Sesame chicken is a popular Asian-style dish featuring breaded chicken with a savory sauce and sesame seeds. It is not a traditional Asian dish and is often made with the same chicken used in other dishes. Home cooks have many options for cooking and saucing the chicken. The sauce typically includes soy sauce, chili paste, cornstarch, sesame oil or butter, sugar, and sesame seeds. The dish is often served over rice and can be garnished with chopped green onions.
Sesame chicken is an Asian-style dish that typically features breaded chicken covered in a savory sauce and topped with sesame seeds. The chicken can be served on a bed of white rice or fried and mixed with broccoli, snow peas, or chopped green onions. While popular in Asian restaurants in Europe and the United States, this is not a traditional Asian dish. It has typically Asian flavors, but is generally not served in Asian countries.
When you order sesame chicken at a restaurant, the deep-fried chicken served under the sauce is usually the same variety of chicken served in sweet and sour chicken, orange and garlic, popular in Chinese restaurants. To save time, many restaurants make one type of breaded chicken and heat it up in different sauces to create all of these dishes. This type of sesame chicken often doesn’t include the sesame seeds in the breading, just in the sauce.
Those interested in making sesame chicken at home have many choices when it comes to how the chicken is cooked and how the sauce is prepared. Some cooks love the breading and take great care to coat the chicken in a mixture of egg, cornstarch, and breadcrumbs before frying. Cornstarch often puffs up and creates dozens of tiny air pockets when fried, making for a very crunchy breading. Many Asian restaurants also coat their chicken in cornstarch.
Other cooks may like to make real sesame chicken by adding sesame seeds to the breading. This gives the dish an extra touch of delicate sesame delicacy. Still others may prefer not to bread their chicken at all. These folks often marinate chicken pieces in sweetened soy sauce to infuse them with flavor. Home cooks who bread chicken can also do this to give each bite of the dish a nice burst of added flavor.
The sauce used in sesame chicken is usually a mixture of soy sauce, chili paste, cornstarch, sesame oil or butter, sugar, and whole sesame seeds. These ingredients are heated together in a pan and stirred until thickened. The sauce should ideally be a very dark red, translucent, and easy to drizzle. The sesame seeds can be added at the end of the cooking process or toasted before adding the other ingredients. This largely depends on the cook.
When the sauce and chicken are both ready, the cook typically drains the excess oil or liquid from the chicken and adds the sauce. The two are mixed until the sauce starts to sizzle, then poured over a bed of rice. Rice can be white, wild, brown or fried. Some cooks like to garnish the finished dish with chopped green onions for a pop of color.
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