To China... and Beyond!

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On Monday, I wrote about a cooking class I took in Beijing last month. On Sunday night, I took a crack at preparing a couple of the dishes that we made in class. The main attraction was gongbao jiding, or “kung pao chicken.” (A bit of Googling suggests that the name means “Imperial Governor’s Diced Chicken.” For more on its history, NPR wrote about the dish last summer.) This spicy Sichuan stirfry is a spicy mix of chicken, dried chilies and peanuts. It’s popular among Western travelers to China in part because the bones and skin are removed before cooking — not true of most chicken dishes.

The mise-en-place for gongbao jiding.

The prep work for gongbao jiding is fairly straightforward, and I began cooking quite confident in my memory of Chun Yi’s teachings. For this dish, all of the ingredients are cut into small pieces of roughly the same size. You need to do all the chopping ahead of time — there’s no time to cut anything up once the cooking begins. You can see my “mise en place” at right. Once that was set up and the sauce was made, I rinsed out my mother’s old, long-disused wok and prepared to cook.

This is where my memory of cooking the dish in Beijing began to get fuzzy. We had each cooked the dish individually, but Chun Yi was never far from our shoulders, adjusting the heat and correcting our stir-frying technique. On my own, I failed to turn down the heat before adding the spices, and scorched them a bit. In the excitement of having finished the dish, I also forgot to add the peanuts that are a key component of the dish. Oops.

But despite my screw-ups, the chicken (along with my stir-fried broccolini and my dad’s Hunan smoked pork dish) got rave reviews from from the family. We ate the meal in good Chinese fashion, with plenty of rice and beer and absolutely no fortune cookies. Although I’ve got a ways to go before I can challenge a Chinese grandmother, it was liberating to realize that I won’t have to return to American “Chinese food” when I come back to the States for good.

"Homestyle" gongbao jiding.

Gongbao Jiding (宫保鸡丁)

Adapted from Chun Yi of Hutong Cuisine Cooking School

Ingredients:

• 2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into 1.5 cm cubes (approximately 1/2 pound)
• For the marinade: 2 teaspoons rice wine, 2 teaspoons soy sauce, 4 teaspoons cornstarch

• 2 cloves of garlic, sliced thin
• fresh ginger, same amount as garlic, cut into thumbnail-sized slices
• 2 spring onions, white part only, cut into 1.5 cm sections
• 4-10 dried chilies, cut into 1.5 cm sections (remove the seeds if you don’t like spicy food)
• 1 teaspoon Sichuan peppercorns

• 1/2 c deep-fried or oil-roasted peanuts
• Cooking oil (peanut oil, canola oil, or a mixture of the two)

For the sauce:

• 1/3 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons light soy sauce (We only had one type of soy sauce in the house, so I just used three teaspoons of that.)
• 1 teaspoon dark soy sauce
• 3 teaspoons sugar
• 1.5 teaspoons rice vinegar
• 2 teaspoons rice wine
• 1 teaspoon cornstarch
• 3 tablespoons water

1. Prepare the marinade by mixing the wine, soy sauce and corn starch in a bowl large enough to hold the chicken. Add the diced chicken and mix until all of pieces are coated with the marinade. Let sit for at least 15 minutes while you clean and chop the rest of the ingredients.
2. Cut up the seasoning ingredients (garlic, ginger, spring onion, chilies) as listed. Prepare the sauce in a separate bowl by mixing all of the ingredients until combined.
3. Heat wok over high heat until wok is hot. Add two tablespoons cooking oil and turn the heat down to low. Add the Sichuan pepper and dried chilies. Saute them until they turn brown and fragrant.
4. Increase the heat to medium-high and add the chicken to the wok. Let it sit for a couple of seconds before you begin stir-frying to let the marinade adhere to the chicken pieces.
5. When the chicken pieces begin to separate, add the ginger, garlic and white spring onion to the side of the chicken along with 1 teaspoon of oil. When the seasoning is fragrant (30 seconds), mix it with the chicken and cook them together until the chicken is thoroughly cooked, 1-2 minutes more.
6. Return the heat to low. Give the sauce a quick stir and pour it around the chicken. Mix the sauce with the food until it thickens. Turn off the heat.
7. Add the peanuts and mix. Serve.

Stirfried broccolini

Hunan-style smoked ham