How to Make Gong Bao Ji Ding | The Original Kung Pao Chicken | 宫保鸡丁

So Kung Pao chicken and chicken with cashew nuts are two of the absolutely most popular dishes in American and Australian Chinese cooking but they both derive from a classic Sichuanese dish known as Gong Bao Ji Ding and it means literally the palace guardian's diced chicken. So the original name Gong Bao Ji Ding comes from the name of an ex-governor of Sichuan province. Sichuan province in Chinese cuisine is known for its very spicy and numbing cuisine and you can see how this dish kind of translates into American and Australian Chinese cooking with the Kung Pao chicken and the chicken with cashew nuts and if you haven't seen the recipe from last week that we have for the chicken and cashew nuts, head over here for a little bit and check that out first because a lot of the things I'm going to talk about here actually relate to how it was translated back into westernized Chinese cooking. First I'll talk through some of the ingredients that were translated from the Sichuanese dish over to the westernized dish. Instead of capsicum, we use dried chilies. Instead of cashew nuts, we use peanuts. The chicken remains the same but it all becomes slightly different in the way it's cut because the biggest difference between say cashew nut chicken and the classic Sichuanese Gong Bao Ji Ding is that it's using a completely different technique. Both take place in a wok but in a wok you do two types of frying generally, the two main ones. There are many more you can do of course but there's chow which is the classic kind of stir-fry technique much like the cashew nut chicken but there's also a lesser known technique called bao and bao means like explosion or flash frying and that's how you make a real Gong Bao Ji Ding. Let me walk you through the whole process. So it's pretty similar to the cashew nut chicken in terms of the ingredients. We have a sauce that we have made, we have some chicken that gets slightly marinated, we have instead of obviously the capsicum, we have the chili and instead of the cashews, we have peanuts but the rest of the aromatics and things are fairly similar. There's some onion, garlic and ginger which I'll just cut up now. Now I need to explain the bao technique a little bit first of all because rather than a stir-fry where you might want to flavour the ingredients by stirring it all together I guess in that chow kind of technique, a bao is a flash fry, a really explosive burst of heat. The wok's heated up very hot, oil and then all the ingredients are sort of thrown in in succession while everything's being tossed together. It's a quite a different process from traditional stir-frying but that means there's a difference in how we cut our ingredients. Everything has to be a lot smaller because it cooks a lot faster. So my garlic for example is cut a lot more finely than I would for a traditional stir-fry technique. About two teaspoons of chopped garlic there and then the same amount of grated ginger. I've chosen fairly thick spring onions because you want these to be about you know a centimetre thick so they can be roughly the same size as the chicken when we cut it up. Around the same thickness as they are wide so about a centimetre for just the white and the light green parts of the spring onion. So that's kind of the wet aromatics now for the dry aromatics. I've got some dried chilli here and in Sichuan a very specific type of dried chilli is used but obviously outside of China you can use just about whatever you like. I just want to snip that into about one, one and a half centimetre length just the same as we had for the spring onion and the chicken when I get to that part as well. Shake the seeds out too because you don't need the seeds in the dish, they'll just create an unpleasant texture and you want quite a lot of this dried chilli. Lovely vibrant red that's going to give a great spiciness to the final dish and the chilli goes together with these Sichuan peppercorns. They're not actually a true peppercorn, it's the husk of a seed that's part of the citrus family but it has the most wonderful fragrance and the effect that it really is known for in Sichuanese cooking is its ma, like the numbing taste that it has in your tongue. So the chilli provides heat and then the numbing Sichuan peppercorn kind of knocks it back a little bit. It's really quite amazing and it's worthwhile trying to get to an Asian grocer's to find these because you cannot make this dish without it. The lack of Sichuan peppercorn is really why a dish like Gong Bao Ji Ding became Kung Pao Chicken or became chicken and cashew nuts when it got westernised because of certain ingredients that you couldn't get in Australia or in the US. And then our chicken. I've got a large chicken breast here. This is a really great dish to make with chicken breast because the bao technique will keep the chicken breast really really tender by not releasing its juices, cooking it very very quickly so that it stays juicy. I want to cut the chicken into about a one and a half centimetre so a little bit larger than the spring onions because it will shrink slightly but even that is much much smaller than I would for a traditional chow technique stir fry. The fast frying means I have to cut everything quite a bit smaller so it cooks very very quickly. Now a very quick coating for the chicken, just some corn flour, a touch of Shaoxing wine and a bit of soy sauce too. The corn flour is the important part here because in that flash fry it'll form a bit of a coating on the outside of the chicken. Peanuts here too and I should say don't worry about the amount of chilli that's going into this. You're not supposed to eat every single piece of chilli. You can if you want to but the chilli is really there to flavour the oil in the frying so that then it goes onto the chicken. You don't have to bite through all of these bits of dried chilli. Now for the sauce. The seasonings are quite similar to the cashew chicken that we made last week. Again if you haven't seen that go check out the recipe but it's sort of sweet and sour so I've got some sugar, black vinegar instead of ordinary white vinegar. Again one of those substitutes that might have taken place because you couldn't in the past get black vinegar in the west. Some dark soy sauce, some light soy sauce, some sesame oil and one thing I'm not adding here because of the different technique is any chicken stock or water. I want this sauce to be very very concentrated so that in the flash fry it's just going to thicken very very quickly you know rather than having to reduce and simmer and that kind of thing. The difference between that stir fry and bao technique is you need a lot less liquid to actually do the flash frying. So give that a stir and over to the wok. So this is probably where you can see the biggest difference between the two stir frying techniques. For a regular stir fry I'd add the oil first and the aromatics and then the meat and cook that all together just like we did for the cashew chicken last week but for bao you get the wok really really hot. Traditionally it should be red hot then the oil goes in and the ingredients are added in fast succession constantly while the wok's being tossed. Now for a domestic stove you can't actually keep the wok in constant motion because you do need to stop for a little bit just because the heat's not quite as big as it would be on a commercial stove but it's still the same. I'm going to start with the chilli and the citron pepper which is kind of an odd thing for a regular stir fry because they burn quite quickly but for a bao stir fry it's actually totally fine. Then the chicken then the rest of the aromatics then bring it all together at the end with the sauce. Okay the wok's really hot. Oil in straight away you need a bit more oil than you would for an ordinary stir fry and the chilli and the citron pepper and keep it moving. Now for the chicken you can let it sit for just a little bit while the chicken goes in just to let the wok come back up to heat. Keep tossing keep that separating. Then the garlic and ginger and the spring onions. Lastly the sauce thickened with a bit of corn starch and the peanuts at the end. And that is the original Sichuan classic Gong Bao Ji Ding.