Food Lab Basics: POV Kung Pao Chicken

Avery, Kenji, I'm here in the worst room at my restaurant in San Mateo and today I'm making

kung

pao

chicken

. You've probably made a couple videos of this before, but you know it's like a new format I guess. Whole new world, so we'll do it again, starting with some

chicken

thigh this time. I think the recipe I've written calls for chicken breast, but you can really do it either way. I happen to have some chicken thigh here. trim off a little bit of this excess fat, this is one of those dishes that actually works quite well with chicken breast because, uh, chicken breast, you know, I think it absorbs the flavors really well and as long as you don't overcook it , it can be really nice and tender I don't know if I'm getting older or what, but nowadays I tend to prefer chicken breasts over chicken thighs most of the time, at least one is well prepared, so let's go to cut this into Hmm, maybe the half inch to 3/4 inch dice don't have to be too precise, the goal really is to have a uniform size so that everything cooks evenly, you don't have to wait for it to Cook large pieces while small pieces cook. cook, this is a classic Sichuan dish, it has some of that mala flavor, the UM, the spicy, numbing flavor because I used citron peppercorns and dried chilies, but it's not particularly spicy, you know, it's not, no It's like Lhasa, gee, like Chongqing. chili chicken style, which is very spicy,

kung

pao chicken is a little milder, so we have our chicken.

I'm going to go into this sixth pan, look, it's not the restaurant we do, we do color-coded things: red is for meat. the white one is for vegetables and stuff so there is no cross contamination at home. You don't really have to do that, just be careful how you wash it. I'm going to wash my hands. People sometimes ask me if it is important to wear gloves. or not, or if you're supposed to wear gloves in a restaurant, well, gloves are optional in the state of California, they're optional, and in fact, a lot of research shows that people who don't wear gloves actually tend to be a little cleaner because they wash their hands more frequently, whereas when you wear gloves you tend to forget to change them often enough and therefore you end up hearing more pathogens around than you would if you just washed your hands without wearing gloves, so now I have my chicken this is a little bit of light soy sauce you can also use sure it's about a teaspoon and this is about 12 ounces of Jing a little bit of cornstarch it's very small you can use silence on wine, you can use dry sherry if you wish.

I don't have wine screaming the evaluation line is an oxidized rice wine, Chinese rice wine and a little salt. I'm going to mix it all up if you really want to go all out with this and extraordinarily tender chicken, what you can do is wash it, which I do sometimes with my meats. I generally don't make too much chicken. I could do it with chicken breast, which is where you wash the meat, so you take the chicken and put it in a bowl of cold water. spin with your fingertips, um, if you watch Chef one gangs YouTube channel W Aang space G ang, he was once a chef at Citron, he knows a great YouTube channel, he frequently shows you how to wash meats like that and he It helps absorb the marinades a little. a little bit better and it also softens them, so I have a couple more ingredients here, we have our chives, so chives are what I like to do, you see how sometimes they get cut like this, with slimy outer layers, just run them through a little cold water. and you basically slide those layers off and sometimes you want to, sometimes like with things like this you want to peel off all that outer layer and it'll feel like a kind of slimy mid layer that you need to slide off right there as well.

You go Scottie and, therefore, we are also going to cut the chives into pieces of a similar size to the chicken. The goal here, and in fact with many stir-fry dishes, the goal is to get all the ingredients together. about the same size, you know, the size of chopsticks, so these scallions want to be cut into knobs about 1/2 to 3/4 inch, just the white parts, you can save the green leaves for something else or if they look tired like mine is used to, you can just throw them away, we have our scallions here, we have our chicken, we have peanuts and what is it?

We have some garlic here, peeled garlic, cut the top off and then you can, you can chop it or it guides you. I prefer sliced ​​garlic. For this, what I do is lay it flat, cut it not all the way up, not all the way perpendicular to the grain, but a little bit at an angle, and what I do is go halfway this way and then flip it over to 5pi making some time serve again if it's a very big stick like that, so I was cutting like that. I can turn it over again so the flat side is stable.

Well, I mean, let me show you slowly, so fingers like this cut that cut. slices and then you try to take it and you turn it on its side like this you continue look easy these are going to go in here and some gingers I'm going to take how much ginger do you want? We love you. I will use it. Like maybe one of these smaller pieces, a spoon is the easiest way to peel ginger, just rub it with a spoon and the peel comes off the skin. I must say that the skin does come off, yes, and if it's really old ginger, you might want to consider ordering it. from microbrushing it or chopping it very finely, this ginger is good and it looks nice and tender, so I'm just going to slice it and actually slice it, so I'm going to make a first slice on boards like this, it's okay, and then I'm going to be more or less, you can be very precise if you want, you know, like if I were doing this in a fancy restaurant, I would be very precise, but I'm not.

I'm just cooking for myself right now, so I'm going to arrange them roughly until they're perpendicular to each other, oops, and then go back this way to get thin julienne strips, thin julienne, matchsticks, that's what they call them, okay, hmm, okay, so that's our aromatics, aromatics, peanuts, scallions, chicken. List your spices so we have these dried chilies. These are peppers that look towards paradise. You can use chile de arbol chile. Any type of small hot pepper will work. Cut the stem end of all of them. Now chiles de arbol are quite spicy and these systems. These two chilies are also quite spicy, but most of that heat is in the ribs and seeds, so what we really want is more chili flavor and less heat, so we're going to remove the seeds.

What I'm looking for, after trimming them, that guy's looking a little tired, dried chiles, by the way, keep them in the freezer and they last a long time, so I'm going to take out the seeds first, like this, shake a little bit and move like this. Of course, if you really want this dish to be spicy, what you can is totally up to you, you can leave those seeds right there and it will make it very spicy, so the chiles will provide the spicy heat. In fact, let's do it quickly so that these. I'm also going to cut them into roughly the same size pieces.

Basically, I'm going to cut them in half. By the way, this is one of my all-time favorite dishes as a kid. You know, I grew up in New York. In Chinese restaurants in York and New York, the dish amounted to something called diced chicken with chili peppers and peanuts and usually had bell peppers, peanuts and celery, so it's not a particularly authentic version, but I like both versions. You know, this is this one. a sort of more classic version of real citron, so we buy our chilies some peppercorns, these are too many, but when you get your stitch, a person's calluses are the event of the peel of the prickly ash, a berry of the prickly ash and mostly you're looking for, you're looking for just the husk, so if you look, if you get the core peppercorns, I buy mine online usually or sometimes in the Chinese market.

These came from the Chinese market. Sometimes they have these little black seeds that are the inside parts of the shell and you don't want them, so if you can pick them out there usually aren't too many, but it really varies from brain to brain, so there are a couple here that get crunchy. sandy in texture and they are really unpleasant to eat so you just look for the shell which is where the flavor is and of course some brains also come with lots of twigs and things inside, this one is brown. it looks very neat which is nice sometimes you will see small twigs here is a small twig if you see twigs like that get rid of them so peppercorns chilies and maybe a teaspoon or so of peppercorns , No?

There's no need. too many, this is what will provide that kind of numbing heat, plus a lot of aroma, they have a kind of lemon aroma that is beautiful, leave me any pine aroma and then they numb your mouth and that's really one. from the features of cooking with lemon and lemon, right, I think that's all of our ingredients, so the only other things are the sauce, let me get a little bowl to make this amazing, who is it? So, some water or broth. I'm just using water here. A couple of tablespoons, let's make a little bit of light soy sauce, a little bit of wine for shashing.

I'm just looking at this, but if you go, I'll leave a link in the description that will tell you exactly where the recipe is. With all the exact proportions of ingredients, this is Cinque Kang vinegar. So it's a aged vinegar if you can't find clinking vinegar which you can find basically in any Chinese market or order it online if you can't get it or not. I don't want to order online, you can use balsamic vinegar, which is actually the closest thing, a little bit of cornstarch, so it's not a super spicy dish like American Chinese style kung pao chicken is, so no we want it. be super sticky and cornstarch is what makes sauces, gives Chinese sauces and puts American sauces in particular, but also Chinese sauces to shame.

In a way, I don't know that kind of shiny, slippery texture that's not who we are. In this dish we want it to be a little bit dry, finally a little bit of honey, so sweet, vinegary, salty, spicy and numbing, those are all the qualities that you get from this dish, oh, that was probably about a tablespoon more or less. of honey and here we go, okay. I have my way in the highest seat. You can get this. This burner is pretty hot, so I'm lucky in that regard, but you can easily make this at home if you make it at home.

A home burner uses the highest heat possible, let your wok preheat and you actually know what I'm doing. This is peanut oil and these peanuts are actually raw, so that's what I'm going to do. What I do is give them a little frying so that they cook. You can easily use dry roasted peanuts. I'm going to let it sizzle a little. Let me get a skimmer, by the way, a skimmer that was peanut oil. Peanut oil is really great for stir-frying, it has a high smoke point, it's actually great for deep frying, it's very hot, it's a highly saturated fat, it's a vegetable, but it's more similar to some animal fats in the sense of which is highly saturated and generally things when you fry things and highly saturated fats, they are crispier than if you plane fry them and they reduce the saturated fats, that's why you know how to say like fried duck, fat duck, fried duck, fried potatoes with fat are really crispy and delicious, while anything you fry in olive oil tends to soften a little quicker, okay, let's let it sizzle a little well, this wok that I have, by the way, is a 14 inch wok that I bought it in 2000, I think something around there is about 20 years ago.

I bought it from Target. I think it's the Typhoon brand. I would have no idea if they still make that brand. I really doubt it. I bought it from Target, but I have a couple other rides. I recommend a 48. for the home I recommend a wok that is at least 14 inches and I recommend one with a handle and auxiliary handle some things some styles of walks have two handles like this one for cooking at home I find it much easier to use the type that has both handles they end up with an auxiliary handle and then I recommend a flat bottom wok for a home stove, if you have a wok burner setup where you have your ring type with flames when we're all around, then the traditional wok with a round. the bottom is better, but for a flat bottom wok set up at home, okay, these peanuts are getting nice and brown and the trick with any stir fry, of course, is that you have to have everything ready because once you start cooking it's fast.

I'll take that off for a second so I can remove some of the oil. I don't need a lot of Bao, everything to start well, so I have a couple of tablespoons of oil in there, we bring my chicken here, prepare my chicken. My aromatic chickens have been marinating for about 15 minutes, give or take 12 minutes. The ideal is to let it marinate for about 20 minutes so that it has time to fatten. Sorry, the protein is time to break down from the attack you've added, which helps make it juicier. here the aromatics are going to fry for just a few seconds just to infuse that oil and the chicken is goingstraight.

You don't want to let those aromatics cook too much because they'll start to burn and I'll switch to my actual spatula first. I don't know, I'm using this spoon. Burnt aromatics don't taste good, they taste burnt, so if you have a very weak stove at home, what I would recommend doing is cooking in batches, so cook half the chicken, take it out and reheat it. just reheat your wok, cook the other batch of chicken, take it out, reheat your wok, add the scallions and peanuts again, cook them, then add the chicken again and add the sauce.

This burner is hot enough that I can cook it all at once, so once it's constantly moving, pull, pull, pull this one. I'm going to add my aromatics to the garlic and ginger to the scallions, man, that smells good. Let's put our peanuts back in your sauce. I'm going to stir it a little less one last time just to make sure none of that. the cornstarch settles at the bottom and it's all homogenized here it's fine, we ended up leaving my wife here, there you go, this is how to prepare lunch. I don't have chopsticks here.

I'm not going to eat pork, I guess. I'm going to eat with the spoon, well, let's try this anyway, it was good, museum, let's improve the light shows. Hot a little spicy, a little numbing, a little sweet, vinegary, I've got those crunchy peanuts. The chicken is tender and tasty, I got some good stuff. Sorry, my dog's not here, I can't, Peter, I'll bring something home for later, bye guys, see you tomorrow.