Sesame Chicken

I love lots of Chinese food, but Sesame Chicken is by far my favorite. I have wanted to learn how to make it myself for a long time but didn’t think it was a dish that could be made properly by home cooks (don’t know why I thought that). Anyway, I came across this great recipe online at MyKitchenSnippets, modified it slightly, and dove in. Verdict: Delicious! This recipe is not for beginning cooks, but it’s not super hard.

Sesame Chicken
Total Prep Time (including marinating time): Approx. 90 minutes
Yield: About 2 servings, depending how large you like your portions

Ingredients:

3 pieces of chicken breast, cut into bite-size pieces
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon cooking wine
1/2 tablespoon sesame oil
1 teaspoon sugar
2 tablespoons flour
1 tablespoon cornstarch or rice flour
Salt & pepper to taste

Sauce:

3 tablespoons of sweet chili sauce
2 tablespoons of ketchup
1 1/2 tablespoons of honey
2 tablespoons of soy sauce
1/4 cup water
Sesame seeds, toasted or untoasted

1) Marinate chicken with soy sauce, wine, sugar, sesame oil, salt and pepper for at least an hour.

2) Just before frying, combine the flour and cornstarch and mix it into the chicken, making sure each piece is well-coated.

3) Prepare the oil for frying. I’d never fried anything before, so this was new to me. I don’t have any pictures of this portion because it’s a very delicate process and I didn’t want to burn the kitchen (or myself) down. I used a stock pot so the oil couldn’t splatter and burn me. I put about 3/4 of a bottle of vegetable oil into the pot to make sure the oil was a couple inches deep and heated it to about 350 degrees (get a frying thermometer so you can check the temperature as you’re heating it or you might have a disaster on your hands). If you’re using a shorter pot, make sure you have several inches above your oil level. Then, turn the heat down to medium so the temperature levels out.

4) Fry your chicken. Use tongs or a frying basket so you don’t end up with burns! Using tongs, I put a few pieces of chicken into the hot oil at a time—carefully! But do it quickly. Keep an eye on them until they’re nice and golden brown. Turn off the heat when they’re done and carefully remove the pieces with tongs, setting on paper towels to drain. They should look something like this:

5) Let those cool while you prepare the sauce. Mix together your sauce ingredients (but don’t add the sesame seeds yet). Wisk it so it’s super smooth, like this:

6) Pour this into a saucepan and bring it to a boil. Then leave it alone for a couple minutes until it thickens up a bit. It should look something like this:

7) Now bring it back down to a simmer and add in all your chicken pieces. Mix it up really well so all your chicken pieces have a nice, even, thick coating. Now sprinkle on your sesame seeds…you can use as many or as few as you like.

8) Serve over rice and enjoy!

Side Note: Apparently you can filter and re-use your oil after you’re done frying. I was lazy, so I just threw mine out. It wasn’t very thrifty of me. Oops.