After a hearty Thanksgiving, it’s time to cook Chinese again. I had meant to post this for months but am only getting to it now.
I wonder how many lunch orders Chinese restaurants in the U.S. get in a day for Chicken Broccoli. It’s so popular. It’s a great one-dish meal, easy to make and you can make dinner in less than 30 minutes. What can be more healthful than chicken breast and broccoli?
At home, we fry meat with vegetables all the time. Usually, its a combination of one kind of meat–chicken, beef, pork, fish or shrimp–with one kind of vegetable. If we want to serve other meats and more, different, vegetables, we prefer to make separate dishes, even if the second dish is just frying one type of vegetable with garlic or ginger, or both.
We do have dishes where there are a bunch of different ingredients, like a seafood noodle dish topped with a sauce comprising sliced fish, prawns, and squid with, say, baby corn, mushroom, or carrot. Or sliced pork, fried with squid, liver, black fungus, and gailan. Or winter melon soup featuring ingredients like scallops, shrimp, mushroom, bamboo and coconut blossoms.
Typically we don’t combine too many different ingredients in one dish. Rather than having one huge dish of assorted whatever featuring one flavor, we’d rather have smaller dishes with different flavors.
The sauce–bottled or from scratch?
Many franchised eateries and food court stalls in the U.S. seem to use pre-made, commercial, canned sauce. I bet they do because many of their dishes taste the same. When used in excess it becomes boring, gooey and yucky. It’s unfortunate Americans associate this with Chinese food. We don’t find this kind of cuisine even in small street stalls in Singapore, Hong Kong or Taiwan. In Asia, the sauce of each dish is made individually. My friends who own mom-and-pop Chinese restaurants here tell me they make their own blend of sauce in bulk, adding it to the stir fry. Alas, these are heavily influenced by local taste and demand.
If you like that standard sauce, supermarkets nowadays sell a plethora of bottled sauces to make stir frying easier. I have been fooled by their branding, ending up with so many different bottles of just so-so sauces that I now resist the temptation to get these.
Try the authentic, old fashion way of blending your own sauce from scratch. That’s what I learned decades ago from Fu Pei Mei, cooking teacher extraordinaire from Taipei. Granted in those days, such bottled sauces didn’t exist.
It’s economical and not difficult to blend your own sauces. You can tweak it to your taste. All you need are a few basic Chinese condiments which you should stock in your pantry. These include soy sauce, aged soy sauce, oyster sauce, sesame oil, vinegar and rice wine. Or venture further with hoisin sauce, preserved black beans (not the sauce, use the beans instead), dried chili, and toban sauce.
A hint of sauce or swimming in sauce?
Decide how much sauce you want in your stir fry. For a blush of sauce, you can make do just using one or two tablespoons of oyster sauce or soy sauce and a splash of wine. We Chinese purists like this glaze of a sauce–it’s delicious especially when mixed with the juices from the cooked meat or chicken. Don’t expect to have enough au-jus to mix it into your rice.
If you want more sauce, you can add half a cup of liquid like water or stock to your seasoning soy sauce-based sauce. Thicken this with cornstarch to make a more robust, less watery, sauce. Typically we home cooks make this for children because they love sauce on their rice.
Try this. Instead of making the sauce like the standard brown-looking sauce, try making the sauce with just chicken stock, without the dark-colored condiments of soy sauce and oyster sauce. This dish–with the white chicken contrasted with bright green broccoli–is just beautiful. Variation is found at the bottom of recipe.
On how to thicken a sauce, check this post.
How to cook this dinner in less than 30 minutes
This is the most efficient way to make Stir Fried Chicken Broccoli quickly. Time yourself. You might make dinner faster than your delivery order will take to come to you.
Start by washing the rice and starting the cooking process either in a rice cooker or in a pot over stove top. For instructions on cooking rice, click here. Rice will take about 25 minutes to cook.
Once you’ve put the rice to cook, cut up the broccoli and garlic, and slice the chicken. (For less amount of cleaning, I like to cut my veggies before raw meat or chicken.)
Put water in a deep frying pan and bring to boil. While waiting, add marinade to chicken and mix well. Blanch broccoli, drain and set aside. No need to clean pan, you’ll use it for stir fry.
While letting the broccoli drain prepare seasoning ingredients and cornstarch thickener.
Gather all the other ingredients and get pan ready for stir fry.
Stir Fried Chicken Broccoli
Preparation: 10-15 minutes
Cooking time: 10 minutes
1 head broccoli, about 8 ounces, cut into florets
1 chicken breast, sliced into ¼-inch slices
3 tablespoons oil
1-2 cloves garlic, minced
Marinade
1 tablespoon soy sauce
½ teaspoon salt
Dash white pepper
½ teaspoon cornstarch
Flavoring sauce
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon oyster sauce
½ cup stock
Thickening sauce
1½ tablespoons cornstarch
1½ tablespoons water
Bring about 2 quarts of water to boil in a deep non-stick frying pan or wok. Blanch broccoli in boiling water for about 2-3 minutes. Drain and set broccoli and pan aside.
Meanwhile marinate chicken slices in soy sauce, salt, pepper and cornstarch and set aside for 10-15 minutes.
To make flavoring sauce blend soy sauce, oyster sauce and stock in a small bowl. In another bowl, blend cornstarch and water to make thickener. Set aside.
Heat pan, add half the oil and heat oil until it is shimmering. Add chicken and fry quickly until chicken turns white, about 1-2 minutes. Remove chicken to dish and set aside.
Return pan to heat, add rest of oil and heat oil. Add garlic and broccoli and fry quickly, about 30 seconds. (Broccoli is already semi-cooked and doesn’t need much more cooking. Frying it gives it that stir fried “wok” essence.)
Return chicken to pan, add flavoring sauce and bring it to a boil.
Stir cornstarch thickener to blend cornstarch settled at bottom of bowl.
Dribble thickener a little at a time to the pan, stirring the sauce until it thickens and bubbles. Mix sauce well with chicken. Immediately remove pan from heat. Transfer to serving dish. Serve with rice.
VARIATION
Make this dish with its purest color, replacing the dark sauce with one made with chicken stock. It’s beautiful to see a contrast of the green vegetable with white slices of chicken.
Instead of making a flavoring sauce with soy sauce and oyster sauce, replace it with:
½-¾ cup of chicken stock
1 teaspoon salt
You can marinate the chicken as suggested above, or replace soy sauce with ¾ teaspoon salt.
