Is this the best Sweet and Sour Chicken Hong Kong (Cantonese) Style you will ever taste!?!?

Hi guys and welcome to another episode of Chow with Lau. In this show we are cooking sweet and sour chicken Hong Kong style or as some people know it Cantonese style. Guys we are doing sweet and sour chicken Hong Kong style or as some may know it sweet and sour chicken Cantonese style and for this cheat day recipe you are going to need some chicken. Today I'm using chicken breasts. We're going to be using some dark soy sauce sesame oil, light soy sauce, corn flour, an egg, some onions and peppers, a bit of salt and pepper, some ginger, a bit of pineapple, lemon, of course tomato ketchup, some sugar and some vinegar. I've got some black vinegar today you can use malt vinegar or whatever you've got to hand. So without further ado get your woks ready. So the first stage is to prepare our chicken. I have got two chicken breasts here today. Roughly one breast per person is how I'm portioning it. You can scale it up or down however you feel. So we're just going to cut breasts into finish slices. Yeah like that because when we deep fry it which is obviously what we're going to do they will cook quickly. The trick is to try to cut them into evenly thick pieces because then they cook at the same time. Some people like to use chicken thigh meat because it has more marbling or fat in it and that can give it more flavour but to be fair when it comes to chicken I'm not that fussed. As long as the chicken is moist we're okay. So I'm going to cut that bit off we don't want that. So now that we've sliced the chicken we can marinate it. So for that we're going to do the classic if you follow my videos you probably know this off by heart now. So we're going to put a teaspoon of sesame oil, teaspoon of light soy sauce and a teaspoon of sugar and that makes up the marinade. Okay to that I'm going to add a pinch of salt, pinch of pepper just to give it some nice seasoning and also an egg and the egg is going to help it bind with the corn flour. Okay so we get in with our fingers which are obviously clean and we massage that in. Okay I'm going to leave that to marinate for half an hour or so so we can get on with making the crispy coating. Okay guys time to make the crispy coating for the chicken. So I've got 200 grams of corn flour here you can use potato starch instead. At a push you could use plain flour but plain flour doesn't get as crispy as either corn flour or potato starch so try to get one of the other two. Okay so I'm going to season it with some salt and pepper. We can be quite liberal with this in the coating because it gets diluted with the actual flour itself. So quite a bit of salt, not so much pepper required but still quite a lot. Okay and give it a good little shake in. Now for people who watch my videos regularly I've got a special technique to show you to make the coating even crunchier and that's by using a spray bottle. Now a normal spray bottle we used we had a little bit of a technical issue with just as we were kind of doing this so we've had to resort to plan B. As long as the spray bottle hasn't had any chemicals in it any fertilizers for your plants or anything that's fine and this has actually been scavenged from a fan cooler thing which you spray yeah you spray the mist and the fan cools you down even more so it's only ever had water in it so we can use this it's quite food safe I think. So what we're going to do is we're going to pump it three or four times into the corn flour get a fork and mix it we're going to do this three times so that's one so again one two three and mix it again and what we're doing is we're starting as you can see from turning the smooth corn flour into the kind of clumps little rocks and when we deep fry that they become little rocks of crunchiness which is exactly what we want and there we go we're ready to go so what we do now is we get our chicken and we pop it into the corn flour the egg that we put into the chicken originally is what's going to bind it to the corn flour as you can see there's a lot of corn flour for the chicken we're using but that's actually what that's intentional because as we mix in it all gloops together but because we've got so much corn flour in there we keep mixing and it starts to separate out again it makes it really easy and it separates out because if you didn't have enough corn flour it would just stick into one solid ball and that's not very helpful at all so initially it sticks together then as you keep massaging it into the flour other bits of flour get in between the chicken the pieces of chicken and it can't stick together which is great and we just keep kind of rubbing it and rubbing it until all available surfaces of the chicken is coated with the corn flour it's a little bit wasteful with the corn flour but it really really works okay and that's it there we go right guys it's time to deep fry the chicken um i've got about a third of a pan of oil here no more than that just for safety reasons and i've got the heat on we're looking for about 170 180 degrees which should fizz a wooden chopstick like this and as you can see that is fizzing away quite nicely so i think we're ready to go so we're going to double fry these bad boys and what that means is we're gonna go in twice with about 20 minutes in between and that means that we're gonna have a nice crispy coating without having a burnt coating and a raw meat if you know what i mean this gives it time to give us a crispy coating but with meat that we can okay because it's quite tricky to do it all at the same time in one go and turn that down a little bit i don't want it to don't want it to overflow if you're using more chicken than i am it might be worth doing two batches because you don't want the oil to be overwhelmed and you don't want the spill over the edge and catch fire or anything scary like that okay we're all in so what we can do is gently stir it just to make sure it's not sticking to each other and because the chicken is cut quite thinly it's not going to take that long and we're not looking for a golden brown here we're just we're kind of just waiting for the coating to start to set and to start to go crispy because if we wait too long it's going to it's going to burn on the outside so we're looking for a pale golden like something like that that's fine that's all we need to do we're going to fish them all out and as you can see two chicken breasts makes quite a lot of quick makes quite a lot of serving if you like there you go that's easy enough for two people i think so we're going to set the chicken aside and we're going to start on the sauce let's go right guys we're going to make a start on our sweet and sour sauce and for this the first thing i'm going to do is cut up some ginger i've got about a thumb's worth of ginger here and what ginger will do is add another bit of depth to the flavor because obviously ginger has got some heat in it so although we're not going for a spicy sweet and sour sauce it'll just give us a nice undertone a different layer of depth of flavor i think they like to call it but yeah i understand that i hope you do too it'll just give us a little bit more richness to the sauce rather than just the sweetness and the sourness from the sugar and the vinegar okay so this will really really boost our sauce so what we're going to do is we're going to take the skin off obviously this is going to make our ginger a little bit smaller but to be fair we're not going to be using a lot of it anyway we don't need a huge amount uh because we we don't want the sweet and sour sauce to actually become gingery um when when you actually have the sweet and sour sauce the the ginger is almost imperceptible but it will like i said give you a it gives a depth to the flavor okay dicing it very finely because we don't want to actually get big chunks of ginger in our mouth when we're eating the sweet and sour chicken so i'm also going to use the juice from a lemon and this will give us probably half a lemon actually but that will give us a little bit of citrus tang to it i think i always like that in an authentic sweet and sour sauce because then you know it's not just sugar and vinegar and it just gives us a bit of freshness which is very very nice indeed cool right guys the next stage is to cook off the onions the peppers and the ginger so i'm going to put a splash of oil in here get it up to temperature and then add in the onions pepper and ginger i've decided to put just half the ginger in because it just looked too much when i chopped it up so i don't like i said i don't want it to be overpowered by the ginger so i've just used half of what i cut up so we're just going to stir fry this for a few seconds and we're just it's basically just going to soften up a little bit and this will give us some aromatics to go into the sauce to create that depth of flavor and also with the the peppers and the onions it'll give us some crunch and some bite to the texture okay so it doesn't take very long as soon as you see it soften we can add some other ingredients so we're going to add the vinegar temperature and we're going to add the ketchup so that's four tablespoons of the vinegar four tablespoons of the ketchup four tablespoons of sugar so you can tell why this is a cheap day recipe guys this is not something you're going to have every day okay make sure all the sugar is dissolved in there you can see it started to look like a sweet and sour sauce now and now what i'm going to add is some chunks of pineapple this is pineapple you can get in the juice so i'm going to add the whole lot in now i know some of you guys don't like fruit in your savory food if you like so if you don't want to put the pineapple in it's totally optional i like it but you don't have to okay and finally we're going to put a tiny tiny dash of dark soy sauce and that'll just give us a little bit of savoriness and it'll add a little bit more richness to the sauce visually there you go okay as you can see it's not like we're going to drown the chicken in the sauce it's just going to coat the crispy bits of chicken nicely if you want to add more sauce because you want it swimming in sauce you can do that too but this is the way i like it it's just going to coat sauce coat just going to coat the chicken right so that is ready and we can just set that aside and now we're going for the second fry of the chicken and we are very nearly there guys so the temperature of the oil is the same as it was when we first fried it so about 170 180 degrees i'm just going to pop it back in and this should only take a few minutes to finish the cooking we need to keep a close eye on this because we obviously don't want it to burn and it really doesn't take very long at all okay i would say that's about ready look at that nice golden brown color exactly what we're looking for and i can tell straight away that the coating is very crispy indeed okay look at that you can hear the sizzle look i'll put you up to my microphone you can hear the sizzle okay guys we're on the final strip we're bringing the sauce back up to heat back up to temperature but before i put the chicken in i'm going to add my lemon juice half a lemon and straight in and that will give us a nice little bit of citrus tang and a bit of freshness it's gonna be great give a stir in okay and i'm just going to add a little bit of corn flour and water just to thicken the sauce a little bit there you go the smell is delicious amazing right let's come up to temperature so i can add my chicken okay and all we're going to do is toss it lightly into the sauce so the sauce coats every bit of the look at that that just looks amazing there you go guys sweet sour chicken hong kong style in brackets cantonese style get your taste buds ready right guys moment of truth time that is even better than i expected the crunchiness is almost explosive in your mouth it's so good that water technique the spray bottle technique really really works i can't i can't tell you guys the sauce it's rich it's sweet obviously it's got a tang to it from the vinegar and you can taste the lemon and the warmth of the ginger is just there it's a hint it isn't overpowering but it definitely adds something fantastic to this sauce the vegetables the peppers nice and crunchy kind of makes you feel that you're having one of your five a day even though maybe the other bit kind of overcompensates the other way but hey like i said cheap day dish what can i say there's a reason why this is always the kids favorite it's a reason why i tend to always order this from a takeaway restaurant when i'm there because it's just so nice so guys if you've liked what do you think hopefully we've inspired you to go and make your own food please give us a like and subscribe we'll see you in the next one take care bye-bye we give it i don't know five or six it's a bit fat than mine but it's not as long okay okay hey come on okay guys so we're going to start on the sweet and sour sauce now my god why are you laughing hmm okay good getting a hot under the cover are we dear um