Last Thursday marked the beginning of the Lunar New Year. As celebrations around the world start winding down, I give you my first try at one of my favourite Cantonese-style dishes, Soy Sauce Chicken.
It's not fancy, or complicated. It's just great comfort food and one of my favourite things to eat.
Traditionally, a whole chicken is braised in soy sauce and spices. It sits sometimes for hours in this mixture, the soy sauce steeping into the meat. The skin glistens with sticky sweet soy sauce-y goodness and the meat becomes tender and flavourful. It's served with my hands-down favourite condiment, ginger and scallion sauce. The dish requires some work and some time, which I sorta found out too late, but is worth it. I believe I made one of the best soy sauce chickens I've ever had...
I was making this dish for two - Roland and myself. What I had was a five pound bird. A little large for two. So, untraditionally, I broke the chicken down, deciding to braise both breasts and one thigh and turning the rest of the carcass into stock. This actually contributed to a better overall product... I'll explain later.
First step is to create the braising liquid. Soy sauce, water, sugar, ginger, garlic, scallion, cinnamon stick, star anise, cooking wine, pepper. This boils and cooks before the chicken is added to the pot. This sauce smells divine. Lightly sweet, rich and aromatic - the cinnamon and star anise filled the kitchen with warm, spicy goodness.
The chicken cooks for about 40 minutes in the hot liquid and then sits, preferably for a few hours, in the braising sauce so it can penetrate deep into the meat...
The chicken is served sliced, with this great, zippy sauce of ginger and scallions. Minced ginger and scallions combine with salt, hot oil and a little chicken stock to create this addiction-forming sauce. It's sweet and tangy, salty, savoury, umami packed... it's a good thing.
If I had followed the recipe exactly, and let my chicken brew, we probably would have been eating dried out chunks of meat. I can see a whole chicken really benefiting from a long dip in the soy sauce, but nothing good was going to come of letting my smaller pieces of meat, off the bone, sit in this piping hot liquid for hours. Short on time, I sped through the last part of the recipe, removing the chicken pieces after about 20 minutes. The meat wasn't yet dried out, and had absorbed enough flavour. As an added bonus, it was bone and cartilage free. Traditionally the dish is served sliced with a heavy cleaver, each piece of meat sitting on its piece of jagged bone - one of my lesser favourite aspects of Soy Sauce Chicken. We enjoyed this dish with some ginger, garlic, chicken stock-steamed Chinese broccoli and rice. Happy New Year.
Bee Yin Low has a great recipe on Rasa Malaysia - an excellent source for Asian food recipes. I modified her recipe for our Soy Sauce Chicken dinner.
