Lemonade-salabat chicken
March 27, 2005
Filed under Purely experimental
If the name of the recipe sounds strange, that’s because this is a rather strange, and wickedly flavorful, dish. My 11-year-old wanted chicken with sweet and sour sauce for lunch but we did not have the vegetables to go with the dish. Besides, I wasn’t so sure if chunks of chicken would be good for a stir-fried dish. Braising (cooking with very little liquid) the chicken was a better idea. The challenge was to come up with a sauce with a sweet-tangy flavor that would be good for braising the chicken. My first thought was to use kalamansi (native citrus) juice and minced ginger but we did not have enough kalamansi in the fridge. No ginger either. Then I saw the jar of powdered lemonade that someone forgot to put back in its proper place in the beverage cart. I checked if we had powdered salabat and we did. For an oriental twist, I decided I would add some chili-garlic sauce and hoisin sauce.
Note that I used what I had in the kitchen. There’s no earthly reason why you can’t use fresh lemon juice and ginger with some honey or brown sugar instead of powdered lemonade and salabat. In fact, adding some grated lemon zest to the chicken while it cooks sounds like a really good idea. It is the combination of citrus and ginger that gives the dish its piquant flavor and aroma.
Chili-garlic sauce and hoisin sauce are available in the oriental section of most supermarkets.
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In focus
This recipie sounds great. I just wanted to confirm though that you are using pre-sweetened lemonade powder and not unsweetened. 3 tbsp would be quite a bit of unsweetened, and would make the recipie very tart. But since I’ve never cooked with powder, I’m not certain.
Sweetend, Andrew.