’ve done some tweaking here and there to suit my tastes. The original recipe was light on salt, so I increased the soy sauce and salt, though I use Kosher salt, which comes across less salty, so you might want to throttle back a bit if you’re not using Kosher salt. I increased the garlic, and the ginger. I’m not sure you can have too much garlic in this dish. Of course it cooks in the oil so it won’t be bitter.
The picture is a 2.5x recipe. But don’t do that in one batch unless you’ve got really serious heat available to you.
The original recipe comes from Raymond Delfs’ The Good Food of Szechuan
Chicken with Red Pepper Shreds
Marinade
Mix up the marinade, whisking vigorously to break the gel of the egg white and get it to mix smoothly with the cornstarch. [Update: I forgot to mention you should mix it with the chicken at this point. Duh!] Then let it sit and infuse flavor while you proceed with the chopping steps. Put in a bowl (peppers on top):
You can use more hot pepper than that if you can take the heat.
Almost there. It’s not a particularly hard recipe, but it’s really good.
Sauce
Mix in a small bowl:
I use Shao Xing wine, and not the kind labelled “cooking wine,” which contains salt. Don’t try to substitute Japanese Mirin, it’s too sweet and just doesn’t work in Chinese cooking, in my experience.
I use a Taiwainese aged vinegar that’s available in my area, but any white rice vinegar will probably do.
I like Kadoya brand.
Ok, you’re ready to cook. Add a cup or two of oil to the wok, and heat it until hot (350 degrees or so). Drain the marinating chicken, and add it to the wok, stirring it around until it turns white, then getting it quickly out of the oil and letting it drain. This step is something I’ve heard called “velveting” or “going through the oil,” and it does remarkable things for the texture of the chicken. You don’t have to do it, but the change in the results is noticeable.
Dump the oil out of the wok and add 3 tablespoons of fresh oil. Heat it until very hot, then add the peppers, ginger, and garlic. I suggested above putting the peppers on top; that’s so the garlic doesn’t hit the hot oil first, and brown.
Stir it all around, letting the flavors infuse the oil, and the pepper shreds soften, until it’s really fragrant, which may be a matter of seconds depending on how much heat you have.
Add the chicken, stir fry it until it’s almost done, which I judge by poking my finger into pieces of it to see how it feels, but you can also cut open a piece if you’re not sure. You don’t want it raw in the center, but you sure don’t want to overcook it. Chicken breast is so superb and bouncy and sweet when properly flavored and just cooked, and turns fibrous and bland when overcooked. The ideal of chicken breast stir-fry would be if the bit of pink in the center just vanished while the dish was sitting in the serving dish, still quivering from the heat of the wok.
Stir the sauce to get the cornstarch back mixed in with everything else, then add it to the wok. Stir around for a few seconds until the sauce thickens and clings to the chicken, get it quickly out of the wok and serve.
Yum!