EclecticGuy

Many years ago, my favorite Chinese restaurant in Troy, NY (Plum Blossom, is it still there?) served Chicken with Pine Nuts. It was scrumptious and was my introduction to pine nuts! It was served on a lettuce leaf with a dollop of Hoisin sauce and rolled up. Over the years I worked on replicating the recipe. The “secret” was the rice wine. Do not use Japanese Sake, try to find an Asian market that carries a quality rice wine. Here is the recipe I came up with:

Chicken with Pine Nuts

Ingredients for 4

• 2 chicken breasts
• 1/2 cup pine nuts
• 1″ cube  of fresh ginger root
• 1 chile pepper (more or less to taste)
• 1 egg white
• 1 tablespoon cornstarch
• 1 tablespoon of rice wine
• 1/2 teaspoon sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt (less if on a sodium restricted diet)
• 4 tablespoons peanut oil
• 1 teaspoon cornstarch dissolved in 1 tablespoon of water
• a dozen Iceberg lettuce leaves, washed and drained
• 1/2 cup Hoisin sauce 

Procedure

• Toast the pine nuts lightly in a toaster oven or carefully in a hot skillet. Set aside in a bowl.
• Remove skin and bones from chicken breasts. Cut meat in to very thin slices then in to thin shreds (1/8″ or so). Add the shreds to a glass bowl and toss in 1 tbls of cornstarch until coated. Add the egg white, rice wine, sugar, and salt and toss well.
• Seed and dice the chile pepper.
• Scrape the ginger root.
• Add 1 tablespoon of the peanut oil to a wok (or large skillet) and place on high heat. The secret to wok cooking  is the concentrated heat in a small area at the bottom of the wok. Heat until the oil is just about smoking. This is a little trickier to do with a large flat frying pan.
• Stir fry the chile peppers for about a minute. Don’t burn them though. Remove from wok into a bowl.
• Add the remaining peanut oil to the wok and bring to temperature. Stir fry the ginger briefly (just a few seconds should do it) and then add the chicken – s l o w l y. Stir fry the chicken until it is white and firm – usually 1 to 2 minutes.
• Stir in the chile peppers and add the teaspoon of cornstarch dissolved in the water. Stir well.
• Remove mixture from wok to a serving platter.
• Sprinkle the pine nuts over the chicken mixture.

Serving

Serve the lettuce leaves on a clean plate, alongside the Chicken with Pine Nuts mixture and a dish of Hoisin sauce. 

Place a lettuce leaf on your plate and add a teaspoon of Hoisin sauce to the middle of the leaf (more or less to taste). Add a dollop of the chicken mixture – making sure to get some pine nuts! Don’t overdo it, you need to be able to roll the lettuce up tightly around the mixture. 

Fold opposite ends of the lettuce leaf over the mixture and then roll from one of the unfolded sides. The servers at the Plum Blossom would do all of this at your table using a pair of tablespoons!

Enjoy!