Chicken Stir Fry
Twenty minutes in bicarbonate of soda is what makes takeaway chicken silky, and rinsing it off afterwards is what stops it tasting of soap.
- Prep
- 15 min
- Cook
- 10 min
- Resting
- 20 min
- Total
- 45 min
- Serves
- 4
- Revisions
- 1
Allergens
- Cereals containing gluten
- Molluscs
- Sesame
- Soya
Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.
Ingredients
Serves
Chicken
Sauce
Stir fry
Method
Chicken
Slice the chicken across the grain into 5mm strips. Cutting across the grain shortens the muscle fibres, and on breast that matters more than on any other cut of chicken.
Toss the strips with the bicarbonate of soda and 1 tablespoon of water and leave for 20 minutes. This is the tenderising that makes takeaway chicken silky rather than stringy: it raises the pH at the surface so the proteins hold on to water instead of squeezing it out in the pan.
Rinse the chicken thoroughly under cold running water and pat it dry. Do not skip the rinse. Bicarbonate left on the meat tastes soapy and faintly metallic, and that flavour does not cook off.
Toss the strips with the Shaoxing wine, the tablespoon of soy sauce and the tablespoon of cornflour, and leave them while you prepare everything else.
Sauce
Stir the 2 tablespoons of soy sauce, the oyster sauce, dark soy, sugar, the teaspoon of cornflour, rice vinegar, sesame oil and stock together in a small bowl.
Stir fry
Line the garlic, ginger, pepper, broccoli, spring onions and the bowl of sauce up beside the hob. Once the wok is hot there is no pause in this recipe long enough to go and prepare anything.
Heat the wok over the highest heat until it smokes, then add 2 tablespoons of the oil and swirl it round.
Add half the chicken in one layer, leave it for 45 seconds, then stir-fry for 90 seconds until it is just opaque, and tip it out.
Repeat with the second half. Two batches, always: all of it at once drops the wok's temperature and the chicken poaches in its own juice instead of searing.
Add the last tablespoon of oil, then the garlic and ginger, and stir-fry for 20 seconds until fragrant and barely coloured.
Add the pepper and broccoli and stir-fry for 2 minutes.
Add 2 tablespoons of water and cover the wok for 60 seconds, so the broccoli steams through while staying bright green.
Return the chicken and its juices, stir the sauce to lift the cornflour off the bottom of the bowl, and pour it in.
Toss for 45 to 60 seconds, until the sauce thickens and coats everything rather than pooling.
Check the chicken has reached 74C/165F and that the thickest slice is opaque right through with no glassiness at the centre.
Add the spring onions, toss twice, and serve immediately with rice.
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What to expect
- Taste
Savoury and salty first, from three separate soy-based ingredients doing different jobs — light soy for salt, dark soy for colour and a slight molasses depth, oyster sauce for a sweet marine savouriness that is the closest thing the dish has to a signature. A teaspoon of sugar rounds it and a teaspoon of vinegar keeps it from being flat. Garlic and ginger are fresh and sharp at the front because they were in the pan for twenty seconds rather than cooked down. The chicken itself is mild; what it contributes is texture. Sesame oil is the last thing and it is unmistakable.
- Aroma
Very hot oil and garlic, in that order, and it happens fast. The distinctive smell of a good stir fry is slightly scorched — the faint smokiness that comes off a wok running hot enough, which is difficult to get on a domestic hob and is worth chasing. Sesame oil at the end sits on top of everything.
- Texture
The tenderising is the whole reason to make this. Chicken breast treated this way is soft and slightly slippery, with a completely different mouthfeel to plain fried breast, and it is the texture people associate with restaurant food without being able to name why. Around it, everything should still have bite: broccoli squeaks against the teeth, pepper snaps, spring onions are raw at the centre.
- Sound
The loudest dish in this collection. The chicken hitting the wok should crack rather than hiss, and if it does not the wok was not hot enough. The sound drops as the vegetables go in and picks up again as the sauce reduces. Sixty seconds under a lid is the only quiet moment in it.
- How the flavour moves
Salt and savoury immediately, then a sweet middle, then a sharp lift from the vinegar and the raw spring onion, then a sesame finish that lingers. Nothing builds and nothing accumulates, which is what makes it easy to eat a lot of. The one thing that does build is the ginger, which gets warmer across a bowl.
- Serve it
Extremely hot and served immediately. A stir fry standing in a bowl for five minutes goes limp as the residual heat carries on cooking the vegetables, and the sauce goes gluey as the cornflour cools.
- Goes with
Plain steamed rice, and nothing else. A stir fry is already a complete dish and adding a second one to the table means both are lukewarm.
Cook's notes
- Difficulty
Easy in execution, and it depends almost entirely on preparation.
- Cost
Cheap.
- Equipment
A wok or the widest heavy pan you own, and a probe thermometer.
- When to make it
Any weeknight where twenty minutes of the time can be spent doing something else.
- Best season
None. The vegetables can follow the season without changing the method.
- You know it is done when
The sauce goes from cloudy and thin to glossy and clinging within about thirty seconds of thickening, and that is the moment to stop. The broccoli should be a stronger green than it was raw.
- And it feels like
Chicken should be silky and yielding rather than stringy. Vegetables should still snap.
- Food safety
74C/165F, and the thickest slice should be opaque right through with no glassy centre.
- Where it goes wrong
- Skipping the rinse after the bicarbonate, which leaves a soapy taste.
- Using more bicarbonate than a quarter teaspoon, which makes the meat slimy.
- Cooking all the chicken at once, which drops the pan temperature and poaches it.
- Starting to cook before everything is cut and beside the hob.
- Slicing the breast along the grain rather than across it.
- Adding too much sauce, which turns the pan into a braise.
- Forgetting to re-stir the sauce before pouring, so the cornflour stays in the bottom of the bowl.
- If it does go wrong
Chicken tough and stringy: it was not tenderised, or it was cooked in one batch. Soapy taste: the rinse was skipped. Watery sauce: the cornflour settled in the bowl and never went into the pan, or it was not brought to a proper bubble. Grey chicken: the wok was not hot enough. Limp broccoli: it was in for too long, or the lid stayed on past a minute.
- Making it ahead
Everything can be prepared several hours ahead and kept in the fridge, which is the right way to cook this on a weeknight. The cooking itself cannot be done ahead at all.
- Keeping it
Two days in the fridge, though the vegetables soften.
- Reheating
Very hot and very briefly in a pan. Microwaving makes the vegetables limp.
- Freezing
Not recommended.
- Leftovers
Cold in a noodle salad, or folded into fried rice.
- Scaling it
Do not double in one pan. Two batches becomes four, and it is genuinely better to cook two separate stir fries.
- Substitutions
Dry sherry for Shaoxing wine is the standard substitute. Oyster sauce can be replaced with a mushroom-based vegetarian version, which is close. Thigh instead of breast is more forgiving and does not need the bicarbonate treatment as much, since it has enough fat to survive the heat.
- Dietary swaps
Contains cereals containing gluten, soya, molluscs and sesame. Tamari and a gluten-free oyster sauce make it gluten free.
- Shopping for it
Shaoxing wine and oyster sauce from a Chinese grocer, where both are a fraction of the supermarket price.
- Keeping the cost down
Whatever vegetables need using. The method does not care.
- Nutrition
Lean, and lighter than most of the chicken dishes here. Most of the salt is in the sauce.
- Worth it?
Twenty minutes in bicarbonate and a rinse is the whole secret, and everything else is heat management.
Where it comes from
- Origin
The technique is Chinese and Cantonese in this form. The dish as written is a Western weeknight adaptation.
- Also called
Chao, the Chinese verb for stir-frying, names the method rather than any dish.
- What the name means
Descriptive.
- History
Stir-frying developed around a specific set of tools and constraints: a thin carbon steel wok, a very high and very concentrated flame, food cut small enough to cook in seconds, and a fuel economy that rewards speed. Restaurant kitchens tenderise meat before it goes into the wok, using starch and egg white coatings and alkaline treatments, because the technique is brutal and lean meat has no defence against it. That preparation is the invisible half of every stir fry anybody has eaten in a restaurant.
- Why it matters
Stir-frying is one of the most widely practised cooking techniques in the world. A generic chicken stir fry, though, is a Western category rather than a Chinese dish, and it would be misleading to attach cultural significance to it that belongs to the method.
- When it is eaten
Any weeknight.
- The traditional way
High heat, constant motion, everything prepared before the pan is lit, and cooking in batches so the pan never loses its heat. Wok hei, the faintly smoky character a properly hot wok imparts, is the thing a domestic hob cannot fully reproduce, and knowing that is more useful than pretending otherwise.
- How it changed
The Western version tends to add more vegetables, more sauce and more liquid, all of which lower the pan temperature and turn a stir fry into a braise. The recipe is written against that: two batches, a small quantity of sauce, and a minute under a lid as the only wet step.
- Regional variations
Every Chinese regional cuisine stir-fries, and the seasonings differ completely between them. This one is broadly Cantonese in seasoning.
- How this version differs
It uses the bicarbonate of soda tenderising rather than an egg white velveting, because it is faster, needs no oil blanching, and works better on a domestic hob.
- Sources and credit
None.
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