Recipe: Soy-Braised Chicken | Appetite for China
Soy-Braised Chicken
Serves 4
500 mL (2 cups) soy sauce*
750 mL (3 cups) water*
1 piece ginger, peeled and sliced
45 mL (3 tablespoons) sugar
10 mL (2 teaspoons) cinnamon
5 mL (1 teaspoon) star anise
4 pieces chicken, thighs or wings or combo
1 scallion, roughly chopped
*More if needed to cover chicken at least 3/4 of the way, but maintain the 2 parts soy sauce to 3 parts water ratio.
Begin heating soy sauce and water over medium flame. Add ginger, sugar, cinnamon, and star anise.
Bring mixture to simmer and add chicken. Reduce heat to very low and cover casserole dish/pot. Make sure heat is as low as can be without turning off; simmering soy sauce can easily become rapidly boiling soy sauce, which can easily become a big mess to clean up.
Cook chicken for 15 to 20 minutes, depending on the size of the pieces. Cut one open to check for doneness. Ladle chicken from sauce mixture and serve as is. Or if you’re handy with a cleaver, chop up those thighs into smaller pieces. Garnish with scallions and prepare to enjoy some savory, succulent chicken.
i’ve made this recipe a few times this summer. once, for my family and once, for a tubing trip with the boyfriend. both times, it was super duper good and super duper easy to make. all you need is a large pot and you basically just throw in the ingredients. very very savory. the meat is tender and melts right off the bone. i could eat ten legs of this, seriously.
some changes i made to the recipe:
- this recipe calls for a lot of soy sauce. i dumped equal parts soy sauce and all-flavor chicken marinade and used up nearly both bottles (for which i got reamed out by my aunt so i had to buy her new bottles). but i was cooking 8 pieces of chicken instead of the 4 for this recipe. it can get salty so be more careful than me.
- added a few cloves of garlic. i add garlic to everything. my mom says it’s good for the immune system. i always listen to my mother.
- left out the scallions. i always forget the scallions because they’re the garnish. but next time i serve this fresh, i’ll try to include the scallions. fresh raw scallions are always tasty with everything.
- to make the chicken really juicy and flavorful throughout, cut slits into the pieces before you put them into the sauce. it helps bring the flavor into every morsel and mouthful.
- instead of cooking the chicken for 15 to 20 minutes, i cooked mine for 1.5 to 2 hours. i don’t know whether it was my gas stove, the size of the chicken legs or maybe i turned the heat too low. but in 20 minutes, the chicken was still kinda raw inside. but by 1.5 hours, it reached that “savory and succulent,” tender and tasty stage.
- one final note: this recipe makes a lot of leftover sauce, like buckets of it. this was good for us since we used it as a marinade, sauce or stock base for most of our dishes for a week to two. but since it’s so basic, it doesn’t taste uniform when combined with different ingredients.
my chicken didn’t look quite as pretty as the picture above but it was pretty damn good. so try it!
