I’ll preface this recipe by saying that I hope you like spicy food, because this one’s a doozy. Now, you can play around with the number of chilies you use, but I like to follow instructions and also pride myself on having a pretty high tolerance for spiciness, and this dish called for 10 (yes, 10) dried red chiles. So it’s with great authority that I’m able to tell you that on the official spicy scale, 10 chilies = burning eyes, nose and mouth due to inhalation while cooking and sustained fire mouth while eating. Make sure you have a nice, flavorless pile of rice handy to accompany this one.
I’ve been known, at times, to spend half a day preparing a dish only to have it end up tasting weird, or flat, or just plain unappetizing. Thai food is often the thorn in my side- it will have me traveling to Chinatown, finely slicing 45 shallots and combining various forms of rotten fish products for an entire weekend, and come Sunday evening, all I have to show for myself is a pile of tough, salty, grey beef, a beeping smoke detector and hands that still smell like shallots. And then I’ll eat pie for dinner instead. Okay, yes, this is clearly still a fresh wound.
In contrast to the all-too-common above scenario, recipes like this are always such a relief. Yes, it’s a lot of sauces and spices to keep on hand, but I find that cooking Chinese food at home generally turns out tasting exactly like I want it to, regardless of which cookbook the recipe comes from. If you haven’t tried Chinese at home, I hope you don’t let the ingredient list intimidate you (I can see you through this computer balking at the use of both light and dark soy sauce). These products are easy to find online or at an Asian grocery store, you can keep them for quite awhile, and they really do account for the complex flavors these dishes serve up.
I absolutely love this dish. I find the way it looks to be so appetizing, with all of the various ingredients cut in the same size and shape (yes, this sounds incredibly Type A). It has an impressive depth of flavor, but is also super light, unlike the Americanized Chinese food we’re so accustomed to ordering. And the spiciness is a lively combination of dried chilies (which you will proceed to use with caution, I hope) and Sichuan peppercorns, which are actually not pepper but do give you a strange numbing sensation- a different kind of heat.
In conclusion, use your Amazon Prime and your free shipping, order up some Chinkiang vinegar and dark soy sauce, and get cracking on this dish. It’s quick, it’s simple and it’s going to impress people. But if you really love those people, I highly recommend using about 5 chilies instead of 10.
Ingredients
- 2 boneless chicken breasts, with our without skin (11-12 oz/300-350g total)
- 3 garlic cloves
- An equivalent amount of ginger
- 5 scallions, white parts only
- A handful of dried chilies (Fuchsia says 10! I say that's a lot!)
- 2 tablespoons cooking oil
- 1 teaspoon whole Sichuan peppercorns
- 3 oz (75g) roasted (unsalted) peanuts
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 2 teaspoons light soy sauce
- 1 teaspoon Shaoxing wine
- 1 1/2 teaspoon potato flour
- 1 tablespoon sugar
- 3/4 teaspoon potato flour
- 1 teaspoon dark soy sauce
- 1 teaspoon light soy sauce
- 1 tablespoon Chinkiang vinegar
- 1 teaspoon sesame oil
- 1 tablespoon chicken stock or water
Instructions
- Cut the chicken as easily as possible into 1/2-inch strips, then cut these into small cubes. Place in a small bowl. Add the marinade ingredients together with 1 tablespoon water, mix well and set aside while you prepare the other ingredients.
- Peel and thinly slice the garlic and ginger and chop the scallions into chunks as long as their diameter (to match the chicken cubes). Snip the chilies in half or into sections. Discard their seeds as much as possible. Combine the sauce ingredients in a small bowl.
- Heat a seasoned wok over a high flame. Add the oil with the chilies and Sichuan peppercorns and stir-fry briefly, until the chilies are darkened but not burned (remove the wok from the heat if necessary to prevent overheating).
- Quickly add the chicken and stir-fry over a high flame, stirring constantly. As soon as the chicken cubes have separated from each other, add the ginger, garlic and scallions and continue to stir-fry until they are fragrant and the meat just cooked through (test one of the larger pieces to make sure).
- Give the sauce a stir and add it to the wok, continuing to stir and toss. As soon as the sauce has become thick and shiny, add the peanuts, stir them in and serve.
Notes
From Every Grain of Rice
