Chongqing spicy chicken | 辣子鸡 (Laziji)

If you want something hotter than Nashville hot chicken, Chongqing spicy chicken is your choice. Boldly flavored with oil, salt, and spice, this is a typical style of Chongqing cuisine among grass-root folks. Goes best with humid warm air, a big bowl of white rice, and one or two quick-tempered Chongqing friends XD.

If you want to make it the most authentic way, remember to use hot chili at least twice the amount of chicken, so that the spice goes deep from skin to bone. But be careful. When I stir fired the the dried chili, the air got so filled with spicy smell that my roommate's cat began to cry.

STEPS

1.

Wash and cut the chicken thigh into small pieces. Marinate with soy sauce, salt, cooking wine and corn starch for 3-4 hours. Cut dried chili into pieces. Roughly mince garlic.

2.

Heat a large drizzle of oil in a pot. Deep-fry the chicken until it turns golden brown. Transfer out to a paper to drain the oil.

3.

Keep ~3 tsp oil in the wok. Add garlic and stir fry until fragrant. Turn on medium heat. Add chili and Sichuan peppercorn, stir fry until you cannot bear the spice smoke. I mean until fragrant while the red chili haven't gone burnt black.

4.

Add in chicken, stir fry until completely mixed with chili. Add sugar and salt to taste.

5.

Transfer to plate and serve!

TIPS

The authentic way is use half a chicken, and chop it into fine pieces. But if you want to make things simple, cutting bone-less thighs into small pieces will suffice. Adding corn starch will keep the meat tender when stir frying.

If you cannot handle that much spice, you can mix half mild chili with half super hot chili. Once I emptied a bag of extremely hot chili and felt like poisoning myself lol. Also the seed is where the spice is coming from, but consider keeping them because that's also the savory part of the chili. Sichuan peppercorn adds in some numbing taste -- you will a lot of them in Sichuan-Chongqing cuisine.