Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Recipe 🐔 Anyone Can Cook a Michelin Star Dish at Home Easily

Hong Kong style soya sauce chicken is one of my favourite dishes. Here's the easy to cook, more or less fail safe recipe I have been using for decades at home 🐔

This staple dish we learnt from our Hong Kong school mates was a life saver during our lean student years in Canada in the 1980s (at that time, SGD1 was worth a mere 60 cents Canadian 😓 ). HK soya sauce chicken was a CDN1 per bird do-it-yourself meal - sumptuous and scrumptious protein for two persons.

You see, frozen chicken is sold at CDN99 cents a 1kg bird at the supermarket but they were frozen rock solid, so they were basically flavourless meat. Cooking in soy sauce made the tasteless chicken more palatable, no, actually delicious. So, we cooked and ate lots of it.

Returning to Singapore, we still cook it at home and occasionally get it at Chinatown food centre where there are several stalls serving HK soya sauce chicken.

Our favourite was Liao Fan (Hawker Chan) Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Rice and Noodle 香港油雞飯麵 👈 click. It was inexpensive and good.



But, the queue got extremely long after Liao Fan (Hawker Chan) was awarded a Michelin Star in 2016 - the first hawker stall in the world to receive such an honour.



We haven't got a chance to try it again since....

Here's how we cook HK soya sauce chicken at home and still do to this day.

List of ingredients (All easily available at any supermarket, almost anywhere in the world)



1. Chicken (of course...... )

2. Dark soy sauce

3. Light soy sauce

4. Sesame oil
5. Chinese cooking wine (either 花雕酒 or 玫瑰露 rose wine)
6. Black vinegar

7. Cooking oil



8. Brown sugar
9. Star anise
10. Cloves
11. Cinnamon
12. White pepper
13. Garlic cloves
14. Ginger
15. Spring onion and parsley (for garnishing).

Method



1. Heat up your wok. Sauté the garlic cloves, ginger, star anise, cloves, and cinnamon in a little hot cooking oil in low heat till their aroma is released.



2. Add the dark soy sauce (1 cup), light soy sauce (½ cup), black vinegar (1 tablespoon), Chinese cooking wine (1 tablespoon), sesame oil (1 tablespoon) and water (4 cups) into the wok. Bring to boil.



I measure with the same cup I use for my coffee 😄

3. Add brown sugar (8 tablespoons).

4. Add a dash of white pepper, if you like a subtle spiciness.



5. Bring the concoction to boil. Do taste tests, adding soy sauce or brown sugar until the desired balance of savouriness and sweetness is obtained.

6. When satisfied with the taste, transfer the concoction from the wok to a stock pot. Bring the concoction in the stock pot to boil with high heat. (You may prefer to fry your spices directly in the stock pot - then, you can skip the step of transferring the stock from the wok to the stock pot.)



7. Gently lay the cleaned and washed chicken into the boiling dark brown concoction (with the breast facing down). (There is no need to marinate the bird.)

8. Keep at high heat and bring the concoction back to boil (bubbling and churning in the pot).



9. Turn the chicken over with the breast facing up. The cavity should be fully flooded and the leg joint at the hip should be under the concoction. Top up with boiling water, if necessary, but make sure to keep the breast above the water line (if you like the breast slightly pink and more juicy).



Alternatively, submerge the whole bird fully in stock, if you like every part cooked through. (If you choose this, adjust portions accordingly i.e. more sauces, more water.)

10. When the stock is boiling steady, turn off the heat completely and cover the pot with a good fitting lid.

11. Let the chicken poach slowly for 30 - 40 minutes in the residual heat of the boiled soya sauce based concoction.



12. After 30 - 40 minutes, remove the whole bird from the stock pot.



13. Let the cooked bird rest for 10 minutes until it is cool enough to handle and cut.

14. Chop and serve 😋 (We can also eat it whole, simply by ripping the tender bird apart with our fingers 😄 )

15. When the stock has cooled, freeze it and it can be re-used many times simply by topping up with water, sauces and spices as desired. Old stock like good old wine tastes better with age.

Taste Notes



Good HK soya sauce chicken is tender and juicy. The browned skin is slippery smooth and the white meat inside is tenderly juicy, sweet.



The flavour is a balance of layered savouriness and sweetness. Even the breast meat is tender and juicy with a slight natural chicky sweetness. The spices like cloves, star anise, cinnamon and white pepper add their characteristic subtle tastes into the stock which cling to and infused the chicken skin. The black vinegar add a very subtle tang to the stock.

Notes

I usually use small birds of about 1kg weight as our stock pots at home are small.

Pink or cooked through? It's a matter of personal preference 😃

Poaching the bird for 30 minutes will result in slightly pink meat, especially at the leg joint. If you prefer your chicken cooked through, just poach it for 40 - 45 minutes i.e. 10 - 15 minutes more. (Poaching time varies according to how much stock you use, and the type of cooking pot you use i.e. how well it retains heat. So you need to experiment till you get the exact doneness you like with your own pot.)

When I was younger I like my poached chicken pink but nowadays, I prefer to cook it through (to the point of slight over doneness).

There is no need to marinate the chicken. Just rub with salt, rinse with water and pat dry will do.



👉 Try it 😊 Hong Kong soya sauce chicken is a delicious, healthy and affordable dish. The difficulty level is not high. Most of us can achieve good results at home on first try, if not, after a couple of attempts. (For first attempt, suggest cooking it through i.e. poach for 45 minutes.)

Would love to hear from you about any tweaks to this dish to make it better 😀 

This is a Halal dish (by using a Halal certified bird and leaving out the cooking wine).

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Written by Tony Boey on 20 Nov 2016