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0:00 Hi everyone, this is Bill from the Walks of Life and I'm going to show you how to velvet chicken today. Now, velveting meats is a time-tested Chinese technique that's used to tenderize and marinate all of your meats before the stir fry, before that hot walk. This is something that if you're going to cook Chinese, you have to master because it makes your chicken so much more tender for stir fries. All Chinese restaurants use this technique. My mom also at home, she used to always do the same thing. What is velveting? Actually, velveting is the process of marinating and tenderizing at the same time. And oil and water is a way of cooking it. Oil velveting, you're deep frying. Water velveting, you're actually poaching. The key ingredients
0:45 for velveting is cornstarch, oil, water. You also have the seasonings, which is the soy sauce and or oyster sauce. You use both. And if you like, you put a little MSG in there or even some shaing wine. We're going to slice up two portions of chicken. We're going to velvet one and not velvet one so that you can see the difference. So, the two tips I'm going to share with you today, one for cutting, you're going to partially freeze this chicken, so it's kind of frosty, but it's not frozen solid. And that'll make cutting a lot easier. And the second is cutting it against the grain, which will help your tenderness. You can see that these fibers run along this way. So, when we say cut across the grain, we mean this way. We want it about 2 in wide. And then I'm going to turn the chicken. And then I'm going to start cutting this way. And you notice this chicken is not
1:30 frozen solid, but it's a little frosty. And it makes cutting a lot easier. And you want to cut this about an eighth to 1/4 of an inch thick. And then your pieces don't have to be perfect. But if you got a round piece here, you could just give it a little slam, too. So now I'm going to show you how to velvet the chicken. So, we've got 12 ounces of chicken here. And the first thing we're going to do is add a couple tablespoons of water. 2 tsp of vegetable oil. Today, we're using avocado oil. This is the soy sauce. If you have oyster sauce, oyster sauce is probably better. So, that's the wet ingredients. And now, I'm going to add cornstarch. Now, we're going to mix everything together. You think this is a lot of
2:17 water, but all of this water is going to get absorbed by the chicken and it's going to make it nice and tender. So, we also have a video that where we show you how to marinate beef and baking soda is a very key component to that. And we have two methods. The shortcut method where we use a pinch and also a method where we use more baking soda to actually tenderize it and then wash it off because otherwise you get a bitter flavor. I would not recommend using the water method for chicken. If you leave it a little bit too long, it sort of gives it this rubbery consistency. So since a lot of restaurants use baking soda, actually many people have gotten used to that consistency or that mouth feel. If you want to recreate that, then yeah, go ahead put a little extra pinch of baking soda in and you're going to have that reaction like, hey, this just
3:02 tastes just like the restaurant. For us, I don't really want that rubbery taste. If you want to try your baking soda, take a pinch and add it in. Make sure everything is uniform. All right, we're going to want to let this sit for a while for about half an hour. While you're waiting for that, you can prep your vegetables. Now, another tip is that you can actually do this the night before and let everything absorb and marinate overnight. That's also another benefit for not using baking soda because if you use baking soda, it's actually going to continue to tenderize and break down the chicken and you're going to really get a textural change overnight. Now, we're going to cook the unvelveted chicken and then we're going to cook the velveted chicken and taste them and see how the difference is. Here we go. Here's the unvelveted chicken. Now, here's the velveted chicken.
3:52 So, here are two plates of chicken. This one is our unvelveted chicken. And you can see it's starting to dry out a bit. This chicken has been out for now about 2 to 3 minutes. So, now let's taste this unvelveted chicken. Tastes like chicken in a salad or something. A poached chicken. That's what it tastes like. And this is the velveted chicken. You can see a little bit more moisture and you see less lines because basically these lines are filled in by your cornstarch and oil, juicier. It's sort of easy on the mouth. Big difference. You got to try it. Don't take my word for it. You can see visually the difference, but if you try it at home, you'll be converted. We prepared two dishes here. Chicken with
4:39 mixed vegetables stir fry. We use water velveting for the more delicate dishes where you have a lot of aromatics in here and ginger that you want those to be forward and those usually are done in a white sauce. Searing or oil velveting with the brown sauce. Okay. So, I don't like to use these phrases, but what we just did would be referred to as water velveting. So, we're going to use this to cook our white sauce version. Oil velveting is what most restaurants do is they throw it into the hot oil. They basically deep fry it and scoop it up ready for the stir fry. We all don't like to deep fry at home because it's a mess and it splatters all over the place. So, we're going to show you a shortcut version of that, which is searing the chicken. You get a nicer taste with the searing of the chicken and the walk, plus you get less oil in
5:26 your food. I've heated the walk. Give it a good amount of oil until it's just smoking. Make sure the oil is spread evenly. For those of you who haven't discovered avocado oil, avocado oil is a great choice because this has a high smoke point. You want to spread this chicken out one even level. And if you've heated your walk properly, it won't stick. So, we've seared on one side, turned it over, is searing on the other side. And now I'm just going to give it a good toss. And this is about 80% done. And I'm just going to put it right back into the bowl. We don't have to wash another bowl. Remember, this chicken is going to get cooked again. Now, if you look at this velveted chicken, you'll see these little crispy
6:12 parts out here. That's the corn starch that's protecting the chicken and getting a nice sear. Makes it really nice. So, today we're going to make chicken with mixed vegetables stirfried in the walk. So, I've just seared the chicken and because there's so much flavor in that walk, I am not going to wash it. We put the garlic in the carrots. Give it a little toss. Carrots take a little bit longer to cook, which is why we put it in first than the celery. I'm going to put in the mushrooms. And I'm going to leave these snow peas for later, cuz they cook super fast. Now, after it's stir fried for a little bit, I'm going to hit it with a little shaing wine. Very nice. See how that shaing wine delazes everything? We have our sauce.
6:58 You always premix your sauce. I put a little cornstarch in here ahead of time instead of using the slurry method, which you can do. But the cornstarch does stick to the bottom and settle. So, you got to give everything a good stir. Now, it's ready for the walk. Pour it all in. Of course, we cannot forget the chicken. Almost forgot that. If you think you have a little bit too much water in here, just turn it on high heat and let it reduce. Almost forgot to add the snow peas. Chicken with mixed vegetables. Velveted chicken with mixed vegetables. So, this is the favorite part of the recipe. And we're in our tasting room here. So, it's our tasting room. It's
7:43 our tasting room. So, look at this. Look at this piece of velveted chicken. Wow. You get the sear which adds extra flavor, but then you still have that silky texture of the chicken. It's super juicy. The brown sauce chicken. It almost tastes like thigh meat, dark meat. It's so juicy. And now we're going to try the water velveted the same dish in a white sauce. Let's go to the walk. And this I had a little cornstarch in. I'm just going to going to pour It looks a little yellow because we used a little chicken bullion. I'm going to add the oil and I'm going to add the ginger first and infuse the oil with the ginger. Add these harder to cook vegetables first and leave the snow peas for last.
8:31 Give everything a stir fry. Now, for a white sauce chicken, we're going to use a clear rice wine. We want to keep that clear and it's a slightly cleaner taste than the sha singing wine. Let's add the chicken. Give that a toss to heat up the chicken again. Now we can turn it back to high heat. Stir everything up. I'm just going to pour it in. Nice. And you can smell the aroma of the ginger here and the garlic. Time we'll put the snow peas in. Last couple of to sauces. And you see all the sauce is just about sticking to the vegetables and chicken.
9:18 That's when it's ready. Look at that beautiful clear sauce and that ginger. Okay, so this is your chicken with mixed vegetables in an aromatic white sauce. And the best part about it is this velveted chicken. Mist silky chicken. This white sauce is a very bright flavor with the ginger and the garlic. No soy sauce. So, you're really tasting the flavor of the chicken, getting that texture of the chicken and the vegetables as well. So, let me compare this. It's the light brown sauce.
10:05 Now, you'll notice this brown sauce is not super super dark with too much dark soy sauce. And that's the way we like it. And that's characteristic of Cantonese cooking. This is even more characteristic of Cantonese cooking. It's even lighter. So, that's everything you need to know about velveting chicken. Don't get hung up with the water velveting or the oil velveting and really differences that you're poaching in one and searing in the other. Just make sure that you marinade your chicken using our velveting technique. It's a game-changing technique that you got to try at home and you got to incorporate into your Chinese cooking. So, if you like this video, like and subscribe and be sure to visit the walksoflife.com for more recipes. [Music]
