Sous Vide Chinese Soy Sauce Chicken (慢煮豉油雞)

Ready to go? Classic Chinese soy sauce chicken. Soy sauce chicken is a traditional Cantonese dish. It's the one that's hanging, you know, in the supermarkets or the barbecue shops. It's not the red one, which is a duck, and there's a white one. This is the brown one. The brown hanging chicken. A good soy sauce chicken is characterized by tender, juicy meat. The bone, you want it to be a little red, but never bloody. You can't eat raw chicken anyway. Okay, fine. You don't want the bone to be completely like brown and, you know, you know what I mean? Perfectly cooked at the extremely perfect temperature. No bleeding chicken today, that's the goal. Only in Japan. Chicken sashimi. Traditionally, how it's made is that it's in a wok with the soy sauce chicken sauce, and then you kind of like keep flipping it every five minutes, and then you have to like keep turning it and putting it on. And you have to cross your fingers that it doesn't stick to the wok, and you lose all your beautiful skin. Yeah, it's a long process. I think it takes about like 45 minutes to an hour, just like kind of standing there, flipping, flipping. So that's why we're doing it in the sous vide today. So the star of soy sauce chicken is... The chicken. Actually, it's the soy sauce. Well, I guess it is the chicken, but let's talk a bit about soy sauce. When you go to the Chinese supermarket, there's literally like an entire aisle of soy sauce. That's not just the different brands. There's different types of soy sauce. The regular soy sauce, called 生抽, which is light or fresh soy sauce. AKA the one that white people put on rice. I don't know if I can say that. This is not helping, but the color is less dark, and it's actually more salty. You use it for cooking to control the salt level. 老抽, the dark soy sauce or the old soy sauce. I don't know if you can see, but it's a little bit more thick. This is used for coloring meats, for long stews, long cooks. Things like the red braised pork, we use this. It's less salty, have a slightly sweet flavor. And this one that I'm introducing today, and what we'll be using is called 头抽, which is like the head soy or like the first soy. Soy sauce is made by fermenting the beans and brewing the beans. This is the first press. So if you think of it as olive oil, like extra virgin olive oil is the first press. So this stuff is the premium stuff. It's what we'll use for our chicken today. Our premium chicken. Our premium chicken with the premium soy sauce. Funny story, when I was a kid, like we fry our eggs and we put soy sauce on our eggs. And when I go to the pantry, there's always a lot of different kinds of soy sauce. And I always put the wrong one. And I might've got beats for it. Because you're using a premium soy sauce. Why do you need a premium one? I didn't use a premium soy sauce. Whenever I use it, I always somehow got the really dark, thick one. And I put it on my eggs. I was like, what is this? It's like molasses. Yeah, so that's the aged dark soy sauce. That's the color. Yeah. My parents were not happy every time I did that. So do you want to try it? You remember what happened last time I tried it? Okay, let's not. We got the organic free run chicken from the Chinese supermarket. Yeah. I feel like it's less fat. It's a little more yellow. It comes with everything. Yeah, yeah. Remember the first time you opened one of these chickens? Yeah, I didn't know because they packaged it in a way where the head is kind of like tucked in and the claws are all tucked in. And so when I opened it and there was this head and eye staring back at me, I'm like, oh my God, what did I get myself into? So I was washing the chicken and I don't do that anymore now. And then suddenly all of the guts and everything fell out and I screamed. Yeah, so that's that. I'm much more educated now and much more prepared. But anyway, you can deal with the chicken. I'm ready. Off with the head. Where's that from? Alice in Wonderland. All right, so off with the head. Ours comes with claws or the feet. So you want to take those out. And now I don't know if you guys eat chicken feet. If you do eat chicken feet, you can keep them. But I will still suggest to cut them off. Oh yeah, cut the butt off. Give them a nice manicure, Kevin. It only has four claws. Yes, you never noticed when you have dim sum what it looks like. You know, I don't like it at dim sum. I never, I usually don't eat it. And when I do, I just pop it all, the whole thing into my mouth and then clean it in my mouth. I don't know if this one have guts. This one does not have the guts. Actually, let's trim the fat off as well. A little bit? Okay. Yeah, the sous vide is not very good with rendering fat. Let's marinate our friend. Two teaspoons of salt. And you give it a nice massage. Make sure it gets into the armpits and you know, all the nitty gritty places. Yep. This is a smaller chicken. I don't have to completely use the whole two teaspoons. Just, it depends on the size of your chicken. And then we have the rose wine, which is a very unique flavor. Actually, this is what the bottle looks like when you look for it in Chinese supermarket. Look for this green bottle. Okay, so we have two teaspoons of rose wine. So I'll put a little half of this here first. Yep. Give it a nice massage, please. The chicken spa. Two teaspoons of dark soy sauce for color. Okay. Give it some tanning. Flip. Okay. Actually, we should make sure there's some stuff inside the cavity too. Rose wine again. This is the rest of it. Yep. And the dark soy sauce. Yep. All right. So our little friend goes into the fridge for at least an hour, but best if it's overnight for marinating. Yep. This will give it some good flavor and color. So let's make the soy sauce chicken sauce. Stir fry the aromatics. Okay. A little bit of oil. Yep. We have two star anise. Crushed garlic. Three pieces of ginger. Two stalks of scallion. Now, scallions are huge, so it seems like a lot. Garlic, ginger, and scallion is kind of like the trinity of Chinese cooking. For Western cooking, it's carrots, celery, and onions, but Chinese is these three. Stir fry until aromatic. All right. So the next step is to put in 250 ml of your premium soy sauce. Two bay leaves. Smells good. Two teaspoons of dark soy sauce or old soy sauce for coloring. This is rock sugar. So with rock sugar, it's kind of hard to measure how much to put in because when you buy it, it's just literally giant lumps like this. Just Chinese style, whatever you think makes sense. It looks good, then okay, fine. Just one piece. Then you just kind of cook it down until it melts. 250 ml of water. All right. Okay. Now we just simmer. When the rock sugar has completely melted, you can turn off the heat and then add your two teaspoons of rose wine. So why do you add it at the end? We add it at the end because we don't want the wine to evaporate. If you evaporate, then you lose all the flavor. Now we need to cool this until it's room temperature and we're good to go. Now our chicken's ready from the fridge. Yep. Our sauce has cooled down from yesterday. Let's bag our chicken. So for this one, we're using the freezer bags because we're putting a lot of liquid in there and we're putting it into the food saver would not be very fun to clean. We're going to use a water displacement method to get rid of as much air as we can, but it's fine because we're poaching it and it's going to be encapsulated in liquid anyway. Do me the honor of holding the bag. So we put the chicken in. I don't think it matters which way it goes and then I'll put the feet in too. Okay. Don't miss. I'm scared. You can do it. Go fast, go fast. Yeah, there you go. It smells really nice. Yeah. If you don't want to prepare all this stuff, if you're lazier than us, you can easily go to the Chinese supermarket, the soy sauce section. There is actually a soy sauce chicken, soy sauce, a whole bottle. Just dump it in. Then you're good. This is a good time to check if you already have any leaks. Make sure you have no leaks. You'll probably see them. Do you want to double bag? And then we will definitely double bag. I always double bag when I use Ziploc bags. I've just had too many bad experiences. One time I double bagged and I still boiled my steak. So double bag. Remember earlier I said that the trademark of a good soy sauce chicken is the tender meat and the red bone, but it's not bloody. So let's take a look. The bone is red. And it's not bloody. Juicy, I think. Yeah? Yeah. Pass. All right, I'm going to try these. So this green sauce is the stuff that you get with your usually barbecue, I guess, barbecue meats or chicken meats. It's just ginger, scallion, oil, salt. Very good. It's very tender. Salty, not too salty. That was a breast piece. And the breast piece was really tender. If you look at this, it doesn't look dry at all. No. It's very, very... Hey, you took my skin. Oh, no, I'm just showing people here. Take it back. Thank you. Tender, but not bloody. It's very good. I would definitely make this. It's so easy. So usually, when we sous vide something, we have to finish it like the chicken thighs, the barbecue pork, the ribs. Everything had another step after sous vide. Yes. But this one, it goes from sous vide straight into your mouth. Well, you kind of have to cool it and chop it. But since it's a soy sauce chicken, there's already color. And it's not supposed to be... The skin is not supposed to be crispy or whatever, right? It's poached. So that's it. This is like our fourth meal today. I'm so full.