Our 1st Viral Recipe, Now Perfected! Soy Sauce Chicken | Chinese Whole Chicken Recipe

Hi and welcome to Spice and Pens. Today we are going to cook one of my favourites, soy sauce chicken. So let's start cooking! In collaboration with Horse & Pens Culinary Studio, we are launching an incredible cooking course featuring our loved recipes. Join us in our exclusive local Chinese delight course. Sign up with the link below or scan this QR code. See you there! Now we'll season and marinate our chicken. I have with me over here one whole fresh chicken weighing approximately one kilogram. Make sure you wash it nicely and of course wash out everything that's within the cavity. We'll use two teaspoons of salt to season the inside of the chicken. Alright, just pour into your palm like this. Slide it in to the cavity and just rub the inside of the cavity. Once you're done with this, we'll use 10 tablespoons of dark soy sauce, premium dark soy sauce. These are not very salty but this will give the chicken a very beautiful dark hue. Also approximately 200 milliliters. Just pour it over the chicken. Now we will not be wasting this because we'll be adding this when we're making the sauce for the chicken. Just pour everything in. Using your hand, just rub the chicken all over with this dark soy sauce. We are doing this so that the chicken will have a very even color after we cook it. I rub it under the wings, under the chicken leg, the thighs, everything. Once you're done with this, you add in approximately 15 grams of ginger. Young ginger sliced thinly like this. Put it into the cavity. One stalk of spring onion, tied into a small knot like this. Also slide into the cavity. Fold the legs into the cavity. Alright, just turn it around a few more times just to have more contact with the dark soy sauce. After you're done with this, we'll just marinate this in the fridge for approximately two hours. Remember to remove the chicken from the fridge at least half an hour before we cook it. I'll see you back in a while. Now we'll start to put the dish together. Heat up a pot using medium heat. Add in a little bit of oil. Just a little bit of oil will be fine. Add in 60 grams of rock sugar. We are going to melt and caramelize the rock sugar. Slowly fry them over medium heat. Fry them until they are melted and beautifully caramelized before we add in hot water. This will take a little bit of time and I'll show you how they look like in a while. Fry the rock sugar until they are a beautiful reddish color or in Chinese we call it 红枣色. If you cannot find rock sugar, you can use cane sugar, brown sugar, no problem. The sugar has melted and be very careful because sugar melts at very high temperatures so it's very very hot right now. We need to cook until the sugar starts bubbling. Remember to continue moving the sugar syrup around. As you can see it's browning very beautifully now. We want the color to be slightly darker but not too dark or burnt. Right now it's small bubbles and turning to big bubbles. It's getting very dark right now. Now we'll add in hot water. We add in a total of 2.5 liters but I'm adding in hot water first. Be very careful. Use hot water for safety reasons. I'm adding in 1.5 liters of hot water as well as 1 liter of normal water. As you can see the water has turned into a very beautiful dark hue right now. This is what we want. Now we're adding one piece of cinnamon bark, about slightly longer than my index finger. Put it in. Two pieces of star anise. Two bulbs of garlic. Please wash them. Two tablespoons of salt and of course we'll add in the dark soy sauce from the chicken. Pour in all the dark soy sauce. Now remember to rest your chicken at normal room temperature first before you cook it. I've been resting my chicken for approximately 30 to 45 minutes. After you have added everything in, we'll add in 100 milliliters of Chinese rice wine. For our Muslim friends, this is optional. Just put it in. Give it a light stir. We'll wait for this to come to a boil. When it comes to a boil, we'll boil this for another 10 minutes just to extract out the flavor of the spices before we add in our chicken. You can put the lid on while waiting for it to come to a boil. I'll see you back in a while. I've been cooking the sauce for 10 minutes and now we add in our chicken. Hold the chicken by the neck and slowly put it in. Breast side down. Move it around a little bit just to make sure that the hot liquid actually goes through the chicken. Just like this will do. Just roll them around a little bit like this. Already you can see the color is very pretty. Put the lid in. We'll need to wait for this to come to a boil. Do not turn down the heat at this moment. Make sure that the sauce is boiling before we cover it up. Breast side down is very important because we want this to be just nicely cooked. If there's any remaining sauce inside a mixing bowl, just pour everything in. Once you can see that the sauce is boiling, put the lid on. Reduce the heat down to low and continue to cook this for 20 minutes before we turn off the flame and further push this for another 20 minutes. I'm not using this as a pressure cooker although this is a pressure cooker pot. I'm using this just as a regular pot. I'll see you back in a while. 20 minutes is up. Now we'll just turn off the flame. Do not remove the cover. Do not take a peek. We'll let the chicken sit in the hot sauce for another 20 minutes before we take the chicken out. I'll see you back in a while. 20 minutes is up. The chicken should be ready. Let's have a look. Let's just remove this from the sauce. Look at how pretty the color is. Just be very careful. I like to handle this by the wings. Okay, I love to coat this with a layer of sesame oil to prevent the skin from drying out while we wait for this to cool down. I'll show you how I do this in a while. Now we're going to make the sauce. This is the sauce that we cook our chicken in. 300 ml of it. You need to give it a taste first and see how savory or sweet you want it to be. For this, I'd like to add in one teaspoon of salt. I like my soy sauce chicken to be a little bit on the sweet side hence I'm adding in two teaspoons of sugar. Give it a stir and slowly add in some cornstarch solution just to thicken this up to the consistency that you like. I'm just using 300 ml over here but if you like more sauce, of course, you can remove more and make more sauce. The rest of the sauce, you can actually keep it. If you put it inside the freezer itself, you can actually keep this for about one to two months and use whenever you want to braise any pork or chicken. So this is something that I like and now it's time for lunch. And now the dish is done. Let's have a taste. Smells absolutely delicious. Let's try this. Very tender, very fragrant, very juicy. This is really really good. So ladies and gentlemen, I hope you like our video. Do click like on our video and do subscribe to our channel. Thank you for watching and now it's time to cook. See you.