i've been making a lot of chicken, broccoli, and brown rice recently. it's easy and it feels healthy enough and i don't really like cooking.however, it's not very nice on its own. i've been buying premixed asian sauces like teriyaki and general tso's, but they often have a lot of sugar in them and i'd rather just make it myself.but it's a huge rabbit hole and i'm looking at buying shit like shaoxing wine and hoisin and mirin and sake and it's kind of a lot.so the question is, if you were going to eat straight up brown rice, chicken, and broccoli, what sort of stuff would you put on it to make it more palatable? sauces, gravy, whatever.
>>21593989if I didn't wanna buy all that shit, I'd just mix up soy sauce, rice vinegar and fish sauce. garnish with some sesame oil. could also add brown sugar, garlic, ginger to taste. should mostly be stuff you have in the pantry or at least isn't hard to get ahold of.
>>21593989I would add some carrots, onions, garlic, make myself a fresh salad, switch up chicken for some fish or shrimps or beef.I would not buy the chinese slop in a bottle.
>>21593989you could use the rice fond to make a pansauce
>>21593989Stuff without too many additional calories. Sriracha, soy sauce, sambal; Asian flavors go well with the things you're eating. I wouldn't add a lot of sweet and sour or thick teriyaki sauces to it. Traditional pepper sauces are good too. Roasted garlic, onions, bell peppers will add flavor. Cabbage is really cheap. Just find condiments you like and experiment.
>>21593989Classic sort of Chinese chicken and broccoli sauce->Cook the chicken in a pan with oil so you get a fond on the pan, aka all of the sticky stuff on the bottom. It should be brown, like a little overcooked, but not black and burnt like charcoal. If it's burnt and acrid smelling you're cooking too hot and it will not taste as good.>Deglaze the pan with shaoxing wine. Pouring cool liquid onto the hot pan will make the sticky stuff loosen up, take a wooden spoon and scrape all of the stuff off of the bottom of the pan while the wine is sizzling. You can use this shaoxing shit to deglaze for pretty much any Asian stir fry sauce and it never goes bad so it's worth getting if you want to make Asian recipes often.>Pour in chicken stock as your base, most of the sauce should be chicken stock and the rest of the stuff is just there to add flavor. Talking a cup or two of stock vs a tablespoon or two for the next liquids>Pour in a bit of soy sauce, rice vinegar, and mirin. Not too much, you're essentially balancing salt, sour, and sweet respectively here and if you do too much of either one it will be bad like too soy sauce will make it way too salty. Use your palate and figure out how you like it. You can always add more but you can't take it out once you put it in>Add some pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, ginger powder. You could add actual minced garlic, onions, and ginger before you deglaze but it seems like you're trying to do an easy version so this is fine.>Mix it together and bring this to a boil then let it simmer a bit. Add some cornstarch to thicken it. Easiest way is to scoop out a couple spoonfuls of the liquid into a separate cup, add the cornstarch to the cup, mix it together in the cup, then pour that back into the sauce. This will make it less watery and give it more of that thick hold you get>Throw your broccoli and chicken back in, toss it in the sauce and there you go
>>21594182>>21593989Some notes>Shaoxing wine is chinese cooking wine. You can use actual wine like sake or even just normal french white wine. I guess the shaoxing stuff is more 'authentic' but not sure you'll be able to tell the difference>You can substitute sugar for mirin and wine or apple cider vinegar for rice vinegar if you have those and don't want to buy the other stuff>You could add the cornstarch directly to the sauce but it tends to cake up and form little lumps in your sauce so I highly recommend mixing it with a small amount of sauce first in a separate cup where you can really get the lumps out before adding it back to the pan>Adding a bit of sesame oil to the end of the recipe will give it a bit of a sesame taste which is good>You mention hoisin, which is basically like a chinese ketchup. You can use that in sauces if you want, you use it more to make a chinese style BBQ type of sauce the same way in the US you'll see a lot of recipes call for ketchup.
>>21593989Back when I was in college this guide came out and I started making chicken stir fry with the curry sauce and that was my primary meal for years. I recommend that you find a red curry paste with shrimp in it, it'll stink up your kitchen but the flavor is worthwhile.
>>21593989I would just use hot sauce, or a spicy mayo if I needed more substance to it.Avocado and straight eggs also would help make it creamier while adding more nutrients. When my gf would make chicken and rice I'd add some fried eggs and call it chicken both ways but it's apparently already a dish in Japan or something mother and baby chicken.
>>21593989soy sake mirin
>I don't really like cookingIt shows
>>21593989soy sauce and black vinegarold balsamic
>>21593989butter, soy sauce, ketchup, tabascobutter, soy sauce, sweet chili sauce
>>21593989so it depends on what regional style you're afterbut the generic chinese food toolkit that you'll use in 90% of basic recipes isn't that complicated. this is what chicken and broccoli would fall under.light soy sauce( lee kum kee or pear river bridge are the recommended brands for chinese but kikkoman is fine if that's what you're used to)oyster sauce(look for the red bottle with a panda)shao xing wine(just get that one bottle everyone recommends with the red gold label)congratulations you have just assembled the core chinese sauce ingredients that are not easily subbed and are used in most recipes.if you are feeling more ambitious you can move on to:msgchicken bullion powderdark soy sauce(just get lee kum kee brand if too many choices)white pepperrice vinegarsesame oil hoisindried red chilisthese are either less commonly used, can be omitted, or can be subbed for a western equivalent. if you're content to stay within the framework of westernized cantonese takeout style then this pretty much covers your bases unless you want to do something specific like a blackbean sauce
>>21593989Your taste buds are defective. No amount of sauce can fix that.
Dijon mustard a la French style. Swiss schnitzel. Garam masala/punjabi. Persian saffron. Greek oregano with lemon. Cordon bleau. Your choices are unlimited but as an anon you will make tendies.
>>21594263Your rudeness showsBet you can't go one day without making a disparaging remarkProve me wrong and have a good day
>>21593989>if you were going to eat straight up brown rice, chicken, and broccoli, what sort of stuff would you put on it to make it more palatable?I would throw in maybe 100g of frozen pre-cut bell peppers. Very low impact calorie-wise, buy they add their own flavor. As for seasonings, just soy sauce is good enough for me. Any more sauces or spices would be too lavish and overcomplicated.
thank you for the responses. esp:>>21594182>>21594406i am going to go to the asian grocery store this weekend and look around. i tried to get some shaoxing wine but my grocery store didn't have any, nor really any dry sherry.i do want to branch out to other things later, but this is a really simple meal i can tolerate and i dont think its bad to have in the rotation.eating it regularly has made me internalize just how many dishes are "protein and vegetables with carbs". burrito bowl, jambalaya, fried rice, paella, curry.the fundamentals of cuisine are very fundamental and basically universal. yeah, obviously, but mentally i put different cuisines in different boxes and they were isolated from each other.
>>21596046no problem. if you can do this recipe successfully you can make a ton of other recipes especially in french and italian cooking. Cooking chicken to build a fond without burning it, deglazing with wine, and then constructing a sauce is a pretty good starting point. Chicken marsala, shrimp scampi, chicken francese, etc all more or less use this process with different ingredients and some extra steps like making a roux. But obviously right once you can do this you can just make your own wine sauces that don't necessarily have to be asian. Cook and remove fish on a pan in olive oil, throw in some garlic for a minute, deglaze with white wine, melt some butter, add a bit of lemon juice and you have a garlic lemon white wine sauce for white fish. Breaded chicken cutlet, sautee some garlic and shallots/onions, deglaze with marsala, chicken stock, add some pepper, salt, herbs, after you simmer add a bit of cream (always add cream after you boil, not before or it will separate), and that's literally just chicken marsalaAfter you remove the chicken but before you deglaze you can add chopped onions to cook until they sweat/become fragrant, then add garlic for like a few seconds then deglaze. It does make it a bit taster than just powder but it takes a bit longer obviously to chop this shit up. You can also throw equal parts flour into whatever oil/butter is in the pan to make a roux. Mix it, it should be thick like wet sand just don't let it sit there too long and burn. Then when you deglaze you can mix the roux into the wine and it will dissolve and make it thicker without . Once you can make a roux you can also make a million other things. When you make mac n cheese from scratch, you start with a roux, then add milk to make a bechamel sauce, then melt the cheese into it and you've got a real cheese sauce instead of kraft powder.
