Welcome back to the Ayi’s Recipes food series. Last week Ayi Yuan and I gave you Mapo Tofu, and this week we are sharing our recipe for one of China’s most loved and sought-after dishes, Kung Pao Chicken. This sticky, sweet, and spicy medley of chicken, leek, and cucumber has to be in the top-five list of my favorite Chinese dishes. There is a reccurring theme that you may have noticed so far in my choice of recipes – I like a dish to pack a punch in flavor, and chili will always be a part of the mix!

If you’ve not already taken advantage of the plethora of markets packed full of traditional Chinese ingredients dotted around this city, now is the time. You’re living in one the most colorful and diverse hubs when it comes to cuisine, and what better place to experiment with your cooking skills?

Chinese fare is as dynamic as this nation and is centered on time-old traditions, folklore, fanfare, and family. Learn, brush up, or fine-tune existing Chinese cooking techniques and knowledge with your ayi – don’t have an ayi? Follow this series and use these simple recipes to start your own cooking journey at home.

Get familiar with the basics of the dish

Ingredients

 1 large chicken breast, diced.

1 cup chopped leek

1/2 cup spring onions (optional)

1/2 cup diced cucumber

1 tbsp. ginger

1/2 cup peanuts

1/2 cup Sichuan chili

2 tbsp. granulated sugar

2 tsp. salt

2 tbsp. soy sauce

2 tbsp. Chinese yellow wine vinegar

1.5 tbsp. corn flour

1/2 cup peanut oil

1/2 cup distilled lukewarm water

This dish is all about stir-frying. Keep it moving

Instructions

1. Add a teaspoon of corn flour, 1 tablespoon of soy, 1 teaspoon of salt and 1 tablespoon of Chinese yellow wine vinegar to the diced chicken. Mix well and set aside.
2. Use a Wok and heat the peanut oil over a medium-high heat and add the peanuts. Stir-fry for 5 minutes until aromatic, drain and set aside.
3. Roughly chop the Sichuan chili and add to the oil with the ginger, leek and cucumber. Stir-fry for a few minutes until the leek and cucumber begin to soften.
4. Add the diced chicken and stir-fry until sealed and golden brown
5. Stir the remaining corn flour into the distilled water and add to the wok.
6. Add and stir in the remaining Chinese yellow wine vinegar, salt, and soy sauce
7. Add the sugar and stir in until the sauce begins to thicken. Add more corn flour if needed to make a thicker sauce. Continue to stir-fry for 2 minutes.
8. Add the peanuts and stir-fry for a further 2 minutes. Dish out the Kung Pao Chicken and serve!

The result should be a steaming bowl of deliciousness

Top Tips:There are a number of variations of this dish, and sometimes I like to add chopped celery and carrots. These would go in with the leeks and stir-fried until soft before adding the chicken. For a spicier dish add fresh red chili, or omit the chili altogether for a milder version. The same goes for the sugar. Add more for a sweeter and stickier sauce, or less for more of a savory version.

Photos: Nicole Bonnah

One indication that you’ve been an expat in China for too long is when you’re away on holiday, and you start craving some local Beijing delicacies. Every summer I go back to the UK, and once I’ve had my fill of Sunday roasts, proper bacon, and fish and chips, I start to miss my Ayi’s jiaozi, and the kids are the same. Having not yet mastered the skill of making them myself, we have to be content with going to a Chinese restaurant or getting take-out.

At the moment we’re staying with my parents in Bournemouth. For those of you unfamiliar with this location, here is a short geography lesson – it’s a large coastal resort town on the south coast of England, directly to the east of the Jurassic Coast, a 95 mile World Heritage Site. To the west is Sandbanks peninsula, which is one of the most expensive places to live in Europe, just because of the sea views. Bournemouth has a population of less than 200,000, enjoys 7.7 hours of summer sunshine a day, and serves up more than 2,000 ice creams a day on its seven miles of seafront.

It has many Chinese restaurants, but the authenticity of the food served in most would be questionable. Then someone told me about The Mandarin. It claims to have been serving authentic Chinese cuisine since 1969, and invites you to “experience the true taste of modern China”. The menu incorporates the contrasting tastes of Canton, Beijing and Sichuan cuisine. Considering it is packed out during lunchtimes and evenings, it’s got to be pretty good. Having failed on several attempts to secure a table, we decided to do take-out instead.

We started with some Bang Bang Chicken, a popular Sichuan dish of cold shredded chicken dressed with a salty, sweet, sour, nutty, and hot sauce. It was fabulous and with superb flavor. We were off to a great start. The grilled pork dumplings, or “potstickers”, were delightful tasting wonton dumplings, stuffed full of minced pork, with chopped chives and scallions. They were crispy and crunchy on the fried side and soft and fleshy on the broth simmered side. The kids were grinning from ear to ear. We all dived into a bowl of spare ribs “Peking Style”, which were perhaps not as meaty as ones you’d get in Beijing, but they had the same wonderful sweet and sticky glaze.

Kung Pao chicken, also known as Kung Po or Gong Bao, is that fabulous spicy stir-fry dish of chicken, peanuts, vegetables, and chili peppers. This classic dish is one of my favorites to enjoy in Beijing, so I was a little disappointed to find the version served at The Mandarin was not nearly fiery enough. The chicken was good, there were plenty of scallions, and it had a tasty sauce, but the chilies were not hot ones. For some reason they used cashews instead of peanuts, so this dish really didn’t meet my expectations at all.

Mapo doufu is another Sichuan dish, a combination of tofu set in a spicy chili and bean based sauce, cooked with minced meat. In this case it was minced beef and it was superb. It was a fiery little number, which made me wonder why they’d held back on the Kung Pao. The tofu was perfectly prepared and cooked despite being characterized by its thin oily sauce, the dish still managed to taste somehow light. The final dish was stir-fried shredded chicken in XO sauce, a spicy seafood sauce that originated in Hong Kong. This dish was very well done, and proved a hit with everyone. Steamed rice was served alongside, but no pulled noodles unfortunately.

Outside of major UK cities it’s quite hard to find authentic tasting Chinese food. So I was pleasantly surprised that The Mandarin gets it just about right. For us anyway, my Chinese friends and colleagues may disagree of course. For a restaurant outside of London it is quite expensive, but the chefs clearly know what they’re doing, the ingredients were fresh, great quality, and the cooking techniques superb.

They also have Peking duck on the menu, carved at your table, the skin served first. A part of me is tempted to give it a try. But I really don’t think a restaurant in Bournemouth, no matter how authentic, can ever reach the standards of Běijīng kǎo yā served in a Beijing restaurant.

beijingkids Shunyi Correspondent Sally Wilson moved to Beijing in 2010 from the UK with her husband and son. Her daughter was born here in 2011 and both her kids keep her happily busy. In her spare time, Sally loves to stroll through Beijing’s hutongs and parks. She is a (most of the time) keen runner and loves reading: books, magazines, news, and celeb websites – anything really. Sally is also a bit of a foodie and loves trying out new restaurants.

Photos: Sally Wilson and courtesy of The Mandarin

With Beijing being a ghost town, restaurants closed or operating at unusual times. Don’t let the cravings for Chinese meals stop you from satisfying that need. From our archives here is how to make the classic gongbao jiding

Outside of China, think Chinese food and one of the first dishes that probably comes to mind is kungpao (or gongbao)chicken. The sweet-salty-spicy flavor in the chicken and the crunch in the mouth from the peanuts is a winning combination. It’s a popular take-out food and sometimes comes in those adorable New York style cardboard boxes that feature in many a Hollywood movie. It is best savored with steaming hot rice. 

The dish is said to have been named after Qing Dynasty official Ding Baozhen, whose official title was Gongbao, which literally means “palace guardian.” During the Cultural Revolution, the name of the dish was considered politically incorrect because of its association with an imperial officer, so it was renamed hongbao jiding (fast-fried chicken cubes) or hula jiding (chicken cubes with seared chillies). By the 1980s, the original name was restored to the dish.

This classic gongbao jiding of Szechuan cuisine involves a tongue-numbing experience, thanks to generous portions of flaming hot Szechuan peppercorms. It is not a sensation that agrees with most foreigners, so over the years variations have been made on the original recipe to make it milder and more suited for non-Chinese palates. In the United States, a ban on the import of Szechuan peppers was in effect from 1968 to 2005 because the peppers were known to carry a tree disease that could infect other crops. The ban resulted in yet a another form of the recipe that does not use the peppercorns and is now widely accepted as the American-style gong bao chicken.

When we tried to replicate this staple Chinese dish at home recently, we also chose to omit the fistfuls of Szechuan pepper that were recommended. However, we used a packet of Chinese gongbao jiding mix, and this resulted in a fiery flavor without numbing our taste buds. The gongbao jiding packet is available in any grocery store or market, local or for expats, for approximately RMB5. Picking up a ready-mix seasoning packet is a good way to introduce yourself to Chinese cooking, and eliminates the need for buying several different ingredients that you will use only very little of.

Find out more here.

Photos by Dana Cosio-Mercado