taiwanese three cups chicken 三杯鷄

I don't generally buy whole chickens. The reason is American chicken are bred to have a lot of breast meat, and I dislike white meat especially when a chicken has disproportional amount of it. I can buy Asian breed chickens and I have occasionally over the years. My experience here have been they have been frozen and often for too long so the flavors are lost.

As a compromise I bought an organic chicken as I really want to try out making three cups chicken 三杯鷄 after watching a few videos of how this dish is made. From what I gather it is a Taiwanese dish. The name came from the recipe which includes using equal measures of rice wine, sesame oil, and soy sauce that are measured in equal size cups. So is the origin of the dish's name.

I always pick the smallest and even then this is a jumbo compared to Asian young bird

yup! a big breast chicken

Normally all you need to do is to chop up the chicken into roughly equal size pieces, but with big breast chicken the pieces from the breast will be much bigger. I deboned the chicken instead so I can better render the fat from the skin by frying the big pieces skin down first. I then can cut the big pieces into the size that I want.

When I didn't know any better I would trim off as much fat from the chicken and discard the fat. Now I learnt that cooking with agribusiness' high heat and chemically processed vegetable oil is more dangerous for my health than cooking with animal fat. A lot of cultures home cook meals are cooked with animal fat, as well as using as much of the animal as possible as mother nature intended. What a revelation these are that I discover as I observed culinary techniques of all cultures.

The ingredients for this dish are quite simple, and as always can be substituted by an experience home cook:

• chicken
• rice wine or liquor
• soy sauce
• dark sesame oil
• garlic
• ginger
• scallion
• onion
• chili peppers
• white pepper
• palm sugar
• basil 九層塔

I started by frying the deboned chicken skin side down in a wok to render out much of the fat and to brown the skin as well as the meat. The render fat is then used to fry the generous amount of thinly slice ginger, and followed with equally generous amount of garlic, and onion.

As the quality and concentration of the three cup ingredient can vary I would not take it literally to stick with equal volume of each.

The chicken is then chopped up into roughly equal size pieces to be braised in the ginger, garlic, and basil with the cooking wine, water, and some of the sesame oil. At this point the content is transferred to a clay pot for braising with a lid. The last step is to reduce the liquid to a concentrated sauce.

I used this Chinese cooking liquor

much of the braising is done with the lid

the last part of the cooking is the reduction of the sauce to concentrate it

As I didn't have fresh basil on hand nor I want to drive to the store for just some herb I use dried basil from the pantry. I use a lot as dried basil has only a fraction of the fragrance of fresh. It is important to leave most of the sesame oil to add at the very end. Some cooking liquor is also added towards the end. The seasoning with the soy sauce is done very late in the sauce reduction.

The down side of not using fresh basil is the presentation just isn't as good. The dish tasted amazing, and I would like to either using only thigh or Asian chicken next time. For this pot I use only one half of the chicken. You can find many videos on Youtube, especially by searching "三杯鷄".

Note that the sesame oil was never used for high heat frying. The high heat frying was done with the chicken's own fat. The sesame oil was used for braising, and most added shortly before serving.

I ate everything except the bones; the thinly sliced ginger was delicious; the normally dry breast meat is too thanks to the rich and spicy thick sauce

One fun fact that I learnt. Basil in Chinese is 九層塔, which means nine story pagoda. Some Asian basil does resemble Chinese pagodas.