How to Make THE BEST Chicken Manchurian | From Everyday Ingredients | Indian-Chinese Cooking

Now if you like Chinese food but you haven't heard of this dish before then I'm guessing you're not from India because this is absolutely one of the most famous, probably the most famous, Indian Chinese dish that there is. Of course I'm talking about Chicken Manchurian. I would say Chinese food is the most well-travelled and most adaptable cuisine that there is. Whatever country Chinese people go to they seem to create their own cuisine made up from the techniques of Chinese cooking but using ingredients that are locally available. Chicken Manchurian is one of those dishes. It is so popular because it uses ingredients that are found within Indian groceries but it also has that Chinese technique that is so distinctive. Chicken Manchurian is kind of sweet and soury, a bit like lemon chicken that you might find in the US or in Australia or orange chicken or any of those kind of adapted Chinese dishes. Chicken Manchurian's secret to its success is that it can be used with just about anything. Chicken Manchurian of course uses chicken but you can also have Gobi Manchurian using cauliflower, paneer, soy protein, whatever you like but I'm going to stick with the Chicken Manchurian because that's my favourite. It's sort of split into two halves. There's battered chicken covered in a kind of sweet, sour, slightly spicy and savoury sauce. We'll get to the chicken in a minute but here are our sauce ingredients. I've got some sugar, vinegar, soy sauce, some ketchup, some chilli sauce, ginger, garlic, some stock here as well and then a little bit of cornflour to thicken it all up. I've got some red pepper and green pepper, some spring onions too. I might start by chopping a few of my vegetable ingredients because the colour of these is so important for Chinese cooking. I just want to cut these into kind of random shapes, nothing too uniform or ordinary but about the same size so they cook at the same rate. Move those to one side. Now for the spring onions. Finely chop those and separate out the white parts and the green parts. I'll use the white parts in the sauce and the green parts as a garnish at the end. Now for the sauce it's really just a matter of mixing these ingredients together. I've got my sugar, vinegar, soy sauce, tomato ketchup. You might think this is a weird thing to put in Chinese cooking but you'd be surprised how often it's used. It's got a lovely balance of sweetness, sourness and savouriness which is perfect for this dish. Some chilli sauce as well and of course you can balance the amount of chilli sauce and ketchup for how you like it but the important part is that balance of taste. Sweet, sour and savoury. Some stock as well. I won't put all of it in because I want to keep some of it for later so I can adjust the consistency of my sauce. The garlic and ginger, I won't mix in there either because I want to fry those to release some of their flavour. Now to cut the chicken. Now if I wasn't coating this in batter I'd cut it a bit bigger but because the batter is going to protect the chicken I can leave it quite small. Now for the batter I can mix that straight in here. I don't have to do it separately because I can give it a good mix and it'll all come together in the end anyway. An egg first, some plain flour and also some corn flour and a pinch of salt too. I see some batters that have a lot of flavour in them. Some chilli powder, some soy sauce, garam masala even I've seen in chicken Manchurian recipes and you can do that. There's nothing wrong with that but this sauce is so flavourful I don't think you need to overcomplicate it. Just keep the batter simple and let the sauce do its work. That looks fantastic. Not too thick in the coating so you can still see the chicken through it but as we fry it it'll have a lovely crispy coating. Just wash my hands, get over to the wok. Okay so let's talk about wok cooking. This is kind of a three-stage process. We're going to fry the chicken and the other ingredients first, then we're going to make the sauce and then the third step is we're going to mix everything together. Look at my setup here, I've got my wok, I've got another pot of oil here that I'm going to fry with. In a Chinese restaurant the wok is the only thing that goes on the heat so oil goes into the wok, oil comes out of the wok, that's how you do your frying. At home you've kind of got two choices because it can be a bit ungainly to be pouring boiling oil in and out of woks. You can use an extra pot for deep frying and then mix everything together in the wok which is completely fine or you can use the extra pot to transfer the oil in and out of your wok. You've got to do one or the other because otherwise you'll be carrying boiling oil all around your kitchen which you don't want to do. Let's start by heating up the oil first. Now I just fry the chicken in batches until it's cooked through and it's nice and golden brown. The other thing I want to do that's very common in Chinese cooking but I don't see often in recipes for chicken manchurian is oil blanch the vegetables. If you're just going to put the capsicum, the peppers into the sauce it's not going to cook through fully and it's not going to bring out as much flavour in the peppers as you want. So actually cooking the peppers in the oil as well as the chicken is going to add a huge amount of flavour to your dish. Now to get rid of the oil, pull it back into the pot, through the strainer, get rid of the batter. I just want a touch of oil left back in the wok here and then in with my aromatics to fry the onion, the garlic and the ginger. One of the differences between desi Chinese cooking and Chinese Chinese cooking is that minced garlic and ginger are a lot more common in desi Chinese food and that means you've got to use this frying process really, really quickly. If the garlic gets too dark it'll be bitter and burnt and leave black flecks through what we're doing. So just a quick fry to make those fragrant and then in with our sauce. I'll bring that to a bubble, that's looking really lovely and then just thicken it a little bit with the cornflour. I want this to be quite thick so that it coats the outside of my chicken. So I'll throw the chicken and the peppers in there first, get all of that out onto a plate, sprinkle my spring onion greens over the top and that is a pretty great chicken manchurian.