This is another great recipe I got off Woks of Life. It’s so delicious, it tasted good even though I started with pre-cooked leftover turkey meat – ie, meat that wasn’t velveted and a dish without any cooking bits from the chicken.
This recipe basically comes down to the sauce – and what an amazing sauce it is!! They recommend throughout their blog to prep a jar full of the stuff and keep it in the fridge along with pre-chopped veggies for super-quick meal prep. All you need to do is chop your aromatics, make some cornstarch slurry and marinate your meat while you’re doing all that. Dinner on the table in 10 minutes!
You can also do chicken & broccoli in white sauce, which is healthier because it’s prepared with less oil. Basically just skip the soy sauce from the sauce and boil the velveted chicken rather than sauteeing it. Make sure your veggies are super tasty in this version though, as they will be the highlight of the dish.
These are the quantities for one dish. See the sauce-only recipe for the quantities for a jar full.
2/3 c chicken stock
1-1/2t sugar (white or brown)
1-1/2T soy sauce
2t dark soy sauce (this is mostly just to give it the rich brown color)
1T oyster sauce
1t sesame oil
1/8t white pepper
1T Shaoxing wine
For this particular batch, I sliced up 1 carrot, 1 zucchini and 1 broccoli crown; but you can literally use any vegetables you want.
I’ve learned in my journey of cooking great Chinese food at home (and when I say Chinese, I mean the Americanized Cantonese stuff you get from most Chinese carry-out places), the cooking method is pretty much standard:
- Stir fry the meat on high heat (after having marinated it in a bit of water, soy sauce, oil & corn starch) – a common Chinese technique for succulent meat every time known as velveting)
- Turn down the heat for your aromatics (ginger and garlic, plus green onions if you have them) and vegetables
- Add your sauce and finish with a splash of Shaoxing wine to give it the “breath of wok,” or whatever the phrase is that elevates your Chinese stir fry to restaurant quality.
- In their recipe for just the sauce, they include the Shaoxing wine on the ingredient list. The idea there is to set yourself up for super-easy dinner prep, and the fewer steps & ingredients, the better.
For this dish instead of starting by cooking the meat, you start by blanching the vegetables in water then setting them aside. And as I mentioned, I had leftover turkey meat to use (yes it’s January and I’m still eating Thanksgiving leftovers I’ve had in the freezer!) so I didn’t do that step either.