Chinese Lemon Chicken - Marion's Kitchen

Okay guys, here we go. This is my ultimate Chinese lemon chicken. It's fresher, it's lighter. We're going to make it all happen without that stodgy Chinese take-out batter. But first, let's marinate the chicken. I've got some chicken breast here. I'm going to add some light soy sauce. And just the egg white. Using that egg white instead of the whole egg is going to keep everything lighter, which is what we're going for. Then I want a little splash of Chinese Shaoxing wine. This is a really fragrant Chinese cooking wine. If you can't find it, just use dry sherry. But a lot of major supermarkets have this in the Asian section now, or just head to your Asian grocer. You just want to mix that through. Give that a fairly robust mixing. You do want to break up that egg white. You can see that this mixture is really quite wet. That's going to be really important a little bit later when we're making the crispy coating for the outside of our chicken. We just let that chicken luxuriate for a little while, about 20 minutes. Now for the lemon sauce itself. I'm going to keep the lemon part and the rest of the sauce separate. We're going to add the lemon a little bit later. I'm going to start off with some chicken stock. I'm going to want some soy sauce and sugar. Mix that through a little. Now for the lemon. I'm going to use the lemon zest as well. That's going to give us a really lovely tangy hit for our sauce. Now the juice. Just scoop out some of those little stray seeds. Now for the technique that's really special here. We're going to make our crispy coating with zero batter. I'm going to pour all of the chicken and all of that liquid into the flour. That extra liquid, that's what's going to make all these little craggly little bits all around our chicken and make that really crispy. You'll see what I mean when I mix that through. Just smoosh and massage all of that sauce and the flour together. Just pick up these individual pieces. Give them a bit of a squeeze. Make sure we've got lots of little craggly bits sticking to each piece. Now just gently shake off any excess flour from that chicken. Put those into some hot oil. There's something so deliciously satisfying about frying chicken. Don't overcrowd your pan. Just add in enough so that every little piece has their own little bit of personal space. These will take about 3 minutes until they're lovely and golden. Look at that. Look at those crispy little crunchy bits that we've got on the outside of our chicken. So good. Now for the final part. Get your wok nice and hot. Add in some oil, some garlic. Finely grated ginger. Just give that a bit of a mix. Then we add in the sauce. Stir that through. Just make sure all of that sugar's dissolved. We're just going to simmer this for a few minutes. Let it bubble away and just thicken up a little bit and develop some flavours. Now for lemon juice. We've saved that till last because that's going to keep it really nice and fresh and tangy. If we added it in at the beginning, it would lose all of that beautiful flavour. Straight away, we want to add in our mixture of cornstarch and water. Look at that. Just like magic, we have a beautiful, thick, glossy lemon sauce. Now for the chicken. Stir all of that through. Look at how amazing, glossy and beautiful that looks. Just divine. To finish off, we want a few little decorative lemon slices. Some spring onion. A final sprinkling of sesame seeds.