The other half and I love Chinese food and a big part of my home cooking journey is trying to cook dishes that can replace the dreaded take away. This recipe is one I adapted from a sticky pork recipe I saw on YouTube.
Sticky Soy chicken
Feeds 5
1kg boneless chicken thighs
Light soy sauce
Dark soy sauce
Brown sugar
Salt
Pepper
Red chilli
5 cloves of garlic
About an inch of ginger root
1 red onion
1 green pepper
1 red pepper
1 bunch of spring onions
Lime juice
Noodles
Prep time 20 mins
Optional marinating time 3 hours.
Cooking time 20 mins
Prep:
De-skin and finely chop the garlic. Peel the ginger and finely chop. Dice up the chilli pepper – with or without the seeds, it depends on how spicy you like it! Put the chilli, garlic and ginger into a large bowl.
Pour a good “glug” of the dark soy and light soy into the bowl as well along with a decent pinch of salt and pepper. Give everything a mix and set aside.
Cut the chicken thighs into evenly sized cubes and add to the bowl. Give everything a good mix – I tend to use my hands to mix it all together but feel free to use a spoon – just make sure that all the chicken is nicely coated with the mixture. Cover the bowl and pop it into your fridge to marinate for a few hours – you could use it straight away but leaving it will give you a better result.
3 hours later…..
Chop up the peppers into chunks.
Peel the onion and cut into strips. Set these aside, we’ll use them later. Also chop up the spring onions but keep them separate as they will go in at the as minute.
Cook the noodles.I use the dried ones from lidl and they only take 4 minutes to cook. I put the noodle “bricks” into a large bowl, boil a kettle and cover the noodles with the boiling water. I give them a bit of a poke with a wooden spoon to break them up a bit and just leave them to soften. Four minutes later, the noodles are cooked and I pour them into a sieve and run under the cold tap to stop them cooking further. Leave them to drain.
Whle the noodles are cooking, lets make the sauce. In a small bowl put in a good sized glug of dark soy, light soy, lime juice (I use the bottled stuff because it keeps longer), pinch of salt and pepper and also about 3 tablespoons of the brown sugar. The sugar is what will help give the chicken the lovely sticky, glistening finish.
Get your chicken out of the fridge then put a large wok on a high heat and get it smoking hot. A large frying pan with high sides would work as well. When the wok is smoking hot, add a little vegetable oil and add the chicken to the wok. It’s best to do this in batches so as not to overload the pan. Keep the pan moving, the cooking should be fast and frenetic! Stir or toss the pan to keep things moving.
The problem with doing it all at once is that the chicken starts to boil rather than fry.
When each batch is cooked remove from the wok and put in a bowl(test by taking the biggest chunk out and cutting it in half. If it’s pink or red, it’s not cooked yet). Do this until all the chicken is cooked.
Your wok should still be really hot but there will probably be some bits and pieces stuck to it, maybe a little bit burnt. With the pan still on the heat, pour in a little vinegar (I used malt because that’s what I had in the cupboard) and swirl it around the wok. This is called De-glazing and it will clean up the wok and also bring to life all the flavours there!
Now it’s time to add in the onions and peppers to the wok. Try and keep them moving either by stirring or tossing the pan.
After a couple of minutes when the peppers and onions have softened, put all off the chicken back in the wok. Keep it moving! Get everything nicely mixed together and pour over the sauce we made earlier. Let the sauce reduce down a little and add our spring onions.
When everything is nicely hot and glistening pour it all out into a bowl.
Get the cooked noodles and put them in the wok. Move them around until they’ve re-heated and have picked up some of the sauce from the chicken.
All that’s left now to do is plate up! I’m not very fancy when it comes to plating so all I did was to put five bowls out and put five lots of the noodles in each bowl. Then simply put the chicken on top!
This one worked really nicely and is one I’ll definitely be cooking again!
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