Soy Sauce Chicken See Yao Gai 豉油鸡 Homemade Ginger Scallion Oil

What is a buddhist style chicken? I'll tell you, my father-in-law, Judy's father, used to order a chicken for the weekend and the guy would say, oh you want head on it? And then he'd go to the back counter and be like, one Chinese chicken! Hi everybody, it's Bill from the Walks of Life and today we're going to show you how to make an iconic Cantonese dish, soy sauce chicken, or as we call it, siyao gai. What is a soy sauce chicken? When you walk into Chinatown and you see those barbecued meats hanging from the window in these restaurants, that's where you get your siyao gai or soy sauce chicken. You can even go to the Chinatown restaurants that serve banquet meals or serve just restaurant food and you can order off the menu a siyao gai and they're happy to serve it to you. But if you want to make it at home, I'm going to show you today how to make the soy sauce chicken and believe me, you're going to love it because it's packed with flavor. Now this recipe for soy sauce chicken has been on the blog for a while and we've gotten a lot of comments and a lot of questions. Why is my chicken splotchy? What do I do with the master sauce after it's leftover? Can I use chicken parts instead of a whole chicken? We're going to address all those questions and more. So today we're using a Buddhist style chicken but we also use the supermarket chicken and we're going to include that footage as well so you can see what it's like. These Buddhist style chickens are heritage breed chickens so they're very different. Instead of 45 days for growth, they're usually two to three times more. The skin is a little bit thicker and it affects how the chicken absorbs the soy sauce and how uniform it is. The meat tastes better. It's firmer but still very silky. Usually these Buddhist style chickens are not carried in supermarkets. They're in Chinese grocery stores. They're about the same price as organic chicken but I think less. So this chicken is about four pounds and it costs about 16 bucks. If you go into a supermarket and you buy an organic chicken, it's going to be like 18, 20 bucks. But I tell you, this heritage breed, it's just superior. The breeds of chicken used in the supermarket chicken are quite different from the heritage breeds that are used for these Buddhist style chickens. We met the owners of Bobo Poultry. She explained it all. She says, hey, it's all about the heritage breed. We take two to three times more time to raise these chickens than your average 45-day chicken in the grocery store and that makes a huge difference. Soy sauce chicken or see how guy is actually quite easy to make. You've got scallion. If you don't have it, you can also use shallot, some fresh ginger, star anise, sugar to balance the soy sauce, light and dark soy sauce, a little bit of salt, a little bit of oil to sort of caramelize the aromatics at the beginning, and then the wine. So we call for rose wine. Rose wine you could find at any well-stocked Chinese grocery store. If you can't find it, ask somebody. You can always substitute with Shaoxing wine. Sometimes I use a little bit of both. And last but certainly not least, we have our chicken. So now I'm going to show you how to wash the chicken. First thing you do is you sort of pluck anything obvious out. Here there's a little bit of extra fat in here. Okay, here there's usually a giblet package. Any chicken that you get, you're going to have these kidney pieces. That's what they look like. And then you got to reach in and see if there's anything, any of the lungs or anything left in there. Straighten out. So you've got, yeah, you've got all kinds of stuff in there. This is the difference between a good chicken meal and one where you bite down on a who knows what. So probably the number one question I get is, my chicken comes out splotchy. Your chicken comes out nice and uniform. What's up with that? The first answer to that question is that if you use this Buddhist chicken, the skin is actually a little bit thicker and it just takes the soy sauce color more uniformly. There's two layers of skin. There's the dermis layer, which is what we all know as the chicken skin that we eat. And then there's the epidermis layer, which is the layer above that, just below the feathers. Now that layer, it has a natural waxy coating on it and it's not always removed completely. And that's what's causing the prevention of the absorption of the soy sauce and color. So not only are you not getting the color, you're not getting all that flavor. So how do we remedy that? Take some salt. This is sacrificial salt. You're not going to reuse the salt or anything like that. We're going to spread it around all over and we're just going to give it a good rub. You're using the salt a little bit as an abrasive for cleaner. You're flavoring it as well, yeah, but most importantly, you got to get it in the nooks and crannies, like in between the wings or below the drumstick and the spots that are a little bit less accessible, if you will, by the cleaner when they process it. As you can see, a week ago when we made the grocery store chicken, you could see little bits of yellow. You've got this hard skin over here and you're going to rub that off with the salt and you can see how everything's coming off. Now we're going to rinse everything off. And while I'm here, I'm going to cut these appendages off. So how do you cut actually? You cut this at the joint. Now you don't want to cut the skin too close to this joint because then the skin is going to shrink and you're going to see the bone exposed. So what you actually want to do is you want to cut it well in front like that. Cut around the skin and then you can bend it back just like that and find the joint. Cut that where the cartilage is and then the head we're just going to cut right at the neck. Give it one little last rinse. Make sure I drain the water out and I tuck these wings back like this. Then it sort of sits really nicely and here you go. And these parts go to barley. Let's start making our master sauce by cutting some ginger. Cut about eighth of an inch pieces, about seven slices. We call for two scallions. I got these giant scallions from the garden. Probably just cut one of these. What we're going to do is go over to the stove. You want a decent size pot here that is going to fit the chicken but is not too big. The bigger and wider your pot is, the more sauce you're going to need and your chicken is not going to be submerged. We're going to caramelize this in the pot. Then we're going to measure out our regular soy sauce, our dark soy sauce which is what gives soy sauce chicken its richness and color. We updated this recipe and we used quite a bit of dark soy sauce before versus now. I think before we used a cup and a quarter dark soy sauce which yielded a much darker soy sauce chicken. We reduced that actually to half but you do have to have dark soy sauce. We've got two different kinds of wine. We've got a Shaoxing wine and a little bit of rose wine which gives it its flavor. You actually can't taste the rose wine. It's something in the background. It's really pleasant. It adds depth. Now if you can't find the rose wine, it's not a huge deal. Just use your Shaoxing wine or clear rice wine. Sugar. It's quite a bit of sugar. Don't be alarmed. The sauce, the master sauce really needs it and it really needs to absorb into the chicken to get a nice flavor. We've got some salt, less salt because there's already a lot of salt in the soy sauce and we've got star anise which is a main flavoring element for the master sauce. So let's go to the stove. Okay we've got our setup here and what we're going to do first, we're going to pour a little bit of oil, caramelize the ginger and the scallions. They're big. They're nice. Got it going for about 30 seconds and then we're going to get star anise. You want three healthy star anises. I put four in here because some of these were a little bit anemic. I'm going to use a mixture of rose wine and Shaoxing wine. It's about three quarter. Three quarters Shaoxing wine and at this point I'm going to turn up the heat. We're going to have a lot of liquid here. Stir that around a little. One and three quarter cup sugar. It's about a cup. You might be thinking holy cow that's a lot of sugar. Just think about when we made our ribs and we put a lot of sugar in there. That's not quite three quarters cups. I'm going to add a little bit more. All going to turn into flavor. We're going to add four tablespoons salt. That's one. That's two. That's three. That's a little shy. That's the salt that we left over from the chicken rub. I'm going to give everything a stir here and hey for those of you a tip when you use a lot of soy sauce we buy these small bottles and we refilm with these big bottles. Much more economical. So this is regular soy sauce. Superior light soy sauce and we're going to add two cups of soy sauce. Half a cup dark soy sauce. Just 12 cups of water. All right and that is our master sauce. Now what we're going to do is let this come up to a boil. Let it simmer for about 20 minutes to let all the flavors meld together before we add our chicken. So how do you reuse this master sauce? I mean you do have like 12 cups of liquid here. You got to freeze it right. If you keep it in the fridge chicken has been cooking in it and it's not going to last that long. You can use it one time to cook a chicken and then you could probably use it again without anything added. But each time you use that master sauce or the lu soy each time it gets better and more flavorful. Now eventually the flavor will run out so you're going to have to replenish that with a little bit of salt, a little soy sauce and maybe aromatics. So behind the scenes Caitlin has been saying hey you got to tell the people how do you replenish the sauce? How much exactly you put in? Just give a rule of thumb of like you can use it. And I'm like I can't tell you. It's not an exact science. There is no rule of thumb. There's no exact formula to it. That's why they call it the master sauce. No actually they call it the master sauce is because after you have this sauce you can actually on the stove use part of that for your stir fries, lo mein noodles if you like. You could use that part of that for your beef chow fun for example. That's why it's a master sauce because it's kind of versatile. What I'll do is I'll definitely add some more wine, some Shaoxing wine, rose wine and I'll add a little bit more salt and a little bit more regular soy sauce. Usually the darkness is okay but if you like it more darker, your chicken darker, you add a little bit more dark soy sauce. And that's that. That's that. Alright it's been about 20 minutes now. The star anise, the ginger, the scallion has had a chance to release its flavors into the liquid and we're ready to put in the chicken and we're going to slowly place it in. Make sure it's submerged and what we do right away actually is lift it back up and what this does is the liquid that gets inside the chicken is cooled and we just want to give another warm liquid chance to enter in the cavity. You'll see that we don't have a completely submerged chicken and what we can do at this point is use a spoon to baste it a bit. I'm going to turn up the heat to bring the chicken back up to a boil which will take about five minutes and we don't actually want this boiling. We want it to just simmer. So once it's just simmering, you want to turn it down. We're going to let it cook for 25 minutes but since this chicken is not fully submerged we're going to baste it every five minutes and check the boiling temperature. At some point halfway through we're going to turn it over. After that initial 25 minutes of simmering we're going to shut off the heat and let it sit for another 25 minutes in the liquid and everything will be nice and absorbent. We'll turn it back over probably at some point and we'll baste it every 5-10 minutes. After that it'll be in for a full 60 minutes and your chicken will be ready. All right it's been about four or five minutes. I detect this thing is starting to boil and it is. I'm going to lower the heat and an opportunity since I have the cover off I'm going to give it a little baste and the reason why it's important to cook it breast up is because the breast meat cooks faster. Now I'm going to set the timer for 10 minutes and I'm going to turn the chicken over for another 5 or 10 minutes and then turn it back over and we're going to turn off the heat. So the next question that we get a lot is do I have to use a whole chicken and the answer is no. Normally for the lunar new year we use a chicken with the head on and the feet on and that's traditional but any other time like any old weekday yeah sure you can use the chicken leg quarters you use drumsticks you use wings no problem. The dark meat is a little bit moister and it's closer to the texture of what you get in the buddhist chicken. If you prefer chicken breast you could also use a split chicken breast as well. Now the cooking times are much faster you got a smaller piece of chicken and you've got more surface area around it for cooking so a split chicken breast is probably going to take you like 20-25 minutes. So while the chicken's cooking we're going to make some cooked ginger scallion oil because at the Chinese barbecue place when you order a chicken whether it's a white cut chicken or a soy sauce chicken you get some cooked ginger scallion oil. They also include like a sweet dark soy as well but what I like to do is I just like to take some of the master sauce out and use that as a sauce to drizzle on top after you're cutting or when you're serving it. If you haven't picked up a copy of our cookbook already we actually have recipes for the raw ginger scallion oil and we also have a recipe for the cooked ginger scallion oil which is usually what you'll get in Chinatown. So the flavors of this cooked ginger scallion oil is not ginger and scallion they add a little bit of a sand ginger in it they add a little tiny touch of fish sauce and it has a really nice flavor instead of the usual fresh raw oil and raw ginger scallion that we usually use with the white cut chicken. We're going to add seven tablespoons of a neutral oil. Now you may think that's a lot of oil but we've actually got a half a cup of chopped ginger and a half a cup of scallions about three healthy size scallions. This oil is just about ready because I see the oil moving around it's starting to get that little bit of shimmer. I'm going to put all the scallions in here at once and get a nice little simmer in there. So now this all of these scallions are coated in the oil and we're going to add the ginger. You see now all that oil is absorbed and we're just going to continue cooking here. I'm going to give it a little shake to even things out. Now we're going to add an eighth teaspoon of sand ginger or basically a healthy pinch also the same of fish sauce. This fish sauce is pretty powerful so you really only want to add a little tiny bit. I'm just going to give this a little stir. The heat is a little high. I'm going to turn it down and at this point I'm just going to turn off the flame and now I'm going to mix in three quarter teaspoons of salt and stir all these together and we're going to serve it with our chicken. This is what you get Chinese barbecue restaurant when you get those little tablespoon size containers of sauce. You know sometimes those guys they don't like it when you ask for extra sauce. No because they have limited. That's a lot of sauce. You'd probably have to buy like 20 chickens to get that sauce. All right we're about at the 12 minute mark. That means halfway the 25 minutes cooking and this is actually perfect. You can see the water is moving a little bit. A little bit of bubble every so often. You don't want the boil. You want this. But look at this top here. A little dry. We've been basting it. You see this? You see the difference in the color? So what we're going to do is we're just going to give it a quick flip. All right look at that beautiful golden color. Now make sure the air is out of there and now we're going to put it back in. So now it's turned over. We're going to cook it for another 12 minutes. Okay now it's been a full 25 minutes at this simmer. Let's check this. You kind of want to get a little bit of a grip on it so that when you twist it it's good. And look at that. That makes a big difference there. You get a nice color off the chicken and the color is just perfect. And what I'm going to do is cover it now. Shut the flame off and let the residual heat cook it for another 25 minutes and then we're going to check it after about 10 minutes. So it's been 10 minutes. The chicken looks good. I'm just going to give it a little bit of baste. I was thinking I was going to turn it over but the color looks great. I'm just going to leave it. Now I know there's a lot of Chinese whole chicken dishes out there so it can be confusing. So here's a quick rundown and guide that you can refer to before your next trip to Chinatown. Now you're walking down Chinatown. You walk by a Chinese barbecue restaurant and you see things hanging in the window. You might see this golden brown glistening chicken. Now that's a soy sauce chicken. You also see the ducks. You also see this chicken that's wrapped in paper that has a little bit of scallion and ginger on it. That's a scallion oil chicken. You also see a completely white chicken that looks like a poached chicken. Well that's exactly what it is. Baijieji poached chicken. Now in the restaurants when you sit down, if you're lucky enough to go to a wedding banquet or a birthday banquet where they serve a banquet style meal, there's almost always a crispy skin chicken on the table. And that is a beautiful golden brown. The skin is crispy. Get a few like Pringles chips or shrimp chips on there with a wedge of lemon on there. Some five spice salt on the side. Now that's a different chicken. It's deep fried. Another variation of that is the crispy garlic chicken. Now that's also deep fried except that they pour over a sauce with garlic and soy sauce and other flavorings in it. And that's also delicious. Another one you'll see is a salt baked chicken. It's not as common in these Chinese barbecue restaurants but sometimes you'll see it. Now Judy has a traditional salt baked chicken that she actually cooks in hot salt. So be sure to check that recipe out. All right our chicken is done and I just moved the pot over here. It's been 60 minutes. Now I know that this chicken is done because I've done it so many times. But if you're unsure, use a thermos pen. Stick it in the thick part of the chicken. You can stick it in a couple places. Got to be around 165 degrees for it to be done. But I'm going to take this chicken out now. Okay lift this guy out. I'm just going to let the master sauce drip off as possible and transfer it to a plate. Now here's another indication of doneness as well. This is actually maybe even a little bit overdone where the chicken contracts and you see the bone. But no worries. It's still good. All right so our chicken has rested and I'm going to put this out on the cutting board right now. And usually what we do is we cut this chicken in half right down the breast side. I'm going to cut it on one side of the backbone. Okay and put this half chicken right here and deal with one half. Look at that. Oh that's beautiful. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut off this wing. Chicken is perfectly cooked. And then cut off this thigh here. Okay we got some star anise floating. I might actually put that back in the pot. I'm going to cut a little bit of breast and a little bit of dark meat. Breast meat here. Drumstick there. So now we're ready to try our chicken. All right so we're here for the taste test and I'll tell you the house smells wonderful. And this chicken looks and smells delicious. And what I like to do is I take a little bit of the master sauce directly out of the pot and I use that as a sauce and I just drizzle it on. Now if you're Caitlyn and this is her recipe she likes to put this cooked ginger scallion and this is exactly what the Chinatown barbecue restaurants provide you in a little tiny little thing. Now you got a whole bowl of this because I'm just going to put it on the side here because it's really good on the rice as well and with the chicken. I'm going to just dip this drumstick into the sauce. Oh yeah it's so good. So fragrant. Perfectly cooked. There's no red in this at all. A lot of Chinese barbecue restaurants they have a little red in the bone which generally is harmless but that freaks out a lot of people. So when you cook it at home you can cook it just like this. No red at all. It's delicious folks. I'll put a little ginger scallion. There's some merit to that. It's really good actually. Very good. So now that we've given you all our secrets to making the best soy sauce chicken we hope you try this at home. And if you enjoyed this video give us a like, subscribe to our YouTube channel and visit us on thewalksoflife.com for more of your favorite recipes. My father had ate no rice with his soy sauce chicken and that's because he has to have blood work but here we've got somebody who's willing to have a bite of rice. More than willing you might say. Audience like I'm willing. She's cracking the perfect bite. Well? Perfect bite. This is a very special homemade meal. It's kind of similar lift as a roast chicken. And for the Chinese bà chè gài between bà chè gài which is white cut chicken and the soy sauce chicken they all have their merit. Cantonese you know their chicken. This is an end of season scallion. End of season scallion. I think it's perfect. You know where we grew this out of? We took a little scallion, cut off one inch of it and then we stick them all into the ground and then we can't eat them at all in time. We have so many of them and then this is what you get after like a couple of months at the end of season. We pluck them all out and put them in the fridge.