Three Pepper Chicken | How to get the crispiest chicken with no marinade! | The Woks of Life

That's the perfect bite. Hi everyone, I'm here to cook three pepper chicken for y'all. It's a recipe that Judy posted some 10 years ago and it was from a Chinese restaurant, a Sichuan Chinese restaurant, and we ordered this three pepper chicken and it was delicious and it's since actually gotten more popular even since we posted the recipe. But I feel like the recipe wasn't quite the same as the restaurant so every time I cooked it it was sort of missing something. But just a few months ago I actually got a chance to go behind the scenes in a Sichuan restaurant and I was quizzing the chef about it and he happened to cook this and I said I'm gonna learn how to do it. So I'm gonna teach you some secrets. First of all, to explain the dish, three peppers are long hot green peppers. The second pepper are these dried red peppers and they get super super toasty and fragrant. And the third pepper is the Sichuan peppercorn. So the other thing that I learned from the Sichuan restaurant when I was observing was that the chicken is not marinated at all, there's nothing, literally nothing on it, and all they do is deep fry it. And for quite a long time you get a nice crust on it, beautiful fragrant skin on chicken, you get that chicharoni fried chicken flavor. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna do sort of a wok fry and a shallow fry and and give it a shot. I think we can get a get it pretty close. So off to the wok, right? We're at the wok here and we've got everything at arm's length. Turn on the wok and wait till it gets smoking. And we're gonna add a good amount of oil because at the restaurants they deep fry this chicken. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna sort of shallow fry, wok fry this chicken. So I'm gonna add about two and a half tablespoons, maybe three tablespoons of oil. Put the wok really well in the chicken go. I'm gonna spread this in one layer, skin down if you can, look at that. Preheat the wok right, no stick. So I'm actually gonna turn it slightly down because this chicken has to cook for a while, a little while, and we got to get a nice crust on the outside. But you know for your home wok or your home stove, I think you basically want to have full blast. In the deep fryer the chef put it in there for I would say it was like eight to nine, almost ten minutes. Look at all the oil that's been rendered out of there. It's sort of a slow cook but I would say this is this is the equivalent of deep frying at 350 degrees. All right this chicken has been going for about almost 10 minutes, eight to ten minutes, but depending upon how your wok fire goes, how much oil you're using, because I'm using a pretty good amount of oil. A lot of it's been rendered so I started with about two and a half, three tablespoons and now I got well over a quarter cup. I probably got a third cup in here but it's good. It's frying its own fat, it's got a nice crust on it, just like at the restaurant. So now I'm going to scoop it up. I'm going to turn off the flame first, drain some oil, set it aside. All right and that is a pound of chicken folks. Right there, rendered down nicely. I'm going to fry the peppers now. No cleaning the wok necessary. Turn the flame back on and now I'm going to scorch the peppers. Oh yeah, beautiful. You're going to fry them until they get a nice scorch to them and in the restaurant they just throw this right in the deep fryer. All right, these are ready to come up. See that nice scorch on them right there? Pick this up and I'm going to set it aside. Now it looks like we got a little bit too much oil in here. I'm going to take some out. So I'm going to leave about two tablespoons of oil in there. The high heat part of this is kind of over here so what I'm going to do is now I'm going to toast the peppercorns. Add those and this actually is actually a very low heat because you don't want to burn any of these. Now you get a nice toasty flavor on them. Smell that, smell that. Oh yeah, a little bit yes. Next I'm going to put the ginger first. Again this is all low heat and then I'm going to put the dou ban jiang in. Dou ban jiang is a spicy bean paste. It's made with broad beans and very salty. There's not a lot of substitution. You want to get the artisan dou ban jiang actually which is the kind of rough kind instead of the smooth but if you can't get that you can get the smooth kind. I'm going to put the garlic in next. Next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to put the chicken. Give that a little mix. Put the peppers back in. Put a little shaoxing wine. Turn the fire up a bit. Add a little bit of sugar. Sugar just balances the flavor of the dish and then I'm going to add about to taste salt. This really depends upon how salty your dou ban jiang is. Give a few tosses. This is where you add a little bit of scallion for some flavor. Extra oniony flavor. Turn up the flame a bit. Get a few tosses. No soy sauce in in citron cooking practically and this is no different. This is ready to plate. Three pepper chicken. Oh yeah very nice. Three pepper chicken restaurant style. You can do it at home and believe it or not you can actually do this in a skillet or a pan. You don't have to have the wok. The only high heat cooking that you're really doing is frying the chicken and scorching the peppers and then afterwards it's all about finesse to get all the flavor out of the citron peppercorn and the dried peppers. So let's go to the table. See this three pepper chicken. The best things are these little bits of toasted aromatics. Ginger, garlic, the peppercorn and one of these little peppers. That's a perfect bite. Very spicy. Very nice. Oh boy that's good. You get a nice piece with the citron. Really good. Really good. I just had a piece of like chicken skin that just tasted like really good. Eat a pepper. Pretty good. It's actually not that spicy. You're not eating any peppers. All you're eating is chicken. Three pepper chicken lover. This passes the test. Make it at home folks. If you like this video, like and subscribe. First had it at our favorite restaurant, local restaurant. Barley. If you like this fish, give us, if you like this pepper chicken, give us a like.