Chicken with oyster sauce

I’m getting tired of people ragging on my phone camera, so i’m trying out a different tact. Please tell me if this suits or not. Personally, it doesn’t suit me, as i spent almost two hours and developed accute RSI on the above picture, and using my trackpad for anything remotely intricate is a little like herding a blue whale with an eyelash.

Here is a sturdy recipe from my chinese back catalogue. It’s relatively simple, incredibly edible and will show off some interesting technique you don’t really find in oher cuisines. J'adore real chinese food, as opposed to the shit that often gets passed for chinese food in our takeaways and all-you-can-eats, and defy anyone who tells me the pork scratching with strawberry jam dishes can even be mentioned in the same breath as this.

Some of the ingredients here might make you feel like you don’t want to make it. Perhaps you feel like buying a bottle of oyster sauce just for one recipe is madness, or ten pounds for shaosing wine is an outrageous price to pay. But these ingredients are the building blocks to a cuisine. with them, you can make endless other dishes. Essentially what i’m saying is that they’re an investment, like gold bullion, except you can eat them, and you can’t eat gold. Unless you’e this man.

You’ll need…

marinade:

tablespoon of oyster sauce

tablespoon of sesame oil

tablespoon of light soy sauce

tablespoon of shaosing wine/dry sherry/omit because you’re cheap/recovering alchaholic

cornflour

the rest:

chicken thigh, boned and sliced thin

spring onions

half a thumb sized piece of ginger

garlic clove

a pepper

1 bok choi/pak choi

sauce:

half a cup of chicken stock with a teaspoon of cornflour stirred in

1 tablespoon oyster sauce

We need to start with the marinade, but a marinade with a difference, in that it’s really velveting the chicken. This just means it’s marinating with cornflour, which gives the cooked meat a soft, velvety texture and helps the seasoning stick to the meat. To velvet, add the chicken and marinade ingredients to the bowl with enough cornflour to thicken the liquid ingredients into a paste. Set aside in the fridge while you continue prep. It should be in there for half an hour or so.

Thinly slice the spring onions, the garlic and ginger and cut the peppers how you like. Wash the pak/bok choi and seperate the leaves.

To cook, we need to get the pan really hot. All your previous attempts at chinese food were failures because (1) you don’t cook at a high enough heat and (2) you don’t follow my recipes. So get a solid frying pan or wok and let it heat until the metal starts to smoke. Open your kitchen window. Add sunflour oil and when it starts to shimmer, just on the brink of smoking, add your meat to the pan. Shimmy it around a bit and allow it to form a nice little crust, then take out the chicken and set aside on a plate. Into the same pan, add the spring onion, ginger and garlic and swizzle it around until the garlic starts to colour a little, then add the peppers. Push that around, add the stock and turn the heat down to medium. Add the chicken back in, the oyster sauce and finally the pak/bok choi, and allow to bubble for a short time or until the sauce reaches the thickness you desire.

Serve it over rice, or better, cooked noodles you’ve allowed to cool and then deep fried; a bit like this. Or just phone a takeaway and don’t bother you lazy prick.

Braised Recipe Number 1 : Ribs.

Here’s a recipe for pork ribs braised in lu shui, aka master sauce. This is by far the best way i know to cook ribs, the best way to bring out the potential of what i see as a much misused cut of meat. I tire of these stiff, tasteless sticks of bbq meat that bypass the melting, fatty qualities of a good rib, and the slow braise in soy - what the Chinese call red cooking - means you get highly seasoned meat from surface to bone.

pork ribs, rack or split

1/2 cup of dark soy

3/4 cup of light soy

couple of glugs of chinese rice wine

4 tbsp palm sugar

tbsp schezuan peppercorns

bunch spring onions, cleaned, trimmed and halved

thumb sized chunk of ginger

one star anise

water/light stock to cover

If you get a rack of ribs, remember to take off the membrane that runs along the underside of the cut, because it’s a bit shitty and will only work against you in your mission of deliciousness.

Take a pot large enough to contain your ribs, and heat up a kettle of water. We need to pre-simmer the ribs to extract some of the blood and impurities that you’d have to skim off the braising liquid later otherwise. So boiling water and ribs into the pot, give it about ten minutes at a rolling boil and then drain them off.

Replace the ribs in the pot and the pot on the hob, then add your master sauce ingredients and enough water to cover the meat. Bring these up to a slow simmer, a really tender simmer and put the lid on. then walk away.

Three or four hours later, get some white rice if you want it, perhaps braise a little choi sum or pak choi in the pot and lay a few ribs on the plate. Most of the time i just eat it with a tsing tao and a boner.

———

Please, please, please consider keeping this leftover sauce. after cooking these ribs, you’ll have added a deep rich pork flavour. Next time you use it it will flavour you’re new meat further, resulting in more delicious meat. Obviously there are some concerns that this isn’t exactly the most healthy thing you can do, but i assure you that if the sauce is brought back up to temperature again, and you’re heating it for hours at a time then it won’t give you rickets or make you poo and sick so hard you scream my name and curse me, beating your fist into a steaming pool of your insides, weeping diseased master sauce tears. If it makes you feel any better, the Chinese also call it ‘thousand year sauce’, ‘the sauce that goes on and on’ and ‘fine to reheat sauce’.

To store the master sauce, wait for it to cool completely. You’ll have a thick layer of fat on the top which you need to remove, and then pass the sauce through a sieve. Store it in a bottle, a pot, or a watertight boot in the fridge or freezer. Next time you want to cook with it, top up with a little more soy, wine, stock, et al.

Think about braising whole chickens, chinese sausages, eggs in shells..............