I found out about this dish by accident when surfing some websites last week. La Zi Ji is a Szechuan term meaning, as far as I can tell, Chicken with Chili Peppers. It’s normally deep-fried in China but I stir-fried the chicken – healthier and if you’re using chicken breast, there’s no dodgy meat to hide!
I basically followed the recipe as laid out on this page, though I used a LOT more marinade (and skipped the eggs in it). Instead of the few teaspoons of rice wine, I used 1/4 of a cup, and 1/8 of a cup each of dark and regular soy, with a tablespoon of corn starch. Marinade for about half an hour, then stir fry it at medium-hot (8 on my burner’s scale) for about 5 minutes. It came out beautifully flavored and juicy.
Then, fry some sliced garlic and ginger in some new oil, throw in the 40-50g of dried chilis that you’ve previously cut in half and de-seeded (the longest part of the whole process!), some spring onions (yeah yeah, green onions now that I’m in Canada; I’ll always call them spring onions though) and a tablespoon of Szechuan peppercorns (found them in the Asian foods aisle in Safeway). Stir the chicken up with the now-fragrant oil, take it off the heat and finally add a bit of sesame oil.
It looks great, with tons of color. We had it with boiled rice. And don’t eat the chilis! You can’t really anyway, they have the consistency of a thin piece of plastic. They’re just there to flavor the oil when cooking and for color.
It tasted really good, lots of different flavors, spicy without being super hot and it had a wonderful aftertaste. I had leftovers the next day and it was a little bit hotter and still great. Can’t wait to make it again, but it’ll have to take its place behind all the other stuff I want to cook first!
#1 by Robin on May 28th, 2009 - 3:07 am
Looks delicious! The Sichuan cuisine is the best in China. At least, that’t what I think. 😉