Chinatown-Style Kung Pao Chicken with Vegetables

Today Miriam, author of El Invitado de Invierno, brings us a chicken and vegetable recipe, prepared in a traditional cast-iron skillet and focusing the appeal of the recipe on the way the vegetables are cut: with the help of the Spirelli spiralizer, she gets these spirals that make the recipe original and remind us of noodles also typical of Asian cuisine. With its spicy touch, it’s a really tasty recipe you must try!

Today we go a bit oriental with this delicious stir-fried chicken and vegetables recipe for which we allowed ourselves to make some super-cute zucchini spirals. This kung pao stir-fry is one of those sweet-and-spicy dishes characteristic of certain areas of China, as it includes soy sauce, rice vinegar and chilies.

This recipe is taken from one of my favorite websites, Serious Eats, specifically from Mr. J. Kenji López-Alt, a theorist of good cooking who writes very interesting articles. In English, sorry. For the quick stir-fry as if in a wok I used my De Buyer pan, because it transmits the heat perfectly.

The original Sichuan dish is much spicier than the one we prepared because it uses tons of chilies and Sichuan pepper; this is the milder version adapted to the North American tastes sold by Chinese take-away restaurants in Chinatown, New York. That way you can feel like when our Friends ate with their chopsticks from those iconic takeout boxes that appear in all U.S. series and movies. And everyone is skinny. Oh, the magic of cinema.

De Buyer Mineral B iron frying pan and Emile Henry Pavot Blue ceramic dishes

Ingredients (for 4 people)

For the kung pao sauce:

• 3 garlic cloves
• 2 tbsp. fresh grated ginger
• neutral oil (sunflower, for example)
• 240 ml dark soy sauce
• 3 tbsp. sugar
• 115 ml rice vinegar
• 1 tbsp. cornstarch dissolved in 2 tbsp. cold water
• crushed chilies to taste

For the chicken with vegetables:

• 500 g chicken meat (breast or boneless thighs)
• 1 bell pepper
• 1 medium zucchini
• ¼ of a spring onion
• 1 generous handful raw peanuts

Directions

1. We start by preparing the sauce: crush the garlic and grate the fresh ginger. Put the cornstarch in the water to hydrate. Crumble the chili if using. If you don’t like it very spicy, one chili is enough.
2. Cover the bottom of a pan with a splash of neutral oil and sauté the crushed garlic and ginger over high heat. When the aromatics begin to toast, add the soy sauce and deglaze.
3. Then add the sugar and rice vinegar, mix briefly and heat over medium until it boils. Add the cornstarch and mix vigorously because lumps will start to form. Cook a couple of minutes until it thickens. Set aside.
4. Cut the chicken into not-too-large cubes and put them in a bowl to marinate with a couple of tablespoons of the sauce, about 20 minutes.
5. Cut the pepper into small cubes and the spring onion into strips. Also cut the zucchini into long strips with a spiralizer (if you don’t have one, slice it into thin strips), like long pasta. Put the zucchini in a colander with some salt so it releases water and doesn’t water down the final dish.

Spiralizer Spirelli 2.0., Pallarès carbon steel knife and Emile Henry ceramic plate

Cover the bottom of a cast-iron pan or wok with some oil and heat over high. Sear the chicken until it changes color on the outside, but without cooking through. Remove it.

Add a bit more oil and do the same with the pepper and spring onion, until they begin to brown. Then add the zucchini, which takes less time to soften, and continue stir-frying until the vegetables are a bit browned but still crisp. Also add the peanuts to toast them.

Lower the heat, return the chicken to the pan and add the sauce; mix well, turn off the heat and let it finish covered for a couple of minutes with the residual heat. You’ll see the chicken and vegetables come out perfectly cooked. Enjoy, dear ones.