I don't have a photo as I didn't cooked this with making a blog post in mind. I was desperately googling recipes for this as I was craving for it but didn't want to haul my ass to a Chinese restaurant. This isn't actually a Filipino recipe (it's actually 粤式豉油鸡 or just 酱油鸡), but most recipes I found had ingredients that I'm not sure where to get so I changed some with items that you can get from your local palengke or grocery. Still turned out pretty close from what you can get at a Chinese restaurant though.
- 8 pieces chicken leg (most people use whole chicken, but most people like legs or thighs thus I'm using only legs)
- 1 cup brown sugar (idk if you can use white, but I only had brown at the time)
- 6-8 cloves of garlic
- scallions (if you can't find it, just use spring onion. Personally I don't think there is much difference with the result)
- 3 whole star anise
- 1 tablespoon oil
- 1 tablespoon sesame oil
- salt to clean the chicken and salt to taste
- some ginger, sliced flat but not too thin (maybe around 6-8 slices of 3-4 cm in length of ginger)
- enough water to cover the chicken plus the other liquids below (personally I used around 100-150ml)
- 50-100ml of Marca Pina cooking wine
- 150 ml Kikkoman
- 150 ml of normal soy sauce like Datu Puti
Just a note on some of the ingredients, on most recipes it needs rock sugar, chinese rose cooking wine, light soy sauce and dark soy sauce. Upon research, soy sauce in Asian countries varies in tastes and most recipes online don't really specify which soy sauce to use but I imagine it is Chinese soy sauce. I don't know where to get Chinese soy sauce (although on Marca Pina's website, their soy sauce is labelled as Chinese soy sauce?) and it tastes different from Japanese shoyu (like Kikkoman) but I wanted to give it layers of flavor thus I opted to use Kikkoman plus Datu Puti. Anyway, the resulting dish still turned out nice.
Procedure
- In a container with the chicken legs, put in a lot of rock salt and give the legs a body scrub massage. I mainly do it out of habit to clean the pores of the chicken but this is a must when cooking whole chicken (to ease out cleaning the nooks and cranies and to give it a just came from the spa glow). Rinse out the salt well with water
- Optional step but I like trimming out the fat from the leg since this will produce a lot of oil. A lot of the fat is under the skin so you would either need to cut some of the skin or patiently trim out the fat
- Heat some oil then caramelize the ginger for around 30 seconds on a pot
- Put in the garlic, scallions (or spring onions) and star anise and cook for around 30 seconds
- Dump the cooking wine, Kikkoman and your other soy sauce on the pot
- After it has boiled, put in the chicken. Add just enough water to cover the entire chicken if the liquids from earlier is not enough.
- Boil the chicken but not a vigorous kind of boiling (just on boiling point or slightly higher) for 15 minutes. Then lower the heat to simmer
- Put in the sesame oil, stir to distribute. Make sure chicken legs are even in coloring. The liquid shouldn't have lessened significantly but if it did just add some more of the soy sauces, cooking wine and water maybe a ratio of 1:2 (1 of the soy sauces, cooking wine then 2 for water).
- Simmer for 15 minutes
- Optional step: With all of the soy sauce you'd think you won't need to salt it as it is already plently flavorful but should you feel the need to, salt according to your taste at this stage
- Simmer for another 10-15 minutes. Turn off the heat, stir again so chicken are evenly coated then leave it in the pot. You must let it rest for around 15 minutes before serving but you can also choose to leave it in there for a few hours so the chicken can absorb the flavors more
If you have a significant amount of sauce left, you can use it to flavor boiled eggs! Just boil some eggs on a separate pot then after peeling just dump them on the remaining sauce and simmer for around 10 minutes (make sure eggs are evenly coated).
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