However it’s used in several dishes in Sichuan Cuisine in Both Chinese and English, so evidently it is not unusual there. But I had never run across it in Chinese cooking. I learned that in a cooking class in Saigon, where it was featured in one of the most popular Vietnamese dishes. I know Vietnamese cooks use a caramel base in their clay-pot pork and fish dishes. Two brands of Shaoxing wine and a sherry substitute But real Shaoxing wine is best and is easily found at Chinese markets. Taylor even makes a sherry for cooking, available at all liquor stores, which, though inexpensive, is a huge step up from grocery-store cooking sherry. It’s important to use the Shaoxing-though the best substitution of all substitutions frequently made for Chinese ingredients is using pale or golden sherry in place of Shaoxing. The recipe relies for flavoring and coloring on Shaoxing wine, caramelized sugar and ginger. Dried Chinese shitake mushrooms are a great pantry staple Reconstitute dried mushrooms in boiling-hot water I also added the shitake mushrooms to the recipe-reconstituted from dry-because it makes a fuller one-pot meal. The recipe calls for asparagus lettuce (celtuce), but that’s hard to come by in the U.S. So I put them to work chopping, the greater part of the cooking effort with any Chinese dish.įor this dish it was really only celery, shitake mushrooms and ginger. Yulian was eager not only to eat but to learn, since her family of 16 people doesn’t often cook Chinese. But this was the first time they’d seen each other in almost four years. Yulian was adopted by a wonderful family in Chicago about six months before Fongchong joined our family, and they have remained good friends through FaceTime, QQ and text. Yulian is an old friend of Fongchong’s from her village in rural Guangzhou, and she eats like a normal Cantonese it’s FC who’s got the unusual palate for a Cantonese, with a constant craving for spicy food. Teens with cleavers! Two girls who grew up in China, learning to cook Chinese in America So this dish satisfied both those goals that week, since I had not one but two hungry-for-Chinese girls on my hands.

A home cook will almost always prepare a braised dish to go along with stir-fries, not only because it varies the tastes in the meal but also because it can be made in advance. In fact, a great deal of it is braised, boiled or steamed. Though you wouldn’t know it from American-Chinese restaurants, not all Chinese food is stir-fried. It is comforting in the extreme but not dull in the least. I just had to call on all the dishes I make that aren’t spicy, starting with this one for Shoaxing wine and ginger chicken stew, more poetically called golden chicken stew, which has intense chicken flavor punctuated by the slightly sweet nuttiness of yellow wine from Shaoxing and the slightly sweet heat of ginger with an undertone of caramelized sugar.

And this was a real challenge for me, since almost everything I make has at least a hint of spice. But we adapted that week and still ate well. Recently we had a Chinese friend stay with us for a week who doesn’t eat spicy food. I gave it a star for being easy, a star for the chicken coming out well, and one more because I think this may be tastier with some tweaking, something to make the sauce a little more savoury maybe.Jump to Recipe – proceed at owN risk Chengdu Challenge #7: Caramel, Wine and Ginger Make Stew Sexy Although we did not salt & pepper it on our plates, I just sprinkled it with the parsley,(which did look nice.) I was quite surprised with the results,as usually Campbells recipes are pretty tasty.I think they may need to go back to the drawing board for this one, sorry. I then asked my husband if he liked it and he said, no, not really,it's bland. While the chicken turned out great,(it was falling apart), during my first few bites I was trying to figure out what it was missing. prior to the 4 hour mark, so I turned it to high for that 15 mins & thickened the sauce with some cornstartch, as it was still pretty soupy. I added some Salt & Pepper to the breasts and a little pepper to the sauce. I kept the sauce ingredients the same as I wanted to have lots to put over the noodles. I made this recipe exactly as stated except I only used 4 chicken breasts and a few less carrots.

Golden chicken recipe