How To Make Kung Pao Chicken With Steven Chu

No one eats the cookies. You will eat great Kung Pao chicken today. Oh, yeah. It's good fortune cookies. Hey, everybody. My name's Steve Chu, chef and co-owner of Ekiben in Baltimore. And today, we are going to be making, arguably, the most popular schezwan dish in America right now, which is Kung Pao chicken. It's had a history in America for hundreds of years, and it's woven itself into the fabric of American cuisine. So we have chicken thigh meat right here. Boneless, skinless. You can either trim the fat off or keep it on. It's totally up to you. It depends on your clientele. It depends on who you're serving. I'm going to keep it on because fat is flavor. We're going to cut this chicken in about, like, half... Yeah, like, half-inch cubes. With a lot of, like, Chinese knife cuts, what you want is something that's easily picked up with chopsticks. So Kung Pao chicken originated in the schezwan province. The literal translation is palace guardian chicken pieces. Kung Pao chicken. Traditionally, this dish is made with chilies, peanuts, soy sauce. Sometimes there are veggies. Sometimes there are no veggies. This particular recipe is actually the way my grandpa really loves it, and it has no veggies. Just extra peanuts, extra chili, and, like, just extra deliciousness. We're going to do this process called velveting. And what velveting does is it helps trap the moisture inside the protein. So make sure we add egg white. Don't add the egg yolk, please. So what the egg white will do is keep the chicken soft, and that's actually what helps hold all the moisture in the chicken. Don't get lazy with this step. Like, really just get in there for a little longer than you think you need to. Next step is the cornstarch, and the egg white helps bind the cornstarch to the chicken. So this step is called velveting because it tenderizes the meat, and it has this really nice velvety texture in your mouth. If you've gone to a Chinese restaurant and it had, like, beef and broccoli, those little slivers of beef, and they're super tender, that's because it's gone through the velveting process. Now we're going to season, right? Some salt. So salt and pepper. I'm using white pepper, but you can use black pepper if you want, if you don't have white pepper. And then, you know, next time you're at the grocery store, you can shoplift a little white pepper if you're struggling, and then, you know, use that. Don't shoplift. You could... Don't do that. That's illegal. So we're going to add oil into this, and what the oil does is when we fry it the first step, it'll prevent the chicken from forming clumps. It'll be a little easier to separate. We're going to get a guy that looks like this. A little thin coating of batter, like, super thin, and oil all around. Now we're going to throw this in the refrigerator about 30 minutes to allow the velveting to take some time. So traditionally, in an American-Chinese restaurant, we'll use long-grain rice. Long-grain rice is used because it's just absolutely amazing. Some people like short-grain rice, like Eric Z, but, you know, whatever, long-grain rice is the move. So we got one cup of rice. Bam. That was aggressive. What the washing does is it gets rid of some of that starch, so when it cooks, you can have, like, these really perfect individual grains of rice. Rice is really fucking easy. One part rice to one part water. So whatever container you have, just do equal parts. Put the lid on, hit that button, and that's it. Like, if you don't have a rice cooker at home, you should get a rice cooker. I don't know why people are cooking rice in pots, man. That's a struggle. See how easy that was? Wash, water, button, and now we're done. Now we're gonna go make some Kung Pao chicken. What we're gonna do is this process called guo you, which means passing through hot oil. I know this looks like we're deep-frying something. We're actually not. This is very high heat, like 375, and we're gonna, like, just... It's a very efficient way to sear everything. If you don't have a thermometer at home, it's okay. If you have a scallion, an onion, anything with a little bit of moisture content, anything that's, like, not water, throw it in, and if it bubbles, you're good to go. You need one of these bad boys, and then you're gonna need, like, a spoon or some sort of ladle or whatever. So you want to be careful. This tends to clump together, so when you put in the oil, you want to not drop it all in at once. You kind of want to, like, spread it all out. You don't want to cook it too long. We're gonna work in batches so everything evenly cooks. When I was a younger kid, I loved Jon Tso's chicken, right? See the other video. Link also below. And I wasn't a big fan of Kung Pao chicken, but my grandpa loved Kung Pao chicken. Like, that was his favorite thing of all time, but I didn't really get, like, the peanuts and stuff. You know, I was like, this is a weird flavor combination. Give me that sauce, give me that sugar. But my grandpa passed away a few years ago, and he was, like, actually my hero, and so I kind of went back to Kung Pao chicken, tasting it, and it reminds me of, like, all these, like, really great nostalgic memories. And because I'm older, my palate's a lot more developed, so that's actually Kung Pao chicken's the move. You know, all the chilies, all the spices, and this dish is very technique-focused, so you can get a lot of, like, wok hei. You can taste all of that in this dish. If you order this dish out of a Chinese-American restaurant, you can tell, like, the caliber of the chef. So this is one of the benchmarks for me. This is a good example of it clumping. And then you have a spoon, because you can just kind of separate each individual piece like this. Beautiful, perfectly seared, like, nice little crust forming. Not too dark, right? It's got a little bit of color to it, because we don't want to overcook our meat. Scallions. Take the green part, and we're gonna just cut it into, maybe, like, one-inch pieces, okay? And these scallion whites, all right? This is the gold of scallions. And we're gonna cut these right in half like this. Make sure your knife is sharp. Cut them in thirds. And this is what we're gonna use for our dish. And this is what you're gonna use for the fried rice that you're gonna make with the leftover rice using your beautiful long grain rice. You have garlic. Now we're gonna slice these really thin. You guys ever seen, like, Godfather? How, like, they're in prison, and then, like, they're slicing the garlic super thin so it melts in the sauce? We're not melting any sauce today. But we're gonna be slicing them super thin. What slicing them super thin does is they will caramelize faster. It will impart, like, a really nice, slightly bitter garlic taste to the dish, to kind of, like, round it all out. I like to use bitter in my cooking. I think it's an extra depth of flavor, and it's actually something my grandpa used to talk about all the time. Definitely fucking scallion. Definitely marrying garlic. Definitely killing ginger. Okay, all right, now we're done with the mise en place. We're gonna go over there and start cooking. So first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna crank this wok super duper high. You want to treat a wok kind of like a cast iron. So we're gonna add some oil, and then we're gonna add our scallions in first. So scallions are one of my favorite things to use because just seared scallions is such an amazing flavor. You see it all over, like, Asian cuisines, like scallion oil, this and that. We're gonna char these bad boys. We're gonna add these Tianjin chili peppers, and we're gonna break them in half, break them in half to release the seeds and all the flavor in the dish. And Tianjin chili peppers are really easy to find. Go to, like, any Asian supermarket, and they'll have, like, a huge 20-pound bag of them. It's more than you'll ever need. So give them to your friends and neighbors. You know, you can kind of spread the... Ooh, that's spicy. Spread the religion of Tianjin chili peppers. We're gonna add the peanuts, okay? And add the peanuts to give it, like, a little roasted flavor. Chicken, bam, boom. We're gonna add our Shaoxing wine to deglaze. If you don't have Shaoxing wine at home, you can use any wine that you have that rhymes with Shaoxing wine. We're gonna wait for all the wine to evaporate, and then you're gonna add a little bit of your soy sauce. Not too much, because you want to cook and caramelize your soy sauce. And what this step is going to do, is if you do it correctly, it's going to really coat your Kung Pao chicken and make it nice and dark. Give it a really beautiful color. Next step, add in our hoisin. You'll notice there's, like, no slurry, no cornstarch to this dish, because the hoisin contains some flour. That's gonna be, like, your binding agent. That's what's gonna thicken everything together. Add our garlic in. Now, we add in the garlic a little later, because this dish is so flavorful, so pungent. We want a little bit of that raw garlic flavor to it. It's real nice. Really nice. Sugar. Keep on stirring. If you don't stir, it's gonna be burnt, and then your friends and family won't love you anymore, and they won't want to eat your Kung Pao chicken. And then we're gonna add your vinegar at the end to kind of give it, like, a little glossy look. And obviously, we can't forget the MSG. Bam. That's it. It's what you're looking for. It was real quick. So, nice and glossy. You got these nuts in there. You got some chilies. Smells so good. Time to plate. Oh, yes. And after you tap it, it's perfectly, like, very easy to close. Now, you can't have Kung Pao chicken without some really amazing long-grain rice. Every rice cooker comes with this. Use it. You want to fluff up your rice. If you don't fluff up your rice, you're gonna have, like, really dense grains, and no one's gonna be a fan of your rice. You're gonna be, that's, like, very amateur hour, you know? Man, this rice is so good. So, here we have our Kung Pao chicken, wok-roasted peanuts, wok-roasted Tianjin chili peppers, beautifully-velveted chicken thigh, slivers of garlic. Let's taste it. Oh, boy. I'm talking. I don't know what I'm fucking talking about. It's so good. That shit in your mouth. It's so good. Let's see below, man. Click it. This is fucking bomb.com. I'm ready. How many tries do we have? Oh, my God, it's so bad. It would've been so cool if I pulled it off.