Chris Makes Chicken Stir-Fry

Am I the only person who for years would stand their

ear of corn upright to cut the kernels off?

You did that too.

[Crew] I did that the other day.

Why were we not laying the corn down

and cutting the kernels off that way

so they have less far to travel and ping everywhere.

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How do you even define a stir fry

because it's a set of techniques that

often are lumped together of cooking

relatively bite pieces of protein and/or vegetables in a

very hot cooking environment.

And often with some kind of sauce added,

but maybe not even necessarily,

this is certainly not trying to be some kind of dogmatic

approach to a stir fry

that's rooted in any one particular thing.

This is kind of just how I like to cook a mix of protein and

veg, like in, you know, summer months.

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The one thing I'll say about rice is I love it.

It's basically a perfect food.

I love how everybody has their own technique, you know,

that comes to be the one that works for them in terms

of how to cook rice and not screw it up.

When it's white rice always wash it, wash it, rinse it,

drain it, you have all that starchy surface exposed,

which is nice to take off because that means you will have

more distinct rice with slightly less gumminess.

I did two cups of Jasmine rice.

That is two cups now of water,

and I'm going to add an additional half cup of water.

So it's one and a quarter cups of water for every one cup of

rinsed white rice.

I'm putting this on.

So give it a good stir before you lid it, just want to break

up like any potential clumps there,

and then I've turned the heat down.

I'm just gonna let it.

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I don't even know what I was doing like so many years,

standing it upright, watching the kernels

fly everywhere and just being like, well,

and now we have a flat surface and it's like less

roly poly, so much better.

And you can kind of come back and like get a few of the

extras or whatever, but like, you know, it's fine.

They don't, they're not, they're not going far.

So I'm just going to lay my veggie ingredients out on a

sheet tray here.

Going into the rest of our prep, we want some red onion,

the trinity of garlic, ginger,

and then some kind of onion really works.

It just builds like a baseline for your aromatics that

creates so much flavor.

And I'm going to do some ginger.

I want a one inch piece. It's a little bit big.

If you want to peel ginger with spoon, that is totally cool.

A sharp knife will do a good job of taking off the outermost

layer without sacrificing too much of the

ginger root itself.

There's certain times that you know, I'm,

I'm totally cool with microplaning ginger.

You know, like when it's going to disappear

totally into a marinade or something,

but there's something about grating ginger that,

I like having somewhat distinct little pieces where I can

really control the cooking process on them.

So I'll take the time to, you know,

to really mince it fairly fine.

Going back over,

doing very small matchsticks to cut into very fine dice.

I'm gonna need some garlic.

Like sliced garlic

you can control the cook on a little bit better than minced,

when you mince garlic

I just find it's like little bitsy pieces,

bigger pieces cooks unevenly, it's a bummer.

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I'm gonna use it about a pound of chicken in this case,

that's about five boneless,

skinless thighs, thighs are pretty much

bomb-proof in terms of,

you know, resisting, drawing out pretty much

no matter what you do to them,

you can cook them really hard to the point at which,

you know, they're actually getting some color

on them and you will

retain a lot of, you know, kind of juiciness.

They also just have a little bit more flavor and a little

more going on.

Than boneless skinless chicken breasts often do.

I'm just trimming some of the fat off.

A lot of that will render out during the cooking process,

but I just don't want any pieces that are huge,

kind of do like roughly one inch pieces like that.

You want a size that's basically bite size, you know,

but that isn't so small that the chicken wants to sog out

before I can get any kind of

crispiness or color on it.

I'm throwing some corn starch on top of this chicken and I'm

going to kind of mix it around.

I want to season the other side of the chicken,

get some salt on there.

Now the corn starch is going to help dry out the chicken.

It's also going to help create some crispy edges.

And it's also going to help create a sort of thicker sauce

that clings to the meat and the vegetables.

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Mix up our sauce.

And then I think we're pretty much ready to cook.

I love pulling it together with like a little bit of sauce.

And in this case, I'm using oyster sauce as the base.

It's just like a finishing element that ties everything

together and throwing in a couple tablespoons of water.

I'd want to be able to use this for the oyster sauce.

Oyster sauce is basically packed with umami.

I think it works really well with like the chicken and the

corn, the corn brings a lot of sweetness.

The chicken is obviously bringing in that meaty element,

but this just sort of ties everything together.

Tablespoon of rice vinegar and some toasted Sesame oil as

well, and there is water in there, just enough to thin it.

And the water is going to come into play when the sauce goes

into our skillet and helps activate the starch that is gonna

be on the chicken.

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This is hot pan, hot oil.

So I'm just going to kind of let this go.

This is going to go for like six to eight minutes,

probably total to basically get the chicken to the point

where it's, you know,

nicely browned and nearly cooked through.

That's the kind of browning we want to see right before we

start flipping the chicken.

You can just start talking, right?

And you can flip over the ones that are being a little bit

recalcitrant, at this point, you do not

need the chicken to be cooked through all the way.

It's going to finish cooking

with the rest of the ingredients.

So I'm going to use another couple of tablespoons of oil.

I'm putting it in now,

because if I put it all in at the beginning,

a lot of it would have been absorbed by the corn

starch and the chicken or spattered out of the pan.

And I want to make sure there's enough oil in the cooking

environment to be able to get really good heat transfer

between the pan and the aromatics.

So adding that second addition

of oil makes a big difference.

I love that kind of like that little sweet edge that the

onion is kind of picking up as it softens in the skillet,

but you could use scallion, you could use yellow onion.

It's all good, part of using the thighs is because it's that

insurance we need, right?

In terms of being able to keep the chicken in there while

cooking the aromatics, while the corn goes in there.

And then when the sauce finishes everything,

this is crushed red pepper flakes, right?

Seeds all over the place, going to give you a lot of heat

but not necessarily tons of flavor.

You know, sometimes you want a really big

punch of deep, I'm going to use our Gochugaru.

An Aleppo style chili flake would have been great too.

Something without seeds is really great at adding fruity

notes, depth of flavor, but not necessarily tons of heat,

putting those chili flakes in contact with that hot oil is

going to balloon their flavor very quickly and develop quite

a bit of depth in the flavor.

If I had put the chili flakes in the sauce,

it would not develop as much flavor.

The corn is going in here.

It's going to cook it just enough to soften, the corn only

needs a few minutes to turn tender and just lightly cooked.

So it can go in at the end because it doesn't really need

any kind of special treatment.

All right. So this is the sauce, right?

And this is just going to bring all of this together.

Like this would be frankly, pretty good as is,

but oyster sauce, little toasted sesame, little water,

little vinegar, it's going to activate that corn starch.

It's going to bind everything in a nice sauce.

It's going to just coat everything really pleasantly and

bring it all together.

The sauce has effectively disappeared here.

You know, it has become a little bit more of

just like a very faint

kind of glazey coating, right on, you know,

all the elements in the stir fry.

And it's [beep] delicious. So that's good too.

All right.

We can plate it up.

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I'm loving how fluffy this is feeling even,

you know, for Jasmine rice.

I love how this manages to put corn in sort of a starring

role, but also, you know,

make kind of a full meal out of it.

It's just way more pleasing.

Like when you just kind of let the leaves

kind of fall and do their thing.

There's something like so aromatic about the ginger.

And the way that it shines through here.

Also the sweetness of the corn and almost becoming a little

bit caramelized, like with that oyster sauce flavor,

but against the onion, I'm a big fan,

the oyster sauce really brings this like really subtle and

nuanced flavor,

but that is able to create tons of umami and really give you

like a full-on kind of flavor experience

with pretty little effort.

I highly recommend, you know, seeking it out.

And I find it to be one of those transformative ingredients

where once you start using it,

you can't imagine life without it.

And that was dinner tonight.

All right.

Yeah, so half a bottle of oil,

but you want the cap in there too.