Chinatown style kung pao chicken with vegetables

Today Miriam, author of El Invitado de Invierno , brings us a recipe for chicken with vegetables, prepared in a traditional iron skillet and looking for the appeal of the recipe in the way of cutting the vegetables: with the help of spirelli , get these spirals that make the original recipe and remind us of the noodles also typical of Asian cuisine. With its spicy touch, it is a rich rich recipe that you cannot stop trying!

Today we are orientalizing with this delicious recipe for stir-fried chicken and vegetables for which we have allowed ourselves to make some delicious zucchini spirals. This kung pao stir-fry is one of those dishes with a sweet and sour flavor characteristic of certain areas of China, as it contains soy sauce, rice vinegar and chili peppers.

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

The original Sichuan dish is much spicier than the one we have prepared because it has tons of chilli peppers and Sichuan pepper; This is the milder version, adapted to North American tastes, that is sold by the Chinese take-away restaurants in Chinatown, in New York. So you can feel like when our friends from Friends ate with their chopsticks from those characteristic little boxes that appear in all the American series and movies. And they are all skinny. Oh, the magic of celluloid.

Mineral B iron skillet by De Buyer and ceramic plates by Emile Henry Azul Pavot

Ingredients for 4 people)

For the kung pao sauce:

• 3 garlic cloves
• 2 tbsp. grated fresh ginger
• mild oil (sunflower, for example)
• 240 ml dark soy sauce
• 3 tbsp. of sugar
• 115ml rice vinegar
• 1 tbsp. of Maizena diluted in 2 tbsp. cold water
• mashed chili peppers to taste of each one

For the chicken with vegetables:

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

Elaboration

1. We start by preparing the sauce: we mash the garlic and grate the fresh ginger. We put the cornstarch in the water so that it hydrates. We crumble the chilli, if we put it. If you don't like spiciness very much, putting a chilli pepper is enough.
2. Cover the bottom of a frying pan with a dash of mild oil and sauté the garlic and ginger mash over high heat. When the seasonings begin to toast, add the soy sauce and deglaze.
3. Then add the sugar and rice vinegar, mix briefly and heat over medium heat until it boils. Add the cornstarch and mix vigorously because lumps will begin to form. Cook for a couple of minutes until thick. We booked.
4. Cut the chicken meat into not very large cubes and put it in a bowl to marinate with a couple of tablespoons of the sauce, about 20 minutes.
5. Cut the pepper into squares and the spring onion into strips. We also cut the zucchini into long strips with a spiralizer (if we don't have a spiralizer, we cut it into thin strips), as if it were long pasta. We put the zucchini in a strainer with some salt so that it releases water and does not drain the final dish.

Spirelli 2.0 spirilizer, Pallarès carbon iron knife and Emile Henry ceramic plate

Cover the bottom of an iron skillet or wok with some oil and heat over high heat. Sauté the chicken until it changes color on the outside, but without changing color on the inside. We remove it.

Add a little more oil and do the same with the pepper and spring onion, until they start to turn golden. Then add the zucchini, which takes less time to soften, and continue sautéing until the vegetables are slightly golden, but crisp. We also add the peanuts to be skipped.

We lower the heat, return the chicken to the pan and add the sauce; Mix well, turn off the heat and let it cook covered for a couple of minutes with the residual heat. You will see how the chicken and vegetables are at their point. Bon appetit, dear ones.