Monday, March 19, 2012

Taiwanese 3 Cup Chicken

So my foray into asian cuisine continues!  In the first episode of the 2nd season of Top Chef Canada 'Sarah Tsai' - a Taiwanese contestent - tried to make '3 cup Beef' which unfortunately ended up overcooked.  Since my ethnic background is Taiwanese this immediately looked interesting to me.  However when I looked online, I found that 3 cup Chicken is actually the traditional dish.  3 cup Beef must be Sarah's own variation of the dish.  3 cup stands for the 3 equal parts of soy sauce, sesame oil, and Chinese rice wine.

Ingredients:

  • 1 package of chicken thighs
  • 1 package of chicken drum sticks
  • 1/4 cup Soy Sauce
  • 1/4 cup Sesame Oil
  • 1/4 cup Chinese Rice Wine
  • 1 small red chile pepper, sliced up
  • a couple of cloves of minced up garlic
  • some sliced up ginger
  • some basil leaves, chiffonaded




  1. In your wok, heat up the sesame oil on medium
  2. Saute the garlic, ginger and chile pepper in the oil until fragrant
  3. Turn up the heat a bit and then brown the chicken
  4. Stir in the cooking wine and soy sauce
  5. Bring down the heat, cover and simmer for 5 min
  6. Uncover and turn the chicken over. 
  7. Continue cooking until the sauce is reduced a bit
  8. Stir in basil and serve!


This picture turned out pretty blurry.  :(

It was pretty tasty!  I was afraid that it would be really salty from the soy sauce but the fragrant sesame oil and the rice wine mellowed that out a lot.


I hope Sarah does well on Top Chef Canada.  I'm hoping she'll keep introducing me to more Taiwanese food to try out!

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