Cantonese · Main
See Yau Gai (Soy Sauce Chicken)
- Intermediate
- 35 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, aromatics blooming from the first bite, closing toasted and warm.
Ingredients
- 1 free-range chicken, 1.4 kg
- 600 ml light soy sauce
- 150 ml dark soy sauce
- 1.2 litres water
- 180 g rock sugar
- 100 ml Shaoxing wine
- 40 g ginger, sliced
- 4 spring onions, halved
- 3 star anise
- 1 stick cassia bark
- 2 pieces chan pei (dried tangerine peel)
- 3 cloves
- 2 slices liquorice root
- 10 g sa geung (sand ginger), sliced
- 30 ml sesame oil, to finish
- 2 litres iced water, for the plunge
The skills inside
Brining & curingThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilSalted water & the float testBlanching & shocking
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · 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
- Bring the soys, water, rock sugar, wine, ginger, spring onion and whole spices to a boil in a pot just wide enough to hold the bird, then drop the heat until only a bubble or two breaks the surface every few seconds, around 85C (185F).
- Lower the chicken in breast down, holding the legs so the cavity floods, and lift it clear twice in the first two minutes so the cold cavity liquid drains and is replaced: the brine must never climb back to a rolling boil.
- Poach 25 minutes for a 1.4 kg bird, then kill the heat and leave it covered in the brine off the stove for 20 minutes, until the thickest part of the thigh reads 74C (165F) and runs clear amber juice when pierced. 25 min
- Lift the bird into iced water for 3 minutes, until the skin tightens and squeaks under a finger, then hang it to drip for 10 minutes. 3 min
- Chop through the bone into 2 cm strips, rebuild the bird on the plate, brush with sesame oil and spoon over 100 ml of the hot brine.
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.
Brining & curing 88 recipes
- Fully committed either way: in a wet brine nothing floats clear of the liquid, and in a dry cure every face carries salt, seams and cavities included.
- The time was measured against the weight and the thickness rather than the recipe’s convenience, and it stayed cold for all of it.
- The change is visible and can be felt: the flesh is firmer than raw and its colour has deepened or gone more translucent, rather than still being slack and pale.
- Rinsed and dried as the recipe asks, and anything meant to crisp afterwards has a surface dry and tacky to the touch before it goes near heat.
- Cooked and tasted, it is seasoned right through to the centre rather than merely salty at the surface, and not so salty that the dish cannot be eaten.
Where it goes wrong It sat in the brine well past its time because a few extra hours seemed harmless; the surface is over-salted and the texture has gone from firm to spongy and wet, and no cooking takes salt back out.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Pinot Noir or Gamay
- 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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