Cashew Chicken Recipe (腰果鸡丁)

Cashew Chicken Recipe (腰果鸡丁)

To celebrate the Beijing Olympics, I am going to share some of the most popular Chinese recipes with you in the next two weeks.

While Chinese recipes are often featured here on Rasa Malaysia, I mostly share my favorite Chinese dishes—meaning those that I enjoy eating—with my readers. A simple Google search of the most popular Chinese food in the United States returns the following results:

1. Broccoli Beef
2. Sweet and Sour Pork
3. Cashew Chicken
4. Crab Rangoon
5. Egg Drop Soup
6. Moo Goo Gai Pan
7. Chow Mein
8. Fried Rice
9. Kung Pao Chicken
10. Egg Roll

As a Chinese, I have to say that this is not the most interesting list. In fact, some of the dishes are not even real Chinese, for example: Moo Goo Gai Pan. (Most of the dishes on the list areAmerican-Chinese food, made popular by the Chinese restaurants in the United States. They are what general Americans know as Chinese food.)

Chinese cuisine—when done right—is pleasing, subtle, delicate, satisfying, and a great treat to the taste buds. However, most Chinese restaurants in the United States have pretty much butchered Chinese food and turned one of the greatest cuisines in the world into something vaguely recognizable—gooey, starchy, sticky, greasy, and downright unappetizing—one that is certain to leave a bad taste in the mouth of many diners.

Since most of my readers are Americans, I thought I would share with you the correct way of making these popular dishes. Today, I teach you the proper way of making Cashew Chicken—a very popular eat-in and take-out dish at Chinese restaurants in the United States.

The key to a great Chinese stir-fried chicken dish is simple: smooth and tender chicken meat lightly coated with a sauce, stir-fried over HIGH heat using a wok to achieve the breath of wok. To get the breath of wok, you can buy the cookbook here and learn the techniques. To make the chicken tender, I am going to share with you a secret–one that is used by many restaurants and Chinese chefs—BAKING SODA.

Baking soda serves two purposes:

1. to rid the chicken of any potential smell (I am sure you have had bad experiences eating chicken with a foul chicken-y odor,
2. to tenderize the meat. Just by looking at my pictures, you can tell that those chicken breast cubes are silky and tender. For the detailed instructions, please follow my Cashew Chickenrecipe below.
3. SECRET TECHNIQUE: BAKING SODA is the secret weapon to make any meat—chicken, beef, pork–tender.
   Anyway, once you try out my Cashew Chicken recipe, I am sure you will never go back to the gooey, sticky, starchy Cashew Chicken from your neighborhood Chinese joints again, and you will again enjoy authentic Chinese recipes.