 gun Bar Wooden Back Out Besides from cooking healthier food, stuff a little bit lighter, at least trying to this time of year. You're also thinking about spending less money. With that in mind, we're making Chinese take out tonight. One of my favorite things I've always ordered, it's been my go-to at any regular Chinese restaurant has always been chicken with broccoli and a brown sauce. I've found it's hard for something so simple to be done really well. Some people cut the chicken in a way that makes it like rubbery. Sometimes the sauce doesn't coat the chicken. There's just so many possible ways that it could go wrong. Ironically, with as many Chinese restaurants as there are in the city, I'd say most of them are not very good. The ones that are good are expensive. It just becomes difficult to have access to like basic regular Chinese food that's good that doesn't cost the fortune. So I knew in the freezer that I had some chicken. butcher box set me a bunch of frozen meats for the holidays and so I put it in my freezer and that's a good utilization of them. If you buy chicken and bowl can freeze it, it's a good opportunity to use it. I had to go out and buy some ingredients. These I'm just not well stocked up in my Asian pantry. So I had to restock. Each of these is like a couple bucks, three bucks, three or four bucks. But they should be in my pantry and if they're in your pantry, whether you got meat in the freezer or not, the cost of this dish becomes really low if you've got all the right stuff in your pantry. If I was prepared, I'd have some rice in the pantry. I have all my condiments. I'm lucky because I have chicken in the freezer but not everybody has that. So that's a bit of an expense there but other than that, I bought the broccoli, I bought the green onions, I bought garlic and some chicken stock. Broccoli was 362, scallions were $1.25, the garlic was 50 cents, and the chicken stock was 250. So add on 12 bucks for chicken and you know you can feed a whole bunch of people and not break the bank. And you're also controlling the quality of the meats, the quality, the vegetables and you don't have to kind of be at the whim of your local Chinese restaurant. So let's just get right into the recipe. They tune till the end. I'm not the winner from the giveaway from last week. As always, the recipe for this should be in the link in the description and let's just get right into it. So we're making essentially a stir fry. What stir fry cooking really means is cooking at a high temperature really fast. It's usually done with a wok but not everybody has a wok. Everybody should have a wide bottom pan. Pretty heavy, good quality, not a cheap one. So we're gonna make it work with that. We're gonna have to do is just prepare all the ingredients ahead of time, make sure everything's ready to go. Just gonna slice up the vegetables. We're gonna run through how to do that real quick. We're gonna slice the meat up, get that prepared. We're gonna marinate it for a little bit. Essentially, we're gonna do the same technique as a stir fry as they would do in the Chinese restaurant. But we're just going to adapt it instead of a small super hot surface. We're gonna try and get a wide super hot surface to work with. I also got some sushi rice. I like sushi rice. Sometimes better than regular rice. Different rice has different sort of ratios and cooking temperatures and we did one video with white rice and found that it requires less water than we normally thought. And so I wanted to cover sushi rice. The instructions in here say one cup of rice per one cup of water. So that sounds reasonable to me and we're gonna start with that and see how that goes. So I got these crowns of broccoli. For no other reason then they looked a little bit better than the whole broccoli. And they basically just cut the stock off. So all you have to do is just sort of run your knife through and then cut off whatever pieces you see. You're left with this. You can cook with it. You can just kind of turn it down and you can just cook with that. I'm not going to do that though. I'm going for the real authentic chicken with broccoli. So I'm just gonna make these a little bit smaller, either have them or quarter of them. So they're small, that's okay. That's one head of broccoli. It's about as much as I want to make today. I'm gonna keep these whole and grate them into the sauce. Okay so my main problem with not just the quality of chicken a lot of these places use but is how they cut it. As you can see there's grains that run across the meat. The grain sort of run up the meat and then start to turn. So I'm just gonna start out and I kind of want to make thin slices. So sort of like that. You can make them a little bigger if you want but I'm sort of turning the meat a little bit as I get further along to stay against the grain. Start to get a little longer. Let me just cut them down. Sometimes I like to even split that off just to make it a little easier. I'll cut this guy in half. When they get thicker you just keep them thick and then just cut them in half like that. So I'm just gonna add some cornstarch. I'm just gonna reserve a little bit till after the marinade right now. We're just gonna marinate it with some flavors. I'm just gonna add soy sauce. This is gonna be our seasoning. So instead of salt we're adding a little soy sauce. A little bit of either rice wine, cooking wine or rice wine vinegar also works. Just a little splash and then just mix that all together. We're just gonna let this marinate for a little bit while we get our rice onto the stove. Give it a light rinse under cold water. One cup of water to one cup of rice. Now I'm just gonna put this on the stove, bring it up to a gentle boil, cover it, reduce it to a simmer and let it cook for about 15 minutes and let's see what kind of rice we get out of it. Now let's get into the sauce. I don't really know how brown sauce is made in a restaurant kitchen but this is sort of my best estimation. I think it's just basically soy sauce with some chicken stock, thicken with a little cornstarch slurry. I'm gonna add a few more things just to give it a little bit bolder of a flavor. That tastes about right to me. Let me have this. Quarter cup of water, cornstarch. So in these restaurants are cooking with their walks that basically cook everything in a walk and that's including blanching vegetables and doing all that kind of stuff. So I'm gonna start off with water in my pan. Not too much. Just like enough to have a little bit of depth to it in the pan. I'm gonna bring this up to a boil and then I'm gonna throw my broccoli in and blanch it. Then I'm gonna strain it, keep it off to the side. I'm going to sear the meat which we then have to add. The rest of the cornstarch and then I'm gonna take the meat out once it's seared. I'm basically just gonna let it sit in the pan for a few minutes and let at least one side develop some sort of brown or char. And then I can toss it and flip it off. Get it about partially cooked and then get it off the heat. And at that point I have my broccoli basically cooked and blanched for like a minute. My chicken is almost cooked. Then I just have to get the sauce into the pan, get it thickened and then combine everything back into the pan. So it's gonna go fast but it's relatively easy. We're just gonna bring everything to the stove right now. The sauce is nice and glossy. I think what Chinese take out looks exactly like you would get from the takeout but you got flavor. And it's really good. There's a few things I would have done different. I would have put the corn starch slurry in with the sauce from the get go before adding the vegetables and the chicken. What happened is I needed to cook down that water that I added and thicken that up. That plus waiting around for the photo shoot kind of overcooked the broccoli a little bit but all in all it still tastes exactly like I've gotten from Chinese takeout. I just would get that sauce a little bit more glaze. Add the sauce, add the slurry, bring it up to a boil, reduce that, get it thick and then you're gonna add the vegetables, you're gonna add the chicken and you're just gonna coat it to cover. No biggie, just no works out both ways. This is still delicious. I'm starving, having to eat in all day and now I got Chinese food. These are the longest chopsticks. You've got some hot sauce, you can add chilies, you can add ginger to the sauce along with the garlic, you can add different Asian sauces, the hoisin sauce, you can add all sorts of stuff to that sauce. You can play around with it. There are no rules. If you add more soy sauce than I did or chicken stock or whatever, you can always just thicken it up by adding more of that slurry. Just make a little bit more, add it back and then thicken it up. The flavors you come up with and then just use that technique to thicken it. Adding that corn starch to the meat helps create a little bit of a crust that the sauce coats itself on. And sushi rice is my favorite. One part, sushi rice, one part water, bring it up to a boil, down to a simmer, cover it, let it cook for 15 minutes and then let it sit cover for 10 minutes and it's perfect. Granular, sushi rice is a little stickier so it sticks to each other but I'm thrilled. I'm just missing a fortune cookie. Thanks for watching everybody. Congratulations Monica Rodriguez, you're the winner of my giveaway. You already know that but no one else does and no one else knows they didn't win so I had to announce it. So you'll be getting your gear soon. Just got to ship it. Remember to do that. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Thanks to all my patrons scrolling right now. Appreciate you all. Without you guys, the show wouldn't be the same. Hope everyone's hitting the new year hard until that I got. I'll see you next time. Until then, take care yourself and go feed yourself.