13.180 Soy Sauce Chicken

Cycle 13 – Item 180

4 (Mon) July 2022

Soy Sauce Chicken

3.0

by me

at home

-Changgok, Sujeong, Seongnam, Gyeonggi, Republic of Korea-

with IZ

Lately, I’ve been watching Made with Lau, a cooking channel on YouTube featuring a retired Cantonese chef making dishes in his home kitchen in the San Francisco Bay Area.  The chef speaks in Cantonese, subtitled in Cantonese and English, along with English voice-over explanations from his son.

A recent episode shows soy sauce chicken (see How My Dad Cooks the JUICIEST Whole Chicken).

The first step was to blanch the chicken with boiling water, which makes the skin contract, supposedly making it more amenable to taking on color.

I can’t recall ever ordering the dish – in any restaurant that would offer soy sauce chicken, I would rather get the roast duck – but the technique looked easy enough to give it a shot.

Next time, I’ll use more dark soy sauce and cook the bird completely submerged to promote better browning all around.

The amount of cooking liquid called for in the recipe only came halfway up the pot, so I had to turn the chicken every 20 minutes, leaving one side above the line and therefore not browning at any given moment.

Also, my poor chop-through-bones knife skills left the pieces was somewhat mangled and entirely skinless.

Anyway, it still turned out pretty well.  The meat was juicy and flavorful, enhanced by the silky savory soy sauce made by thickening the cooking liquid.  This has the potential to become a family staple.

(See also GLOBAL FOOD GLOSSARY)

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