Chicken Manchurian Made Easy! - How To Cook Delicious Meal

Crispy, spicy, tangy chicken, this is a Indo-Chinese classic - Chicken Manchurian.

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Hi everyone, welcome back to another episode of Flavor Fridays. It's Cher here  at School of Wok. So, Chicken Manchurian, that is what we're making today. Okay, so deep fried chicken. If you don’t like deep fried chicken, look away now. Okay, so to start off, we have just cut up a couple of peppers.

 

So, a green pepper and a red pepper also half a red onion plus some garlic and also  some bird's eye chili. So, I'm using two red and two green today. Kind of  split them in half if you want to make your chicken Manchurian a little bit more spicy, you can obviously cut your chili down a little bit more as well or add more chilis. So, besides the vegetables, we also made up a sauce.

 

The sauce is made up of oyster sauce.  We have got also some light soy sauce in there, some white wine vinegar, some light brown sugar,  some ketchup. And also just to give it a little bit more of a kick, we've added  in a little bit of sambal because we well, I always have sambal lying around in the fridge.

Battering The Chicken

 

So that's a sambal made up from some shrimps, otherwise known as Hae Bee sambal, if anyone

knows that. So next up, we're just going to take care of the chicken. So we've got some chicken thighs just cut into some one inch chunks here, which I'm going to just very quickly  make a corn flour batter for it. And I'm just going to crack a couple of egg whites in here. So hands again, best tools in the kitchen.

 

We're just going to go in there and just  kind of work the egg whites through the chicken. And in here I've got some corn flour as well, which is going to get enough of that in there to make a nice coating.

Frying The Chicken
 

So make sure  you really work the mixture thoroughly. You don’t want any dry uncoated pieces of chicken. You definitely want every piece to be nicely coated. Okay, that's going to create a nice protective barrier, if you will, for the chicken when it goes into the hot oil for deep frying.  So oil now is pretty hot enough to make a chopsticks sizzle.

 

So that  is exactly how you test for when the oil is hot enough. So that's all good to go. I'd say that's roughly about 170 degrees Celsius. If you're working in Fahrenheit, that is going to be a lot higher. A lot higher. So, we are going to  just very carefully take pieces of the chicken and we’re just going to very carefully drop that in.  

 

And don't worry if they start to kind of stick to one another in the walk, that's really normal. Just don't touch them. Let them kind of crisp up. And then once they form a nice skin on the  outside, then they're much easier to separate. Right, so just looking at our chicken pieces, so they should be light, golden, brown in color.

Sti-Frying
 

Got a nice batter. And also  there's a lot less sizzling now, which means that the chicken is already done. So it's going to turn the heat down and fish out my  chicken. Just going to drain them on some kitchen paper. Right. Stir-frying, this is going to go quick. So we need to just get the wok on super, super hot, hotter than  you feel comfortable.

 

Generally, it's my kind of suggestion, but only to the point of safety. Right. So you've got to be safe. Okay. Couple of tablespoons of oil just down the side. So  I'm just going to go in with, first of all, my red onions and also my garlic, so garlic can burn very  quickly. So you do need to watch this implement of choice. My ladle.

 

I'm just going to stir fry  it. Just stirring, making sure that you really watch the garlic, make sure it doesn't burn. But lots of onions trying to escape from my wok.  Chilis can go in. Just want to bloom the chilies as well. Red peppers, in they go.  Let those peppers make some nice contacts with the wok.

 

Like I said, this is a quick, quick stir fry. It doesn't take very long because that heat from the wok that’s immense  and you want that nice hot wok because that it’s going to give your food a bit of that wok hei. Oh, it's hot. Okay. Bit of a stir, back down. And we’re just going to get our  sauce in. So remember our sauce that we made up earlier in it goes nice bit of sizzle. Now the sauce is a bit dry.

 

So we're going to go with about roughly 80 to 100mls of water  because with a chicken Manchurian, it should be a relatively thick sauce. So runnier, I would say, compared to, say, a sweet and sour. So you want little bit of that runny sauce because that is kind of typical of what they serve in Indo Chinese restaurant, Manchurian Chicken Manchurian by the way, it's lots of different versions  out there today. I'm doing a sort of more Indian Chinese version of it.  

 

So essentially the pepper is actually being cooked also within that sauce. It's actually simmering away in that sauce. Now I'm going to thicken it ever so slightly  with a tiny bit of cornstarch slurry. The cornstarch slurry also gives the sauce a  little bit of that glossy shine, which is what you want. Add a little bit more  if you think it should be a little bit thicker *sneeze* so apparently  it's so smoky from the chilies that all the crew here are sneezing away.

  

That's alright. I'm still here. So chicken can go in. And I'm just going to coat this  now with the sauce and looking at it, it's a little bit thick. I'm just going to add a tiny  bit of water just to set it out so slightly. And that is the chicken Manchurian done.

Serving & Tasting

 

So  literally just once the sauce is wrapped all around the chicken, it's time to plate up. And then just a nice sprinkle of spring onions just over the top. Just a garnish. There you go.  So, chicken Manchurian. Time to have a little bit of a taste test.

 

I might grab a tiny, tiny, but still very, very hot, steaming hot. Can you see all. There’s definitley  a bit of heat in there. Chicken. Nicely coated. there's still a bit of crunch from the batter. So nice. Thank you so much for visited, I hope you enjoyed the recipe. Until next time, bye bye!.