Thai chicken with basil.
I like a combination of sweet and hot red peppers
and these are Thai chilies,
these adorable little super spicy guys
and you can use fresh or dried of those.
So this is thyme, mint and basil
and I actually bought it here in upstate New York.
So it is pretty readily available
but of course you can use the traditional
Italian style basil that you get in the grocery store.
For the sauce,
I start with about a half a cup of chicken stock
or broth or bone broth in the bottom of a bowl
and we're going to add about three tablespoons
of pourable light brown sugar.
Start whisking in our ingredients.
Then a tablespoon and a half each
of light soy sauce and dark soy sauce.
Of course, the option here is if you don't have these,
you can of course just use any soy sauce
or tamari or liquid amino that you like.
Then we're going to add one tablespoon each
of very traditional ingredients for Thai cooking,
fish sauce.
That's our salt.
And oyster sauce.
Whisk this up.
Now, this dish can be made with boneless,
skinless chicken breast or thigh.
My pan's getting nice and hot.
We're gonna get the chicken going.
We brown the chicken first
and then we're going to take the chicken out
and cook the peppers and shallots
and now cook the meat in two batches
if you don't have a large enough skillet.
So I'm gonna run my knife through some garlic.
You can slice it.
You can crush it just with your knife and barely touch it,
okay, or you can grate it with a hand grater,
whatever's easiest for you and you want
oh, two to three clothes per pound of chicken.
I already have some ginger root
that I started working on over here
and I have four large shallots sliced up.
If you want a milder chili flavor, spicy but not crazy,
just add one or two little Thai chilies and split them.
If you're using dry chilies,
you can add just a few whole and don't eat them,
discard them.
When you dish it up,
tell everybody, oh, just put the chilies off to the side.
It'll give heat to the dish without it getting too spicy.
We love spicy food, everyone in my family so I've chopped,
finely chopped the whole little Thai bird chili
and we've got store-bought peppers
and these were from our garden.
These are mild to moderate heat
and I've just run my knife through them like this.
Let's get the chicken out of the pan, shall we,
'cause it smells like it's done.
Add some more high temperature cooking oil.
Now, what does that mean?
Grapeseed, peanut, safflower.
All of our peppers go in.
They can go in with our shallots.
So now we're gonna add in our garlic, our ginger
now that we've let some of the liquid start to come out
of our peppers and shallots.
Our sauce has been patiently waiting.
The basil and mint.
Okay, so now I would serve this right from the skillet
'cause it's so beautiful.
The green onions and I have our rice.
Jasmine rice made to package directions
with the exception of how do we cook our rice, John?
We add in half chicken stock.
Yeah, we use half stock, half water
so that the rice has tons of flavor.