The Best Way to Stir Fry Chicken

The chicken pieces in the chef Elmo Han’s kung pao are so remarkably tender that when teeth meet meat, the poultry barely offers a fight. The dish he serves at Shanghai Terrace, a fine dining restaurant in the Peninsula Chicago Hotel, is a faithful interpretation of the classic, but noteworthy in that it includes chicken breast instead of thighs. White meat, in less capable hands, can quickly dry out and toughen into shoe leather.

Like many Chinese chefs, Mr. Han employs a simple method of marinating and flash-cooking that can make lean meat and seafood silky: It’s called velveting. Think of stir-fried broccoli beef, where the sauce enrobes rather than merely coats the meat. Velveting is the reason. Without it, “the sauce falls off the pieces, and it’ll taste bland,” Mr. Han said. “It helps the sauce cling onto the ingredients.”

In “Stir-Frying to the Sky’s Edge,” the definitive book on stir-frying, the author Grace Young wrote, “No other cooking technique produces such light, delicate, tender succulence.” The process starts with marinating sliced meat and seafood in a protective coating of cornstarch, egg whites and seasonings. After the meat is blanched with a quick dip in hot oil or boiling water, the drained pieces are covered in a gel-like barrier, which yields an extra level of tenderness in the finished dish.

While chefs in restaurant kitchens opt for hot oil, the method works just as well with boiling water. Even cuts like chicken breast become supremely juicy when marinated and dunked in bubbling water. Velveting does the heavy lifting in this lightning-quick stir-fry, tenderizing the chicken before it’s tossed with vegetables in a savory sauce of butter, soy sauce and lemon.

There’s no one way to velvet. Most commonly, thinly sliced chicken breast, fish fillets or leaner cuts of beef and pork are combined with cornstarch, egg whites and a liquid marinade such as soy sauce. Vegetable oil is added if the meat will be blanched in boiling water. Some cooks add a small amount of baking soda, which acts as a meat tenderizer and slows muscle fibers from seizing up during cooking, and other seasonings.

The marinade for velveting should be massaged into meat with a soft and steady pressure.Laura McDermott for The New York Times

The marinade is massaged into the meat, and according to Mr. Han, who grew up in Beijing and learned this technique at age 17, there must be a gentleness to the process. When preparing his kung pao, he spent two straight minutes working the marinade into the chicken, applying a soft and steady pressure with both hands.

At Shanghai Terrace, Mr. Han marinates the meat for several hours before he blanches it for no more than 90 seconds in a wok of hot oil. At home, blanching in boiling water has many advantages — namely that it’s healthier, not as messy and less dangerous. Whichever way it’s flash-cooked, the meat is then strained and ready for stir-frying with other ingredients.

In restaurant kitchens, hot oil is used in velveting, but for home cooks, boiling water is a better option.Laura McDermott for The New York Times

In a way, velveting is a safeguard measure. In professional Chinese kitchens, gas burners heat woks to such high temperatures that it often resembles cooking over a jet engine. Velveting creates “a shell for whatever meat you’re marinating, a bubble to protect it, so the moisture can’t go out as easily,” said ArChan Chan, the chef of Hong Kong’s Ho Lee Fook, a contemporary Cantonese restaurant.

After a quick dip in bubbling oil or water, the velveted meat is strained and ready for a final toss with vegetables and sauce.Laura McDermott for The New York Times

Andrew Wong, the chef of London’s two Michelin-starred A.Wong, said that even when velveted meats are cooked in hot oil, the effect is less frying than it is steaming.

He said velveting is about creating barriers, equally effective in stir-fried or steamed dishes. “Because you’re creating this thin surface over the protein, everything is effectively being steamed at a low temperature,” he said. “It creates a much more moist end product.”

Mr. Wong, who was born in Britain, recommends velveting in non-Chinese applications, too. He has employed it in chicken and mushroom pie and poulet Chasseur.

“Coq au vin, beef stroganoff, you’ll notice a massive difference with velveting.”

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