Wednesday, July 07, 2010

Thai Basil Chicken..with a little difference

One of my favorite chicken dish, never fail to order whenever we're at any Thai restaurant. And I never knew it was this easy to cook before catching this one show on AFC, and I knew this dish would taste great just from the way this lady was cooking it. This dish is a common everyday dish in the Thai household. Eaten with white rice, just YUM!

Can you believe it..we couldn't find red chilli's anywhere yesterday! We went to like 4 supermarkets and nope..no luck! Not even at the fresh local produce market! As red chilli is one of the 2 key ingredient to this dish, the end product was a little bit off the color but tasted just as good. Had to do with just the green chilli's and 2 little "cili padi" (birds eye chilli) for an extra heat factor. Traditionally a mortar and pestle is used to prepare the 1st part of this dish, where we have to pound the chilli and garlic together. But my sis doesn't have one =( so i had to make do with her food processor which worked just fine.

I also added fresh Shitake mushrooms (couldn't resist them at the fresh produce market, they looked amazingly enormous and delicious!) and yellow zucchini just to jazz it up a little (i thought the yellow could make up to the red). I think the mushrooms added great flavor to the sauce.

Thai Basil Chicken

Ingredients

2 chicken breasts, cleaned and cut into bite size chunks
5 large shitake mushrooms, soaked and cut into 4's
1 yellow zuchini, thinly sliced
2-3 red chilli (green otherwise), chopped roughly
2 little pieces of cili padi (birds eye chilli)
6 garlic cloves
Handful of fresh sweet basil leaves
2tbsp oyster sauce
1tbsp soy sauce
A dash of fish sauce
Salt and white pepper to taste
Lil bit of chicken stock for sauce

Method

In a mortar and pestle, roughly pound chilli's and garlic (or whiz it up for about 5 seconds in a food processor). Heat oil in a wok, add pounded chilli and garlic, stirring continuously, for a minute. Now add chicken and keep tossing until chicken is almost cooked. Add mushrooms and zucchini, stir for 1 minute and add in rest of the ingredients except for stock and basil leaves. Stir until chicken well cooked, and pour in as much *stock as wanted. Turn off heat, add in **basil leaves, stir just a bit and serve with white rice. BON APPETIT!

*This is generally a semi dry dish, how much stock needed is totally up to your liking depending on how saucy you'd like your dish to be.
**It is very important to add basil leaves ONLY AFTER THE FIRE IS TURNED OFF, as it will blacken and taste bitter if cooked.


Apparently this dish should also be accompanied with a fried egg to balance the heat of the chilli's. But we were fine without it =) A must try for Thai food lovers!

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