Gong Bao chicken with peanuts recipe
As far as I’m concerned, this is one of the ultimate chicken dishes: quick and easy to make and thrillingly delicious.
The cooking method is xiao chao, ‘small stir-fry’, in which all the ingredients are simply added to the wok in succession.
Ingredients
- 2 boneless chicken breasts, with or without skin (300-350g in total)
- 3 garlic cloves
- 1 knob fresh ginger
- 5 spring onions, white parts only
- 1 handful of dried chillies (about 10)
- 2 tbsp cooking oil
- 1 tsp whole Sichuan pepper
- 75 g roasted peanuts
- 0.5 tsp salt
- 2 tsp light soy sauce
- 1 tsp Shaoxing wine
- 1.5 tsp potato flour
- 1 tbsp caster sugar
- 0.75 tsp potato flour
- 1 tsp dark soy sauce
- 1 tsp light soy sauce
- 1 tbsp Chinkiang vinegar
- 1 tsp sesame oil
- 1 tbsp chicken stock or water
Details
- Cuisine: Chinese
- Recipe Type: Main
- Difficulty: Easy
- Preparation Time: 5 mins
- Cooking Time: 20 mins
- Serves: 2
Step-by-step
- Cut the chicken as evenly as possible into 1.5cm strips, then cut these into small cubes. Place in a small bowl. Add the marinade ingredients together with 1 tbsp water, mix well and set aside while you prepare the other ingredients.
- Peel and thinly slice the garlic and ginger and chop the spring onions into chunks as long as their diameter (to match the chicken cubes). Snip the chillies in half or into sections. Discard their seeds as far as possible. Combine the sauce ingredients in a small bowl. Heat a seasoned wok over a high flame.
- Add the oil with the chillies and Sichuan pepper and stir-fry briefly until the chillies are darkening but not burnt (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, add the ginger, garlic and spring onions 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.
Every Grain of Rice, by Fuchsia Dunlop. Texy by Fuchsia Dunlop, 2012. Photographs by Chris Terry, 2012. Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, Plc, 2012.
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