Sichuan · Starter
Guaiwei Ji Si
- Intermediate
- 30 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with toasted, nutty warmth throughout, aromatics blooming from the first bite, finishing long and savory.
Ingredients
- 600 g free range chicken, leg and breast on the bone
- 30 g ginger, sliced
- 2 spring onions
- 10 ml Shaoxing wine
- 150 g cucumber, cut in fine batons
- 30 g zhima jiang (Chinese sesame paste)
- 30 ml light soy sauce
- 20 ml Baoning vinegar
- 15 g caster sugar
- 40 ml hongyou, with its sediment
- 10 ml roasted sesame oil
- 3 g ground roasted huajiao
- 15 g garlic, crushed to a paste
- 20 g spring onion greens, sliced fine
- 30 g roasted peanuts, crushed
- 3 g salt
The skills inside
The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilBlanching & shockingKnife cuts: dice, julienne, bias
The words inside
Cleavers: Chinese Chef vs. Bone
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · nuts · peanuts · soy · sesame · alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Poach the chicken with ginger, spring onion and wine at 80C (175F), never letting it boil, for about 20 minutes, then drop it straight into iced water until cold through; the skin tightens and the flesh stays juicy. 20 min
- Let the sesame paste down with the soy and vinegar a spoonful at a time, stirring smooth after each addition. Add the liquid all at once and the paste seizes into grit that never comes back.
- Beat in sugar, salt, garlic, ground huajiao, sesame oil and hongyou, then taste for each flavour in turn, salty, sweet, sour, numbing, hot, fragrant and nutty, correcting until none of them arrives first.
- Tear the cold chicken along the grain into shreds about the thickness of a pencil lead, discarding bone and keeping the skin.
- Bed the cucumber, pile the shreds on it and spoon the sauce over only as it goes out; dressed early, the shreds go slack and the sauce splits.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Blanching & shocking 76 recipes
- A large volume at a hard rolling boil, and enough of it that adding the food barely interrupts it; a pot that goes quiet has started stewing rather than blanching.
- Timed rather than watched, and short. This is an interruption in the cooking of something, not the cooking of it.
- The ice bath was made and standing beside the pot BEFORE anything went into the water, not started once the timer went off.
- It went straight into the ice water, fully submerged, and stayed until cold at the centre: a piece still warm inside is still cooking, and the arrest has not happened yet.
- Drained and dried afterwards rather than left sitting in water, so it does not carry that water into whatever it meets next.
Where it goes wrong The ice bath was not ready, so the food sat draining in a colander while its own residual heat carried on cooking it. By the time it cooled it was a stage past where it was pulled, and exact arrest is the entire reason for blanching rather than simply boiling.
Knife cuts: dice, julienne, bias 150 recipes
- Take any three pieces from anywhere in the pile: they match closely enough in every dimension that you would have to measure them to argue otherwise.
- The cut faces are flat and clean rather than ragged or crushed; leaves and herbs are cut through, not bruised, and the board carries no dark smear where they were.
- The stated size is the actual size, held against a rule or a known reference rather than called about right.
- Everything in the pile is the shape that was asked for: no wedges, no half pieces, and no offcuts swept in to avoid waste.
- They cook evenly, which is the entire point: at the end of cooking nothing is still raw and nothing has collapsed.
Where it goes wrong The knife was dull, or the vegetable was never squared off first, so the pieces vary: the small ones are mush by the time the large ones are cooked, and the dish has two textures where it wanted one.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Chardonnay (village Burgundy)
- Also Right
- Chenin Blanc
- From the Taps
- Bière de garde
- Zero-Proof
- Verbena iced tea
Chicken is wine’s most agreeable partner. Match the SAUCE, not the bird: cream to oak, tomato to Sangiovese’s acid, herbs to Loire whites.
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