Steamed Chicken with Ginger

This may not look at that pretty, but I was still kind of happy with the results. I was trying to adapt a recipe I made at the James Street Cooking School but using chicken instead of fish.

This was a more ambitious undertaking than it may seem, as I had some equipment issues. I do own a bamboo steamer, but it is quite small and I don't own a plate that fits inside and it doesn't sit nicely on any of my pans so it really doesn't do much more than take up space in the cupboard. I also have a double boiler saucepan which includes a steamer pan, but that was much too small for what I wanted to do. I ended up improvising.

I took my little nonstick wok and put two small ceramic condiment dishes in the bottom upside down. I then put in a tiny amount of water and finished it off with a plate which still let me close the lid (my wok has a flat lid). It looked a little ridiculous, but it worked!!!

This recipe was originally made with freshwater fish and has strong flavours which are perfect to disguise any muddy flavours. Of course, I was making this with chicken so my muddy flavours were fairly limited. I still thought that the flavours would translate well to chicken.

I didn't have any young ginger so I substituted normal ginger. In the cooking class we also used normal ginger, however I do think that ginger was a higher quality than the one I ended up using. Good knife skills are very handy when making this as the finer the ginger is sliced the easier it is to eat once it's cooked. My knife skills vary depending on my mood and this ginger was not as fine as I would have liked.

The first step is to marinate the ginger in some lemon juice. Then heat some grapeseed oil and sesame oil in a pan and fry 6 finely sliced cloves of garlic until they turn pale golden and then add the oil and garlic mix to the ginger and lemon juice. Add some toasted sesame seeds and soy sauce and then pour over some sliced chicken tenderloins and steam until cooked.

I slightly overcooked the chicken, I didn't realise the pieces would cook that quickly. The flavours were there, wonderful ginger and soy and sesame. I'll try this again, but I might try larger cuts of chicken next time. Comparing my sauce to the pictures of the sauce from the class, I may also add some extra soy sauce next time.

The sauce was fantastic even if it was a bit pale, it matched really well with the udon noodles.