Szechuan Chicken - Khin's Kitchen (2024)

Our family's favourite Szechuan Chicken recipe, made with crispy chicken and packed with authentic Sichuan flavour. With this recipe, you can create your own restaurant-quality Sichuan Chicken with minimum ingredients!

This dish is one of my favourite dishes to order from a Chinese restaurant. A perfect combination of spicy, sweet and savoury flavour in one dish. If you like Sichuan Chinese cuisines, you'll definitely love this one.

What is Szechuan Chicken

Szechuan chicken is known as Sichuan Mala Chicken or Chongqing Mala Chicken. In the Chinese language, it is called La-zi-ji, which means dried spicy chilli chicken. It's popular in China, Chinese restaurants and takeaways in UK, United States, and across the world.

Compare to Kung Pao and General Tso's Chicken, this dish is spicier. It has a unique flavour of Sichuan peppercorns and Sichuan dried red chillies. The cooking method and ingredients can be slightly different depending on the restaurant and family own recipes. In this recipe, I'll be sharing how to make a dry spicy stir fry version that we love.

Ingredients

Stir Fry Ingredients:

Chicken Marinade:

There are only 3 ingredients that might not be familiar to everyone, Sichuan peppercorns, Sichuan dry red chilli, and Shao Xing wine. Most of these ingredients are available at Chinese or Oriental grocery stores.

• Sichuan Peppercorns - is also called Hua Jiao in Chinese language. Widely used in Sichuan Chinese dishes like Ma La Hot Pot, Ma La Xiang Guo. It has a subtle tingling, numbing, pungent taste. A bit of refreshing citrus aroma. This is the key ingredient of this whole dish. As you need to use only a very few amount, one packet last for few months. You just need to store in an air-tight jar to keep it dry. Any substitute for Sichuan peppercorns? I haven't found any ingredients that is quite similar to Szechuan peppercorns, but if you cannot get it, you can simply add crushed black pepper.
• Sichuan Dry Red Chilli - are fragrant, citrus, medium-hot chilli pepper with thin skin. If you cannot get Sichuan chillies, you can substitute with any medium-hot dried long red chilli.
• Shao Xing Wine/ Shao Hsing Wine - is a Chinese cooking rice wine, stronger than vinegar and milder than alcohol. Adding a splash of Shao Xing wine in marinade takes out all the unpleasant smell of the meat or seafood. You can also add in soup, broth or stir fries. A must have ingredients if you love Chinese cooking.
• Frying oil - you can use vegetable oil, corn, sunflower, canola, etc. Chicken pieces can be either shallow fry or deep fried.

How to make Szechuan Chicken

You need to follow 3 simple steps to make this dish perfectly.

1. Marinade the chicken with soy sauce, Shao Xing wine, black pepper, sugar, corn starch, and baking soda.
2. Shallow fry the chicken pieces until crispy golden brown.

3. Toss the vegetables, dried red chillies, Sichuan peppercorns, seasoning sauces, and fried chicken pieces together.

What to serve with

You can simply serve up with plain rice, egg fried rice or noodles. Or pair it with Chicken Corn Soup, Prawn Spring Rolls, Crispy Fried Wonton Crispy Shredded Orange Beef, Beef Lo Mein or Prawn Fried Rice and make it a wholesome dinner.

FAQ

Why you need to try this recipe:

• You can recreate restaurant quality dish with minimum ingredients.
• No need special equipment or wok skills. You can create with non-stick wok, pan or skillet that you already have at home.
• Budget friendly starter or main dish that you can serve a crowd.
  ( Double the ingredients if you are making for crowd or meal prep. )
• As you make at home you can adjust the spiciness by adding less or more chilli intake according to your preference.

More Chinese Takeaway Recipes:

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