Chinese Lemon Chicken

Source: The Food of China by Deh-Ta Hsiung and Nina Simonds

I've been on a mission for the past year, to find the best General Tso's Chicken or Orange Chicken in Austin. For the most part, I'm really a healthy eater. I try to have fresh vegetables with most meals. I've switched from cooking long-grain white rice and jasmine rice to the more nutritious brown or wild rice.

But every now and then, I just crave some cheap, shitty Americanized Chinese food. And few dishes epitomize cheap, shitty Americanized Chinese food like General Tso's Chicken. There's something about that unique breaded texture of the meat, the thickness of the sauce, and that combination of sweet and savory flavors that has me hooked.

Or maybe it's my body saying "you need to eat more greasy stuff and restore balance." I don't know.

At any rate, I've been trying random Chinese restaurants around Austin and seeing how each one's General Tso's Chicken (a.k.a. Orange Chicken) stacks up against the others'. This is all excluding Panda Express, of course. Not to get all Hipster about Chinese food, but they're too mainstream, they lack soul.

Not too long ago, I realized that cooking it on my own isn't very complex. All it takes is a nonstick pan and oil that's hot enough. Plus I already had a semi-authentic Lemon Chicken recipe to work with from my big Chinese cookbook. The final result wasn't quite restaurant quality, but it was surprisingly satisfying.

Ingredients for chicken:

- 2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into 1-inch pieces

- 1 Tbsp light soy sauce

- 1 Tbsp Shaoxing rice wine

- 1 scallion, chopped finely

- 1 clove of garlic, minced

- 1 Tbsp ginger, minced

- 1 egg, lightly beaten

- 1/2 cup corn starch, or more

- Enough cooking oil for frying

Ingredients for sauce:

- 2 Tbsp juice from a lemon or orange

- 2 tsp sugar

- 1/2 tsp salt

- 1/2 tsp toasted sesame oil (I used chili sesame oil)

- 3 Tbsp chicken broth

- 1/2 tsp corn starch

Procedure:

1. In a large bowl, combine the soy sauce, Shaoxing, chopped scallion, garlic, and ginger. Add the pieces of chicken and toss them to coat it all in the marinade. Cover the bowl, and let the chicken marinate in the refrigerator for at least 1 hour.

2. When the chicken is done marinating, coat all the chicken with the beaten egg. Coat the chicken with the corn starch, shaking off any excess. I poured the dry corn starch into a sealable plastic bag, added the chicken, and shook it all until everything was coated.

3. Pour the frying oil into a wok or nonstick frying pan, and heat it to medium-high. When it's hot enough, a drop of the egg and corn starch should fry golden-brown within 10 seconds. Add a about 1/2 of the chicken, one piece at a time, and fry them while stirring constantly until they are golden-brown (~4 minutes). Remove the cooked chicken with tongs or a wire-sieve, and repeat with the remaining chicken. I lay out the cooked chicken on paper towels to absorb excess oil.

4. When all the chicken is done cooking, drain out the oil and carefully wipe the frying pan dry. Reduce the heat to medium and let the pan cool a little bit. Mix all the sauce ingredients very well, and add the mixture to the pan. Let it cook while constantly stirring until it's thickened. Return the chicken to the pan, and lightly toss it in the sauce.

Chicken à la Provençal

This has to be one of my favorite dishes to make. It has a thick, hearty, tomatoey sauce; a nice acidic bite from the olives and anchovies; and the active prep time isn't very long. I've seen a few variations on this recipe, some calling for white wine vs. red wine. Personally, I like my Chicken à la Provençal to be a little heavier on the tomatoes, so I feel like red wine goes well with it.

I'd go with a Côtes-du-Rhone red, and not just because of fond memories of vast vineyards and bums peeing on restaurant doorsteps. I agree with the philosophy that traditional foods and wines from the same region always go well together. But I guess some further experimentation with the wine variety is in order.

Oh Snap, What's That? [Vol. 2]

Harissa

I was walking down the international foods aisle at Central Market, looking for God knows what. Then, I spotted this guy:

Hello harissa.

I really can't remember where I had heard of it before. I checked my Mediterranean cookbook, and there was hardly a mention of it except for in a recipe that I never even considered making (raw turnip salad with harissa dressing). All I knew about it beforehand that it's some sort of spicy seasoning.

What is it really? Harissa is a hot chili sauce whose roots go back to North Africa, and is made up of chili peppers, tomatoes, and paprika. It's often used as a condiment, or to kick the spice up on other sauces, or as a marinade ingredient. The particular brand I bought, DEA, has a pretty prominent paprika taste to it, and a nice slow-building heat. Another observation about the can I bought, the company is based in Nîmes, France :)

After I tried tasting the harissa straight-up a couple of times, I realized where I might have had it before. Back when I was a grad student at Columbia, one of my favorite places to grab lunch was the Lebanese place on 113th/Broadway, Amir's Falafel. Seriously, my friend Wil and I would go there at least twice a week, their shawarma beef was like crack. But one of the things I liked most about the place was their hot sauce. It wasn't your typical Frank's or Tabasco, so heavy on the vinegar. It had a somewhat smoky chili and paprika flavor to it and delivered the heat, but it didn't add so much of an acidic bite that the standard American hot sauce has.

Actually one of my favorite things about Amir's Falafel is a memory of one time I had lunch there with Wil. The chalkboard at the front of the restaurant had some specials listed. I didn't pay the board much attention, I glanced at it as I walked to the counter and saw "Hummus". Wil pointed out that it was definitely written as "Homos." Awesome.

I did some searching to see what is a good way to use harissa in a meal, and I found a spicy North African-inspired chicken recipe. Check it out after the jump.

Chicken Marsala

Recipe Source: Experimenting & The New Best Recipe by the people from America's Test Kitchen

Recipe Result: Damn good

I remember the first time I tried making chicken marsala in college, in the shared floor kitchen in my dorm. I didn't have a recipe, I just went by my friend Kelly's description of "you just saute the chicken breast, add some flour, add some wine, and you're done." How did that work out, you ask?

First off, I left the chicken breast cutlets way too thick, so it took forever to cook them all the way through. Then the idea of adding flour and then cooking wine left me with this nasty, thick, gooey substance one can maybe classify as a sauce. And I didn't even know how much wine to add, so I started with a few Tbsp, and I saw that all I had in the pan with the chicken was flour paste. So I added more wine, and more, and more, until half the bottle of cooking wine was gone. This girl who was also in the kitchen, and could not have possibly weighed more than 100lbs, said she was getting a buzz from the evaporating alcohol. The end result: inedible.... dang.

Eventually, when I was on an internship and had a proper kitchen and free time and had learned the wonders of cookbooks, I developed much better technique. Thinly sliced breast cutlets, dredging in flour, real wine instead of cooking wine, all that good stuff. And eventually my chicken marsala wasn't half bad.

Last year I got The New Best Recipe by Cooks Illustrated. The cookbook takes popular recipes and scientifically breaks down what ingredients and techniques work best. But I have to say, I disagree with parts of their chicken marsala recipe. The recipe says that between cooking the chicken and cooking the mushrooms, you fry some pancetta to re-grease the pan. I think the bacon-y flavor of pancetta is overkill in this dish, and it calls for too much butter. So I found a pretty good medium between my old recipe and the book's version, and it's worked well for about 3 or 4 iterations so far.

The potatoes on the side were pretty simple too, I won't put up a whole post about them. The recipe is from a Mediterranean cookbook, Olives and Oranges. All I did was take some young red potatoes -- the smaller the better -- and boil them until they're almost cooked through. Remove them from the water, let them become cool to the touch, and then cut each in half. Give each half a quick smash, season with salt, pepper, and dried rosemary, and saute in butter until they get golden-brown and develop a good crisp.

The recipe is after the jump, try it out!

Jerk Chicken Wings [Attempt #1]

Recipe source: The Real Jerk: New Caribbean Cuisine

Recipe result: Good flavor, skin could've been crispier, needed mo' fire (habaneros). But it got a good response from my friends.

Whenever I go home to Long Island, I have a list of foods that I need to have: pizza, bagels, mom's papaya smoothies, etc. But if I ever find myself in Uniondale near the Haitian barbershop I used to go to, I need to pick up some extra hot jerk chicken from Tropical Jerk, the Jamaican place across the street. It's masterfully seasoned and char-grilled to crispy perfection. For real, I'm tempted to even eat the bones... not just the marrow, the bones.

For Christmas in 2008, my good friend Dominic bought me a Jamaican cookbook, written by the owners of a well-known Toronto Jamaican restaurant. Naturally, the first thing I had to try out of this book was the jerk chicken.

So what goes into jerk seasoning? Loads of allspice, ginger, nutmeg, black pepper, and hot-as-hell chili peppers. Traditionally, the recipe calls for Scotch Bonnet peppers, but down in Austin it's way easier to find habaneros, and they're just about the same in appearance and heat. Jerk sauce serves as a marinade for the chicken, before it's grilled to a good crisp. I don't have a grill, so I usually broil it, or sometimes braise it the same way I do in my Haitian chicken recipe. Typically I use thighs and breast, but this time around I made wings for my friend's Superbowl party.

You can find my recipe after the jump. Try it out and let me know how you like it.

Haitian Braised Chicken

Recipe Source: Mom

Recipe Result: finally mastered

Every Haitian mom has some variation on a dish of marinated meat braised with tomato and onion. I remember growing up and having this for dinner every Sunday, like clockwork. Back then, my friends would ask me what Haitian food is like, but I had no idea how to describe it. Now that I've been cooking for a few years and learned some techniques, I can say that the bulk of Haitian cooking is all about braising.

I've watched my mom make this several times, even had her walk me through the steps as she was making it. But there were a lot of subtleties that I had to figure out through practice. In a way, this dish is what really made me consider writing a recipe journal. I must have tried cooking Haitian braised chicken a couple dozen times before I felt like I mastered the recipe. Here's what I learned in the process.

1) Most of the flavor comes from the meat getting sufficiently browned, and the cookware you use for braising makes a pretty big difference in how well it browns. When I first tried braising chicken, I had been using my usual stainless steel sauce pan, but the browning would happen too fast and I couldn't get the meat to release its juices the way I wanted. Then my mom bought me a cast aluminum pot (technically, a caldero). Cast aluminum is used all throughout the Caribbean and Latin America because it's cheap and lightweight. It heats up a little slower than your average stainless steel pan, so it gives the meat a good gradual brown. A dutch oven would also be great to use.

2) The other primary source of flavor is tomato paste, and when it's added to the pot. When I started trying to recreate this dish, I would dissolve the tomato paste in the water that I would add as the braising liquid. But I was impatient with letting the liquid reduce and letting the tomato paste impart its flavor. I learned that adding the tomato paste while the chicken was still browning gave better color and more intense flavor. Before I understood that step, I would cheat and use some gochujang (Korean soybean/chili paste) for extra flavor. A little MSG makes everything better... right?

3) Patience is the key. When you add the water after the chicken browns, you really need to be patient and let it reduce on medium-high heat. If you have time, let the water reduce to almost half so you're left with a good, concentrated sauce. Then add more water and let it reduce some more. Though, I am still working out the optimal time to let the chicken brown before adding chicken and the optimal time to let the sauce form and develop flavor so that the chicken doesn't get overdone. The dark meat always comes out great, but breast meat gets slightly dried out.

Ingredients:

- 4 chicken thighs

- 1 half of a split breast (I pick up a pre-packaged split breast and then ask the butcher to cut it into 3 pieces for me)

- 1 lime, cut into thick wedges

- 2 cloves garlic, crushed/minced

- 2 Tbsp red wine vinegar

- 2 tsp olive oil (for marinade)

- an additional 1 Tbsp olive oil for braising

- 1 Tbsp tomato paste

- 1 small yellow onion (3" diameter") or 1/2 of a large yellow onion (4" diameter), sliced into rings

- salt and pepper to taste

- a pinch (~1/8 tsp) dried thyme, or about 1/4 tsp of fresh thyme leaves

Procedure:

1) Rub each piece of chicken with the lime wedges. Then season liberally with salt and pepper on all sides. Arrange the chicken flat in container you can fit in the refrigerator. Add the 2 tsp of olive oil, the vinegar, and the garlic. Mix it all together, so all the pieces of chicken are marinating. Cover the dish and refrigerate, letting it marinate overnight.

2) Wash your hands. Seriously.

3) In your dutch oven, caldero, or whatever you have, heat the 1 Tbsp of olive oil over medium heat. When it's hot, put in the chicken so that the sides with the flattest surface area are face down. Let it cook for 10 minutes or so without moving the chicken. Keep it still so it browns nicely. When it does start to brown, throw in the 1 Tbsp of tomato paste and flip each piece of chicken. Toss all the chicken around so that the tomato paste gets spread around the pan, then let it sit over the heat and brown some more.

4) Both sides of each piece should be nice and browned. Don't worry if you get some slightly burnt spots too, it adds to the flavor. Add 1 cup of water, or however much you need to nearly cover the chicken, like in the photo below. Dial up the heat to medium-high and bring the pot to a boil. Let the pot simmer on medium heat, and add the sliced onion, the thyme, and salt and pepper to taste. I also recommend a couple of dashes of hot sauce at this point, for the spiciness and the acidity from the vinegar. Simmer until the liquid is reduced by half. You can add more water if you want more sauce in the end.

Yields about 4 servings. Enjoy!

South Indian Coconut Curry Chicken [Attempt #1]

Recipe Source: http://www.spiderkerala.com/kerala/recipes/ViewRecipe.aspx?RecipeId=259

Recipe Result: Flavor was... acceptable. Texture was an epic fail.

I'll be making all Indian dishes this week, and Sunday night I started things off with a coconut chicken curry. I settled on this one since it looked pretty authentic (no pre-mixed curry powder) and I'd never worked with dried, grated coconut before. I made a few changes to the ingredient list, just to yield a little less than the original recipe would turn out; not to mention some of it is pretty vague. I mean, "15 medium sized pieces of chicken." Way to be specific. Here's what I used:

- 1lb boneless, skinless chicken thighs, cut into small pieces
- 1 yellow/sweet onion, maybe 3" in diameter (I made thinly sliced half rings)
- 1 cup dried, grated coconut
- 4 large cloves of garlic
- 2 tsp, each, of coriander, cayenne pepper, julienne sliced ginger
- [forgot to buy red and green chilis]
- heaping 1/2 tsp turmeric
- 8 curry leaves
- a little more than 2 Tbsp of vegetable oil
- 1 cup water
- salt to taste (came out to maybe 2 tsp or more)

Yielded about 3 servings

I basically followed the cooking directions as given. For grinding the toasted coconut into a paste, I used about 3/4 cup of water and put it all into my food processor. That was the first mistake. "Grinding" in the processor didn't do a damn thing about the granularity of the coconut, even after letting the pot simmer for 20 min or more. That's what I mean about a step in a recipe being totally intuitive to the writer, but could be lost on the reader.

The other mistake was the 2 tsp of cayenne. I like my food spicy. But that much cayenne all at once while toasting the coconut kind of made it hard to taste-test for adding salt... and made it tough to breathe near the stove.

Lesson learned: Stick with coconut milk. Or if choose to use grated coconut again, use a big mortar and pestle to really smooth it out. As it turned out, the sauce the mouth-feel of sawdust suspended in water.