Proportion control
Re-creating a classic Chinese dish not as simple as it seems 3-cup chicken
When my editor asked if any of us had a favorite Chinese recipe we wanted to write about, I confidently raised my hand and blurted out, “Three-cup chicken.” After all, not only is the popular Taiwanese dish a comforting and flavorful meal that more people should know about, it would also require the absolute least amount of investigative work possible for me. Win-win!
The dish (san bei ji in Chinese) gets its name from the three equal portions of sesame oil, soy sauce and rice wine used to make the sauce. Add chicken and maybe a few other ingredients, and you’re done. In that respect, it’s a lot like pound cake, which traditionally calls for a pound each of flour, butter, eggs and sugar. All you need to know is right there in the title.
So imagine my surprise when I glanced through recipes for three-cup chicken and noticed that almost none maintained the three equal cups formula. In retrospect, it’s easy to see why: Those proportions make for an exceedingly oily dish. Lessening the amount of sesame oil is the most common move, but it’s definitely not the only one.
In fact, few versions agreed on the perfect proportion, meaning that my only path forward was to test various recipes and see which appealed to me. And just like that, my sweat-free assignment vanished before my eyes.
I started by dramatically cutting the amount of sesame oil, which helped with the heaviness. After experimenting with doubling the amount of rice wine, I went back to an equal proportion of soy sauce and rice wine. But what I quickly learned was that while the three ingredients that give the recipe its name are fundamental to the dish, they are by no means the only ones.
Ginger and garlic are essential, while some sugar helps balance the saltiness from the soy sauce. One surprising ingredient that kept popping up was Thai basil, which was always added at the end for an appealing pop of color and freshness. Grace Young in “The Breath of a Wok” had the bright idea of adding star anise, and I loved the aromatic notes it lent the chicken.
With the sauce sorted out, I turned my attention to the chicken. Here, fortunately, there is a consensus. Every recipe called for using bone-in, dark-meat chicken cut into 2-inch pieces. I tried making it with white meat and even boneless dark meat, but the chicken always overcooked, and the sauce never tasted as developed as it should.
This does require one to split bone-in chicken, a task that’s relatively easy with a meat cleaver, though slightly harder with a regular kitchen knife. If you’re particularly concerned, some dedicated butcher shops will do the work for you. It’s worth the effort. The nuggets of chicken come out juicy and coated in the umami-packed and intricately flavored sauce. And while it took me far more effort to nail an adequate recipe than I’d imagined, the result can be whipped up in about 30 minutes. Prep: 2 ¼ 10 1 2 ¾ ¾ 3 1 Cook: Nutrition information per serving: