Soy sauce chicken with spring onion oil
Easy Chicken Dinners
This is a classic Cantonese style 'lo sui' dish that is frankly so incredibly easy it feels like cheating. This is sometimes called "master stock" in English but I've never called it that (or ever heard any other Chinese people calling it that either.
The chicken is simmered at very low heat so that it is gently cooked and impossibly tender.
After the chicken has been removed, you can bring the braising liquid to the boil, allow it to cool and freeze it for poaching again another time.
Every so often you might need to add a little extra soy sauce, salt or sugar to maintain the seasoning, but you can just eyeball that.
Cooking time
<1hr
Ingredients
- 2 cups soy sauce
- 1 cups dark soy sauce
- 1 brown onion, halved and with the skin on
- 1 thumb-sized knob of ginger, thickly sliced
- 2 star anise
- 2 cinnamon sticks
- 1 piece dried tangerine peel (optional)
- 1½ cups caster sugar
- 6 chicken marylands
- Spring onion oil (makes extra)
- 2 tbsp grated ginger
- 5 spring onions, white and light green part, thinly sliced
- ½ tsp salt flakes
- ½ cup vegetable oil
Method
- Add all the ingredients except the chicken to a very large pot together with 1 litre of water. Bring the pot to the boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Add the chicken and reduce the heat to very low. Cover and simmer for 45 minutes. Turn off the heat and allow the chicken to cool in the liquid for a further 15 minutes.
- Remove 2 cups of the poaching liquid to a small saucepan and bring boil to reduce by about half.
- For the spring onion oil, pound the ginger and spring onions to a coarse paste with the salt in a heatproof mortar. Heat the oil until smoking and pour over the mixture.
- If you can, remove the chicken from the bone and cut into slices. Serve with the spring onion oil.
