Kung Pao chicken.
I love this dish because it's very quick
and you can modify it to your liking and you know what?
Switch it up any way you want.
The first thing we're going to do is oyster sauce.
Oyster sauce really is the core
of Chinese cooking, it's not soy sauce.
Hoisin sauce, which is more of a sweet,
kind of caramely coverage to it.
We want to always add a little bit of acid
and this is just basically rice vinegar.
This is Chinese chili garlic sauce.
Now how much of this is totally dependent
on how spicy you like it.
So if I'm cooking for the kids,
I'd probably back down quite a bit.
And then the last thing is a little bit of soy.
A good rule of thumb team is if you're cooking Chinese food
stay with Chinese ingredients, right?
Because Japanese soy is not exactly the same as Chinese.
Guess what? I've just made stir fry sauce,
that's how easy it is.
Let's get into produce prep now.
I always have bell peppers, I always have onions.
I always have scallions and some garlic on hand.
Because that means I can slam together
a stir fry any night of the week.
And you know, whether you marry that to a little bit
of white rice or brown rice, you're good to go.
So I leave the onion flat and I cut
with the edge pointing towards the actual core.
This is how I like to take apart the bell pepper.
I make everything into a tile first.
So there's a tile off the back,
there's a tile off the front, okay?
And then I actually will take my knife in the side,
open up that flap, turn and cut.
And that's how I make bell peppers into one giant tile.
And cut them into kind of a large dice,
like one inch or three quarter inch diced.
Scallions, I usually split them greens to whites.
And if I want a vegetable in a scallion, I'll do one inch.
And you can put an angle on it if you want.
But if I want a garnish, I'll actually take these
and angle them, what we call the bias slice.
Finally, I've got raw protein on deck.
and what I'm doing is using a gel board.
And this knife, once it touches this chicken,
it's going away.
I'm going to cut with the grain first
in about two to four inch width pieces.
And then I'm going to cut against the grain,
angling the knife and making tiles.
This is the cut I like to recommend for stir fry
because check it out, it's nice and thin, okay
and it'll cook up really evenly.
And I'm going to show you how to marinate this chicken
in for maximum deliciousness.
We call this velvet-ing in the Asian kitchen.
So all velvet-ing means is
how do we tenderize it?
How do we get it slippery
and have a beautiful type of texture?
Baking soda is the key.
I would say about a half of a teaspoon per serving.
I've got a little bit of corn starch
for that kind of slippery-ness.
And then finally, a little bit of oil.
You could actually do this a day or two ahead.
You could do this and freeze it.
You can always put a little soy sauce.
So let's do that today, why not, right?
So this would be a dark velvet right here,
which means just adding soy sauce.
This is only going to hang for about a minute or two
which is going to be plenty of time to get tender chicken.
But the longer this goes, the more tender it's going to be.
Well, first things first,
is we're going to get our pan very hot.
You don't need a wok to make great stir fry.
You do need high heat though and neutral oil.
And I'm going to be always using grapeseed oil here.
Canola, peanut, vegetable, you don't need to get fancy,
but you do want to see that oil
hit that smoke point, that is critical.
I'm using the rasp a lot lately for doing garlic.
I really like how even this is.
It's going to cook super fast.
In normal times, if I'm chopping garlic,
I'd let it cook up a little bit,
but since I'm using the rasp,
I'm gonna get the chicken in a lot faster this way.
To cool the pan down to protect that garlic a bit.
Just stir, keep flipping it.
And I can really get in there
and dig out the pieces that are browning.
Because brown food tastes good.
It's a Team Tila mantra.
Chilies, amount is up to you,
but I do want to bloom them a little bit
so I'm going to throw them in now, on the early side.
The only thing I don't want to throw in right now
is probably going to be the scallions.
Because they're going to cook up really, really quickly.
If you feel comfortable, feel free to toss.
The nuts are going to go in.
Look at that, it's already gorgeous.
I'm about a minute out right now.
So this is the time for sauce.
(pan sizzling)
Let's give that sauce a stir, that we made.
You could always extend this sauce with chicken stock.
Let's get those scallions in, okay.
There's only one way to make sure
that what you've cooked is delicious and that's tasting.
So let's give that a roll.
Let's do a little bowl.
Always lastly, in a good stir fry,
for the last bit of aromatic, little white pepper.
Very floral, a little spicy.
Let's do the little bit of the scallions on top.
That's what I'm talking about.
(light music)