Name: Chicken Breast with Peppers, Ginger and Spring Onion
Prep time: 30 min
Cook time: 15 min
Total time: 45 min
Yield: 4
Ingredients: 1 tablespoon neutral oil; 2 inches ginger; 4 spring onion; 1 bell pepper; 400 grams chicken breast; 2 teaspoons tahini; 1 tablespoon soy sauce; 1/2 lemon; 2 teaspoons honey; 1/2 teaspoon black pepper; 0.25 teaspoons salt; 0.5 teaspoons soy sauce; 1 tablespoon water; 1 egg white; 4 teaspoons corn starch; 1 tablespoon neutral oil; 0.25 cups neutral oil

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An Intro to Stir Fry

As the inaugural stir fry recipe on Our Kosher Kitchen, let’s start simple. This recipe aims to use the principles outlined in Stir Fry 101 by focusing on three key ingredients: chicken breast, ginger, and spring onion. All other components exist only to support and balance the stars of the show. This recipe was adapted from Chef Wang Gang’s ‘Stir-fried chicken breast with scallion’, which is linked below.

Why Most Stir Fries Are Not Kosher

Chinese cooking uses a wide variety of pantry products to season food. Although some of these ingredients, such as soy sauce, sugar, and sesame oil, can be easily found kosher-certified, most cannot. One example is oyster sauce (shellfish).

Moreover, there is a grey area of ingredients that are theoretically kosher, but kosher-certified versions are difficult to find. These kosher-ish foods include Shaoxing wine, hoisin sauce, and vegetarian oyster sauce (AKA mushroom sauce). Although they will likely become more accessible in the future, until then they shall be avoided.

Localisation

Since China is such a large country with so many provinces and local cuisines, there isn’t such thing as a typical chicken stir fry. However, common seasonings for chicken may include oyster sauce for a meatier flavour, Shaoxing wine for a salty-sour-sweet complexity, and sesame oil for richness and fragrance.

In our case, the unavailability of key ingredients is not reason enough to avoid a cuisine. The best option is to use what we do have access to as a foundation and build off that. For this reason, I have chosen to add lemon and tahini paste. Lemon is added for freshness, acidity, and because it pairs well with ginger. Tahini paste is added because it provides a similar flavour to sesame oil and its viscosity adds substance to the chicken. Honey is also substituted for sugar to assist in fusing these two flavour profiles together. Finally, black pepper is substituted for white pepper only because it is more accessible.

Juicy Chicken Breast? Preparation is Key

When making stir fry, you will spend more time preparing your food than actually cooking it. In this recipe, I aim to show how careful preparation results in juicy and succulent chicken breast,

All the steps outlined below are optional. However, if you do choose not to partake, please at least add some salt. Never, ever, cook meat without salting it beforehand.

Part 1: Spa Treatment

Wash the chicken in a bowl of cold or room temperature water, gently pressing into it with your fingers as you do so. Continue until the breast meat feels looser in your hands. This results in the chicken having a softer texture once its cooked.

Third and final step, velvet. Velveting is the process of marinating meat in egg white and corn starch. Together they act as a protective wall, meaning that the chicken loses less moisture as it cooks.

Part 2: knifework

Place the chicken on a cutting board and lightly tap it all over with the dull end of your knife. This creates small divots throughout the meat that the marinade will then seep into.

Next, how you slice your meat matters.

Make thin slices against the grain of the chicken’s muscle fibres. In other words, inspect the meat closely. See all those little lines running in a single direction? The skinny white ones. Take your knife and thinly slice the chicken at an angle perpendicular to those lines.

You should be left with sheets of chicken breast. Stack these sheets on top of each other and slice into slivers.

Part 3: Velvet

Velveting is the process of marinating meat in egg white and corn starch. Together they act as a protective wall, meaning that the chicken loses less moisture as it cooks.

Then you will add the rest of your marinade. The oil has two primary contributions. Firstly, it limits the chicken pieces from sticking to each other during cooking. Secondly, it promotes a uniform distribution of flavour across the meat. The oil must be added last, else it would block the chicken from absorbing the other ingredients. This is because water and oil do not mix.

When the chicken is added to the wok, it will be shallow fried in large batch of oil to further prevent sticking.

Substitutions

At the end of the day, this recipe is more of a template than a set of required ingredients. Substitute ginger for garlic, spring onion for shallots, bell pepper for mushrooms, chicken breast for lean beef, tahini for red wine, and honey for regular sugar and you will be left an entirely different but equally delicious meal.

Furthermore, instead of egg white, feel free to use the liquid from a can of chickpeas in equal proportion to the egg white. Alternatively, you could use an 1/8 of a teaspoon baking soda, meat tenderising powder or any fruit with papain (e.g., papaya, pineapple).

Sources

Chef Wang. (2022, April 28). Chef Wang teaches you: “Stir-fried chicken breast with scallion”, how to make chicken breast tender [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ir9Ik14pHo

Chinese Cooking Demystified. (2019, March 14). Stir frying 101, Chinese stir fry techniques using pork and chili [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WujehK7kYLM&t

Shao, Z. (2023, January 18). Easy stir-fried chicken with ginger and scallions recipe. Serious Eats. https://www.seriouseats.com/easy-stir-fried-chicken-ginger-scallions-recipe