Gong bao chicken

Ingredients

• Chicken breast — in 2 cm dice500 g
• Egg white1
• Cornflour2 tbsp
• Roasted peanuts80 g
• Whole dried chillies8
• Sichuan peppercorns1 tsp
• Chinkiang black vinegar3 tbsp
• Soy sauce2 tbsp
• Sugar2 tsp
• Garlic3 clove
• Ginger15 g
• Spring onion4
• Neutral oil3 tbsp

Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.

Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.

Method

1. 1

   Mix the chicken with the egg white, a spoon of cornflour, a spoon of soy and a pinch of salt, and leave it twenty minutes.

   20 min

2. 2

   Mix the sauce in advance: vinegar, the rest of the soy, the sugar and the rest of the cornflour with two spoons of water. Keep it within reach — there is no time to mix it later.

   3 min

3. 3

   Heat the oil and fry the chillies with the Sichuan pepper for twenty seconds, until dark but not black. Burnt chilli turns bitter.

   1 min

4. 4

   Add the chicken and leave it alone for a minute, then toss and cook through — two minutes more.

   3 min

5. 5

   Throw in the garlic, ginger and the white of the spring onion, then after half a minute pour in the sauce. It thickens in seconds. Off the heat, add the peanuts and the green of the onion.

   2 min

About the dish

What is served under this name in the West is usually too sweet. In the Sichuanese original the vinegar leads and the sugar only balances it; the sauce is called fish-fragrant for that balance, not for any fish.

The dried chillies are fried whole and not eaten. Their job is to scent the oil; broken open, they make the dish inedible.

The chicken is marinated with cornflour and egg white, a technique called velveting. The starch forms a film and the meat stays juicy under a fierce flame.

Worth knowing

• — The peanuts go in at the very end. A minute in the sauce and they lose the crunch they were added for.
• — Chinkiang vinegar is not worth swapping for balsamic — that is sweeter and smells different. A black rice vinegar comes closest.
• — The cooking takes five minutes, so all the cutting and measuring happens before the heat goes on. That is a condition, not a tip.

Nutrition

Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.

Calories

470 kcal

Protein

38 g

Fat

24 g

Carbs

22 g

More from China

• Mapo tofu — Tofu in a hot doubanjiang sauce with Sichuan pepper, which numbs rather than burns.
• Jiaozi dumplings — Pork and cabbage dumplings, fried and then steamed in the same covered pan.
• Yangzhou fried rice — Rice with prawns, ham and egg, where every grain stays separate under a thin film of egg.