Notes:
You may replace the brandy with whiskey and you may use whole chicken thighs, bone, and skin. In this case, grill them with a pan placed beneath, to catch all the lovely juice and fat, until chicken pieces are close to done and just slightly pink at the bone.
These were brined chicken breast tenders which I diced. No need for marinating as I cut them into bite-sized pieces – Absolutely delicious!!!!!!
Total Weight of Recipe: 1.091 kg – Total Calories of Recipe: 2,191
Weight Loss Tip: You may copy-paste the below ingredients into HappyForks and click on the recipe analyzer. To alter the below amounts to your own amounts, just click analyze recipe, and don’t forget to place your bowl on the scale and weigh your portion of food. The mind has a strange way of fooling us – sometimes it even lies to us!
Ingredients:
800 g chicken breast fillets or tenders (pre-marinated or brined pieces), diced
10 g ginger
10 g garlic
30 ml sugar, caramelized (white sugar is fine)
32 g oyster sauce
32 g plum sauce (recipe)
32 g (30 ml) Hoisin Sauce
15 g (15 ml) brandy
4 ml Five Spice Powder (See bottom for recipe)
2.7 ml salt or more to taste
Pinch red pepper (cayenne pepper)
30 ml chicken stock (fats & juices caught from leftover grilled chicken pieces)
30 ml chicken fat (fats & juices caught from leftover grilled chicken pieces)
Method:
On very low heat, caramelize the sugar in the pan. Do NOT burn! Once it has browned, turn off the heat and stamp in your garlic and ginger to a paste – I use the flat back-end base of a long wooden handled braai\broil or barbecue meat hook.
Place sauce bottles onto the scale one by one, set at zero, and tip a little sauce out at a time into the wok until you can read the bottles minus their corrective measures on the scale. If you don’t have a scale, use the same measures but in milliliters.
Add your brandy, 5 spice powder, a pinch of red cayenne pepper, and salt together with combined 30 ml fat and 30 ml stock (juices) from roasting the previous night's chicken. You may add more to taste, especially if using skinless chicken breasts to counteract the dryness of meat, but will need less if using fatty cuts like pre-grilled chicken thighs with bone and skin on.
As soon as you have all the above to the wok. Turn up the heat, and drop in chicken, stir-frying on high to evaporate liquids until chicken pieces are coated. – Do not allow it to burn. Turn off the heat as soon as the chicken is cooked through.
Serve with steamed or Chinese rice, egg foo yung, carrots, and peas.
You may make extra gravy if you wish
Enjoy!
Chinese Five Spice Powder
Is a blend of cinnamon, cloves, fennel, star anise, Szechuan peppercorns, and sometimes ginger, nutmeg, and or licorice, but the choice is yours and it’s all up to your own taste.
Notes:
- When using whole seeds of spice: You need to measure approximately 15 ml of whole spice to get approximately 5 ml of powdered spice.
- In my part of the world, I cannot get Szechuan peppercorns so I just use some black peppercorns, which I lightly roast together with fennel seeds for a total of 44 seconds on high in a 1000 watt microwave oven in a damp (rinsed, water emptied out but not dried) teacup, cool and grind together with other spices.
Ingredients:
15 ml cinnamon sticks, broken up
15 ml cloves, whole
15 ml fennel seeds, whole
15 Szechuan peppercorns
30 m star anise, whole
Method:
Place all the above whole spices into the coffee grinder and grind to a powder. Store in a sealed container to use in recipes. Enjoy!