Sharing my recipe for making Dapanji. This recipe covers the chicken part. See this for how pulled noodle is made.
Time Cost
- preparing ingredients: 20 mins
- active cooking: 10 mins
Ingredients
- Chicken pieces (dark meat with bones) 2 lbs
- Medium sized onion * 1
- Medium sized Green pepper * 1
- Medium sized Potato * 3
- Ginger * 1 cubic inches
- Garlic * 10 cloves
- Medium sized star anise * 3
- Cinnamon stick * 2 inches
- Szechuan peppercorn * 20
- Dried chili * 10
- Green onion * 3
- Nutmeg * 1
- Crystallized sugar * 8~10 pieces
Preparation Steps
- Optional: remove the skin and extra fat from the chicken pieces. This is to lower the total calories of this and reduce animal fat intake.
- Prepare a pot of boiling water and chop the chicken meat into bite-sized chunks.
- Slice the ginger, crush the garlic cloves and cut green onion into inch-sized pieces.
- Put all the chicken pieces into the boiling water, add a few 2~3 slices of ginger and pour in some cooking wine
- Skim the foam and pick up the half-cooked chicken pieces. Draining well and sit them in a bowl for cooking.
- Coarsely chop onion and green pepper.
Cooking Steps
- Heat the wok on low and add in 3 tablespoon of olive oil.
- Add in crystallized sugar and gently stir until turning into syrup.
- Turn heat to high and and add in the prepared chicken pieces. Stir fry the chicken pieces to get them colored.
- Add everything else except for onion, green pepper and potato. Cook for 2~4 mins until the flavor is fully rendered out (you can tell by simply smelling).
- Add in onion and green pepper and stir fry for about a minute.
- Pour about 4 cups of water to cover all the ingredients. Add in potato pieces now.
- Close the lid (if you have one) and let it simmer for 20 mins. Season well with salt halfway through.
- 20 mins later we’ve got our delicious Dapanji. Enjoy!
Summary
Very delicious dish and fairly easy to make. To make it healthier I removed all the visible chicken fat, but normally people would cook with chicken fat & skin on to get even more chicken flavor.
I don’t have much learning other than balancing the flavors. My first trial seems like a failure simply because I added way too much sugar for coloring and it it overwhelmed other tastes in the final product.
Hope you can give it a try and enjoy this dish!
