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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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Add to bowl and submerge in cold water
Gently massage the chicken until the meat fibres loosen up (about 1 minute)
Remove excess water by lightly shaking and squeezing the chicken
Then, place on a cutting board
Repeatedly tap the back end of your knife against the whole surface of the breast meat until shallow indents form
Thinly slice the chicken against the grain into sheets
Stack the sheets on top of each other and slice into slivers
Add these slivers to a bowl, along with salt, soy sauce and water
Mix
Add egg white
Mix
Add corn starch
Mix
Add oil
Mix
Peel
Thinly slice into sheets
Wash clean and dry
Slice off root end
Separate the delicate and leafy ends from the harder, white ends
Take the sturdier white ends and slice into finger-length portions, then julienne
Slice the greener ends into finger-wide rings
Remove from pan and reserve, along with the oil it was cooked in
Juice over a fine mesh strainer
Add the tahini, soy sauce, lemon juice, honey, and black pepper to a bowl and mix thoroughly
Turn heat to high
Heat a dry wok until it is ripping hot (about 1-2 minutes)
Add oil around the sides of the wok and then swirl it to ensure the entire surface area has been coated
Add ginger and spring onion
Stir fry until there is a fragrant aroma (about 30 seconds)
Remove from pan and reserve
Add peppers and stir fry until nearly cooked (about 1 minute)
Remove from pan and reserve
Add the chicken frying oil and wait until it gets ripping hot
Add the chicken and let it sear until it is lightly browned on one side (about 1 minute)
Stir to separate the chicken pieces
Stir fry until entire outside has changed colour (about 30 seconds)
Drain the oil
Pour the sauce around the side of the wok
Stir fry until liquid is no longer visible and the sound of steaming turns to sizzling
Add reserved ingredients to pan
Turn off heat
Mix in spring onion greens
Serve with white rice