Kung pao chicken is a Chinese takeaway dish of succulent silky chicken mixed in a thick, sweet and spicy sauce with peanuts, dried chillies and vegetables. In Chinese, this dish is called 宫保鸡丁(Gong Bao Ji Ding), and like Szechuan chicken, it's another regional dish from the Sichuan province in China.
While this dish isn't typically cooked in most Chinese households, we used to eat it at home after Mum worked at the Chinese restaurant she ran. For our simple kung pao chicken recipe, we'll show you how to recreate the signature bright flavours that make an easy evening meal.
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Kung Pao Chicken Ingredients
To marinate the Sichuan Gong Bao chicken:
- Boneless or skinless chicken breast cut into one-inch cubes
- Shaoxing wine
- light soy sauce
- Cornstarch
To make the sauce:
- chicken stock or water
- light soy sauce
- oyster sauce
- Shaoxing wine
- dark soy sauce
- doubanjiang (chilli bean paste)
- sugar
- cornstarch
For the stir fry:
- cooking oil
- garlic, chopped
- ginger, sliced
- dried chillies cut into half-inch pieces
- green bell pepper, chopped
- red bell pepper, chopped
- medium carrot, sliced
- Sichuan peppercorns lightly toasted and ground (optional)
- spring onions, chopped (green part only for garnishing, optional)
- roasted, unsalted peanuts
- sesame oil, for drizzling
There's quite a few ingredients we use in our kung pao chicken recipe, so we're only going to go into detail on the important ones. These are the ones that are integral to the dish's flavour or might need a little bit more care when they're being prepared.
Skinless Chicken Breast
We recommend cutting the chicken into relatively small cubes (1 inch) so that you can get a good sear on it. This size will ensure the meat sears well and has a crisp outside for the final dish.
Shaoxing Wine Or Dry Sherry
Shaoxing wine has a rich, robust flavour. If you've never had it before, it's quite similar to red wine vinegar, though more well-rounded. We recommend getting Shaoxing wine as it adds depth to many Chinese takeaway dishes. Otherwise, you can also use dry sherry as a substitute.
Light And Dark Soy Sauce
The two types of soy sauce have pretty different flavours. Light is brighter, and hence, you can use it in abundance. On the other hand, dark is a lot more intense, and therefore, you should use it sparingly. This blend of the two different types of soy sauce is a beautiful combination for our kung pao chicken. However, you should always adjust to your preferences.
Dried Chillies
We recommend adding 8-10 pieces of dried chillies to your dish. You might think that seems like a lot of chillies. However, you're supposed to make it spicy and sweet at the same time. The chillies combined with sugar in our recipe make a powerful combination of flavours.
You can remove the seeds to make it less spicy. If you're not a fan of spice, you can decrease the number of chillies. However, we recommend leaving them in.
Roasted Peanuts
Unsalted peanuts aren't a massive part of our dish but pack a flavour punch. Their gentle and creamy flavour with a slight crunch contributes to the dish's overall flavour.
If you're allergic to peanuts, we'd recommend using pine nuts for our recipe. They will cook similarly and provide a roughly similar flavour.
Kung Pao Sauce
Kung pao sauce is a heavily flavoured sauce that can be used for several things, not just kung pao chicken. The flavours come from a combination of spices and soy sauce, oyster sauce, Shaoxing wine, chilli bean paste, and sugar.
The sauce works really well here, and you could use it on many different types of meats and veggies. It's pretty versatile. We like to use it in our vegetable stir fry and add it to rice or noodles when we're lazy to cook.
Easy Kung Pao Chicken Recipe (Sichuan Gong Bao Ji Ding)
Ingredients
Gong Bao chicken marinade:
- 450 g chicken breast cut into one-inch cubes, skinless
- 1 tablespoon Shaoxing wine
- 1 tablespoon light soy sauce
- 1 teaspoon cornstarch
Kung pao chicken sauce
- ½ cup chicken stock or water
- 4 tablespoon light soy sauce
- 1 tablespoon oyster sauce
- 2 tbsps Shaoxing wine
- 2 tsps dark soy sauce
- 1 tablespoon Chilli bean paste doubanjiang
- 1 tablespoon sugar
- 1 teaspoon cornstarch
Stir Fry
- ½ cup unsalted peanuts roasted
- 1 medium carrot sliced
- 8-10 dried chillies cut into half-inch pieces
- 3 clove garlic chopped
- ½ inch ginger sliced
- ½ green bell pepper
- ½ red bell pepper
- 4 tbsps cooking oil
- 4 scallion stems cut into 1-inch pieces
- 1 tablespoon Sichuan peppercorns lightly toasted and ground (optional)
- 2 tbsps sesame oil for drizzling, optional
Cooking Instructions
- Combine all the ingredients for gong bao chicken marinade in a bowl, then cover and set aside to marinate for at least ten minutes.
- Whisk together the kung pao sauce ingredients, making sure that the sugar dissolved. Set the mixture aside.
- Heat a large pan over high heat, add half the cooking oil and allow it to get hot. Add the marinated chicken and stir for 3-4 minutes while occasionally stirring until edges are browned. Remove the chicken from the heat, and set it aside to add later to the pan.
- Add the remaining cooking oil to the pan. Then, stir in the garlic, ginger, chilli peppers, and Sichuan peppercorns. Stir-fry the mixture for one minute or until it is fragrant. Then, add the bell peppers and carrots and stir fry for another 2 minutes or until cooked.
- Give the prepared sauce a mix, and then pour it into the pan, bringing everything to a boil. Don't stop stirring. Make sure to scrape the bottom of the pan while stirring.
- Once the sauce begins to thicken, add the chicken back to the pan, and mix everything thoroughly until the sauce is coating everything and being nicely thickened.
- Stir in the peanuts and sesame oil (if using). Toss everything well, and cook for another two minutes to ensure all the flavours mix together well. Finally, garnish with some spring onions and serve your kung pao chicken immediately, ideally with rice.
Recipe Notes
- You can add your favourite vegetables, such as broccoli, bell peppers and long beans to the dish, too. Add them at the same time you add the bell peppers and carrots.
- If you can’t find Shaoxing wine, we recommend replacing it with dry sherry.
Nutrition
Calories have been calculated using an online calculator. Nutritional information offered on Honest Food Talks is for general information purposes and is only a rough estimate.
Cooking Tips
Here are some of our best cooking tips to help you get the best results at home.
Preheat Your Pan And Frying Oil
Our first tip for ensuring that our recipe turns out well for you is to make sure that you use a really hot pan. In several of our other recipes, it isn't too important to ensure that your pan is preheated. However, when you're stir-frying, it's vital. It will ensure that every element of the dish has a crisp outside while also having a soft inside: that's what makes a great stir-fry.
In the same vein - allow your oil to preheat before frying, too. Having exceptionally hot oil allows for that same crispiness. Moreover, it also enables different flavours to mix more rapidly. This is crucial for making excellent kung pao chicken.
Keep Stirring Your Dish While Cooking
Our second tip is to ensure that you keep your stir-fry moving. This is for one reason, mainly: to prevent burning.
As the pan is very hot when stir-frying, ingredients on the pan's base are more likely to burn and get stuck to the inside of the pan. It isn't ideal, of course, as it will add a bitter, charcoal flavour to your food.
Instead, making sure to keep the things in the pan moving around is a great way to be utterly sure that none of your ingredients will be too close to the heat and thereby burn. It is a great tip for other stir-fry dishes, including our Chinese lemon chicken recipe.
Don't Put A Lid Over The Pan
The sauce in our authentic kung pao chicken recipe is supposed to be mixed into the rest of the ingredients quite sparingly. If you keep the lid on, then a constant supply of condensation will ensure that the volume of the sauce remains roughly equal. However, if you remove the lid, evaporation will allow your sauce to thicken and soak into other elements of the meal very nicely.
However, the only exception is when cooking vegetables. If you're not using a wok, sometimes the heat in a pan is not enough to quickly cook the vegetables before the aromatics (ginger, garlic) start to burn. In this case, you may want to steam the vegetables in the pan.
To do this, once you've added the vegetables to the pan, add about 2-3 tablespoon of water to the hot pan and close the lid. Allow the steam to cook the vegetables for about 2 minutes. This will help cook the vegetables much quicker but prevent the aromatics from burning.
Cuts Of Meat
For kung pao chicken, we typically use breasts. The chicken breasts are the most versatile cut of meat, and it's an excellent option for cooking stir-fries. This is because breast meat has very little inherent fat, meaning that it can be made crispy on the outside very quickly.
Another option could be tenderloins. These cuts of the meat are slightly more tender than the whole piece of breast meat. Therefore, they're outstanding when crispy on the outside. In fact, many cooks crumb and fry it under high heat to accentuate the crispy exterior relative to the tender inside.
Another option is to make kung pao chicken thighs. You can find these cuts of meat sold as fillets with the skin and bone removed. However, some people prefer to use thigh cutlets, which still the bones and skin attached to it, as they usually turn out more flavourful when fried.
Thigh meat is typically a little browner than breast meat and has more fat content. Hence, they are typically more flavourful. However, if you season any other cut enough, there isn't too much of a difference.
Using An Air Fryer
Using an air fryer to make the perfect crispy kung pao chicken is a wonderful idea. However, if you're air frying, we only recommend to do it for the chicken. Air fry the cubed chicken breasts at 200°C (400°F) for about 10-12 minutes. Then, cook the rest on the stove. It's much easier to stir fry everything and make the sauce over the sauce.
Another Chinese takeaway dish that we love making in the air fryer is our chicken with salt and pepper recipe.
Using An Oven
Similar to using an air fryer, using an oven can reduce the amount of oil you use in our recipe. However, we also recommend only baking the chicken in the oven and cooking the rest over the stove.
To do so, bake in the oven at 200°C (400°F) for about 15 minutes.
The top of the mixture might get too dry. If that happens, put some foil on top. It will prevent that from happening any further. You might not need to do this. This is because it will depend on your oven.
How To Serve
There's no perfect way to serve your meal, though there are some ways that we would recommend.
First and foremost, we would suggest serving this kung pao chicken over rice. By doing so, you will allow any excess sauce to be soaked up by the rice. Hence, leading to a very tasty carb alongside your protein dish.
While you could serve our recipe with noodles, it will make quite a wet dish. Therefore, serving it with noodles could be too, for want of a better term, sloppy.
Aside from serving over rice, the only thing to think about is a garnish. There are a few options, but we'd recommend sprinkling some scallions and a few more peanuts over the top of the dish. Both scallions and peanuts bring fresh flavours to the dish.
Kung Pao Chicken Vs Szechuan Chicken
Kung pao chicken is mildly spicy, sweet and nutty, while Szechuan chicken has mouth-numbing spiciness and isn't sweet or nutty. These two dishes are pretty similar. Therefore, many people confuse the two dishes. Let's go through the differences more thoroughly below.
Kung pao chicken has more gravy than Szechuan chicken, which is relatively dry. Typically, the dish tastes quite spicy and is sweet and a little nutty. Peanuts added to the meal are responsible for the nuttiness of the dish.
Szechuan chicken uses more szechuan peppercorn, and a lot of the flavours is from the peppercorns. It has an intense spicy numbing flavour, also known as 'Ma'. Meanwhile, Kung pao chicken might use Szechuan peppercorn, but it's not essential. The dish focuses more on the spicy flavours coming from dried chilli and doubanjiang. If Szechuan peppercorns are added, it's a secondary flavour and spiciness.
The difference is that the spiciness of the food is the flavour at the forefront of the dish, and it isn't very sweet or nutty. Instead, it has a bold, intense flavour thanks to the use of soy sauce and similar ingredients.
Calories
One serving of our recipe has about 520 calories. That's actually a lot better than what you might expect in a takeaway version of the meal. We find that takeout restaurants typically cook this recipe with a lot of sugar and additives.
You can save our recipe to Pinterest, making it easier to find it when you've got a specific craving later on. If you're looking for more Asian recipes, subscribe to our YouTube Channel.
Feim99
The recipe is pretty good but I like mine abit spicier - so I added more peppercorns in it, thnk that's closer to the original recipe; but turned out great ty!