Serious Eats: Recipes
Dinner Tonight: Numbing-and-Hot Chicken (Ma La Zi Ji)
[Photographs: Nick Kindelsperger]
Chinese cuisine is one I've been flirting with now for a few months. But with a copy of Revolutionary Chinese by Fuchsia Dunlop, I felt confident to move beyond the standard take-out fare and see what else I could do.
The book focuses on the Hunan region, and nearly every recipe looked incredible, but I finally settled on Numbing-and-Hot Chicken, which gets its flavor from the combination of Sichuan peppers (numbing) and chiles (hot). I figured I might as well go all out.
The oddest step in this recipe is the double frying method. Now, as I learned from Chichi, a common stir-fry trick is to fry the meat quickly first (or "pass through") and only then stir-fry it. This technique fries the chicken for 30 seconds, removes it from the oil, then fries it a second time for longer. Only after all that is the chicken ready to stir-fry.
I'm not exactly sure why—again, this is one of my first attempts at serious Chinese cooking—but the results are hard to argue with. The chicken turns into little crunchy clusters and takes on a wonderful aroma from the marinade and sauce.