How to cook Crystal Chicken (poached chicken with sauce) 〜水晶鶏〜 | easy Japanese home cooking recipe

Welcome to Taiji's Kitchen. Today, I'm going to show you how to make crystal chicken. So this is another Chinese dish, and you might be wondering why I'm making so many Chinese dishes even though this is a Japanese cooking channel. That is because we make a lot of Chinese food or Chinese-influenced food in Japanese homes. Especially for our family, my mother quite often made some Chinese dishes, primarily because her father was working in China for a certain amount of time. Probably a lot of people don't know this, but between World War I and World War II, a large part of China and also Korea and South Asia belonged to Japan at that time. And after the war, the people who were there came back to Japan and brought those dishes to Japan. And that's why, even though this is a Japanese food channel, I'm showing Chinese dishes. And this dish, crystal chicken, is very easy, very healthy, and it requires no special ingredients. So I hope you give this a try. Then, let's get started. Here are the ingredients for crystal chicken. For this recipe, it's quite common to use chicken breast, but you can use, of course, other parts of chicken, or you can make this with other meat, like pork or beef. And for the seasoning, I have salt and pepper, and then starch to coat the chicken meat. And then for the sauce, I have scallion, ginger, garlic, sugar, soy sauce, chili. Here I have rice wine vinegar, but you can use any other kind of vinegar, such as white wine vinegar or apple vinegar. And then, sesame oil. Then let's make the sauce first. So this is pretty much the same as the sauce from Yurinchi, but for this, you don't need chili bean sauce. So this should be much easier to make. Then I'm going to cut the bottom off, and then make slits here, like this. And then cut the scallion in small pieces. Now let's prepare the garlic and ginger. And I'm going to smash the garlic in a garlic smasher. You can put this garlic with the skin on, and smash it as it is, like this. And then the skin will stay inside, so it's kind of like a cooking hack. And then for the ginger, I'm just going to cut the kind of dry part off. And then this is not going to fit, so I'm going to just cut it into half. So for the ginger, you can use the garlic smasher with the skin on, and the skin will also stay inside. It's also another cooking hack. Like this. And then to make the sauce, I'm going to put in here two tablespoons of soy sauce, one tablespoon of vinegar, one teaspoon of sugar. If you like it sweeter, you can also use two teaspoons. Then I'm just going to grate in a little chili pepper. If you don't like it spicy, then you don't have to put in chili. And then here, one tablespoon of sesame oil. Then this is finished for the sauce. I'm going to let this sit for about 10 to 15 minutes while we cook the chicken, and let the soy sauce soak in in the scallion. Then let's cut up the chicken. So whenever you're cutting meat or fish on a wooden or bamboo cutting board, then make sure you always wet the cutting board. Otherwise, the flavor of the meat or the fish will soak in on the cutting board, so make sure that you wet it first. And then when you're using thigh meat, you want to make sure you cut off the tendon or the membrane. Some butchers don't take away this tendon, so that's a tendon, so you want to take that off. Otherwise, this tendon will stay in the mouth, and not very pleasant. And then when you're using a thigh meat, you have a flap inside, so you want to take that off. And then you have two pieces, and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut these in thin strips, kind of like sashimi. And then this also, kind of like a thin strip. Just like this. So I'm going to season this very lightly with salt and pepper. A little bit of salt, and also a little bit of pepper, and flip the other side. We're going to coat this meat with starch. So here I'm going to put in about two to three tablespoons of starch, and then just coat with starch. So all the chicken meat is coated up with starch. Let's cook the chicken meat in boiling water. So we're going to put this in the boiling water like this. You don't want to put too much in, just like five or six pieces inside. We're going to let it boil like this until the meat pieces come to the surface. And then when it comes to the surface, then it's a sign that it's cooked through. And make sure you have on the side icy cold water, because if you don't cool the meat off, the meat gets cooked too much with its own heat. So you want to let it cool with the cold water so the cooking process stops. So as you can see, the meat pieces are floating on the surface, so we're going to take it off and put it in the cold water. Put it on. So here you can see that the surface is coated with the starch, and when it gets cooked, it gets see-through and it kind of looks a little bit like a crystal. And that's where the name of the crystal chicken comes from. And then we're going to put in the second batch. And once it's been cooled off, I'm going to put it on a colander and drain the excess water. As we're doing that, the second batch is also floating on the surface, so I'm going to put it in the cold water. And I'm going to put in the last batch. So the last batch is floating also on the surface, I'm going to take it away, turn the heat off. So you want to make sure that you drain all the water off. Now let's put this on a plate. I like putting this over lettuce or some kind of leafy vegetable. I'm just going to try to make a neat form. Then we're going to put in here the sauce. Put a little lemon on the side. And it's finished, let's eat. Oh, this looks so delicious, let's eat. Itadakimasu! Oh, this looks totally delicious. Itadakimasu! Oh, this is so perfect. Oh, this is so delicious. The sauce matches the chicken so well. Oh, this is so delicious. So the breast meat becomes quite dry when it gets cooked, but because this is coated with a starch and then cooked, all the juice stays inside the meat. So this is actually very quite juicy, even though it's a breast meat. And this sauce is just so amazing. This is also perfect to go with rice. So I'm going to have it with lettuce, and you can kind of wrap it up with the lettuce like this. Itadakimasu! So lettuce has this bitterness to it, and it just gives another layer to the flavor. This is such a perfect dish for the hot summer, because even though it's cooked, this is a cold dish. It doesn't make you so hot, so this is really perfect for the summer. Then I'm also going to squeeze in a little bit of lemon. It's kind of changing up the game. Oh, the lemon gives this kind of freshness to it. It makes it more perfect for the summer. Oh, that was so delicious. So savory. Oh, that was really, really delicious. This is some dish that doesn't require any special ingredients at all. So I hope you give this a try. I hope you enjoyed the video. If you like what you saw, please hit that like button for me, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video. Bye!