304. Lemon chicken, 檸檬雞片 - Recipe

Lemon chicken, 檸檬雞片

Do you recall some of the old recipes that began with "First you catch a chicken ..."? My recipe begins with "First you catch a couple of lemons ...". To make lemon curd for the sauce for lemon chicken.

Homemade lemon curd

Lemon chicken is a popular dish in Asian buffets and there are many versions of this dish. I tried quite a few of them until I found the best recipe in Pei Mei's Chinese Cook Book, Volume II.

The late Miss Fu Pei Mei was the Julia Child of Chinese cooking. My best friend and I taught ourselves to cook from her books. We used to cook together on weekends trying her dishes, ticking them off and writing comments on the pages. I treasure my grease-splattered volumes with their broken spines and loose pages and use them as reference books.

I often served lemon chicken at dinner parties and it was the most popular dish on the table. People would call ahead to request it. It seemed they never tired of it.

But students become competent and gain the confidence to change and adapt. So I changed the recipe by making the sauce with lemon curd. The sauce has a lovely, pale, rich, lemon flavour. It is not like the bright yellow sauce commonly seen because I don't use food colouring.

Try it! You'll love it. Here is my version of lemon chicken:

Ingredients:
One chicken breast
Oil for deep frying

Marinade for chicken:

Salt and pepper
Half a tablespoon of wine (rice wine or sherry)
Half a tablespoon of light soy sauce
A tablespoon of cornstarch
A tablespoon of cold water
One egg yolk

Batter:
Half a cup of cornstarch
A quarter cup of flour

Sauce:

A cup of chicken stock
Half a cup of lemon curd (commercially-made is OK but homemade is better)
One tablespoon of sesame oil
2 tablespoons of cornstarch and 1/4 cup of cold water
Optional: Some grated lemon zest

Garnish: Lemon slices and cilantro

Method:

1. Remove the skin and slice the breast meat (1 1/2 inches Wide X 2 inches Long).
2. Stir the marinade and add the sliced chicken. Stir to coat the chicken with the paste. Marinate the meat for 10 minutes.
3. Mix the chicken stock and lemon curd in a small bowl. Make a slurry of cornstarch and cold water in another small bowl ( to thicken the sauce).
4. Mix the cornstarch and flour in a shallow dish and dip the chicken pieces in the flour.
5. Heat the oil to 350 degrees F and fry the chicken in small batches. It should take about 4 minutes per batch. Remove the chicken and drain on a rack.
   
6. Dip the chicken in the flour to coat. Heat the oil to 375 degrees F and fry the pieces again for about a minute.
7. Drain the chicken and set on a platter.
8. Heat the lemon curd and chicken stock in a small saucepan and stir till smooth. Bring it to a boil and add some of the cornstarch slurry. Stir until the sauce thickens and coats a spoon. Add a bit of lemon zest.
   
9. Splash a tablespoon of the sesame oil on the sauce and stir together.
10. Pour the sauce over the fried chicken slices and stir gently with chopsticks to distribute the sauce.
    
11. Garnish with lemon slices and cilantro.

I am sending my recipe for Lemon Chicken to the lovely, Lore of Culinarty.

Lore created Original Recipes to encourage cooks to be confident in their own abilities to cook a dish rather than to rely on cookbooks. Or at least, to change a recipe a bit.

Here are some inspiring recipes from Original Recipes roundup #11.