00:00Hey everybody and welcome back to It's Only Food with Chef John Paulie. Today we're
00:05going to be showing you how to make Sri Lankan chicken. Cue the music.
00:10Alright well welcome back. Appreciate you being here. Thanks a lot for watching. Like
00:32I said today we're going to be making Sri Lankan chicken. So let's drop down here and
00:35see what our ingredients are for this. We're going to start out with two tablespoons of
00:39olive oil, a half a cup of onions that are diced, one and a half tablespoons of fresh
00:45minced garlic, one jalapeno that's been seeded and then diced, two cups of cooked and cubed
00:51chicken breast meat, and one half of a red bell pepper that we've diced up. And then
00:56we're going to season this as it's cooking with a half a tablespoon of ground cumin,
01:01a half a tablespoon of curry, a half a tablespoon of fennel seed, one half teaspoon of turmeric,
01:08one half teaspoon of black pepper, and a half teaspoon of sea salt. And then we're
01:13going to finish that off with one cup of coconut milk, two cups of chicken broth, half a cup
01:18of some chopped up cilantro leaves, and one cup of some pineapple tidbits. We've also
01:24got some rice that we're going to make. We've got one cup of brown rice, one cup of coconut
01:29milk, one cup of water, and a half a teaspoon of sea salt and a half a teaspoon of black
01:35pepper. I've done all the prep, let's start working on our meal.
01:39Alright, before we begin any recipe we always make sure we have our mise en place and we've
01:43got it all ready to go right there. We've got our pan, we've got a spoon back there
01:48that we're going to be using to stir things up. We've got all of our ingredients laid
01:51out right there in order of appearance and order of use. And in the back we have our
01:56rice cooking. There you go, back there in the rice cooker. If you don't have a rice
02:01cooker you can cook your rice in a pot, get it boiling, throw everything in the pot, get
02:06it boiling, and then turn it down to simmer and cover it for about 20 minutes and it should
02:10be done. Alright, so there it is, everything is ready to go. Let's get down here and focus
02:15right on our little pan there and we'll start cooking.
02:18Alright, the first thing you want to do, you want to get your pan going, you want to get
02:21it hot. So set your flame or your temperature to about medium high heat. We're going to
02:27go ahead and dump the 2 tablespoons of our olive oil in here and let that get hot. Alright,
02:37your oil is going to be distributed throughout the pan. Knowing that that's hot, go ahead
02:42and put your garlic and your onions in. Let those start to cook.
02:58Now you just want to sauté these up until the onions get soft, about 2 to 5 minutes.
03:07We can add our jalapenos, our red peppers, stir these up. Same thing, let them get a
03:15little soft, let all those flavors combine. And we'll add our chicken. This is cooked
03:33chicken that we got at the store. It's a wonderful deal and you can see it's a little bit bigger
03:39than a dice. But as it cooks, it's going to break down just a little bit and come apart.
03:46We're going to stir that all in there too. It already looks beautiful. Just let this
03:54alone, let it cook. Alright, that's just beautiful so far. Now we're going to go ahead and add
04:01our fennel seeds, our turmeric, our curry powder, and our salt.
04:09We're going to give this a nice stir. Oh, wonderful smell, wonderful smell.
04:32Now I am just a bit concerned of this recipe, but having 2 cups of chicken broth, I thought
04:38that was a little bit too much. I'm going to let my instincts kick in here. I'm just
04:43going to add half of it for right now. I may be wrong, I know, hard to believe, but I will
04:51add the other half of this chicken stock if we need to. Now I'm adding our coconut milk.
04:59We're just going to stir this up. The reason I say this is that there is nothing in this
05:05recipe that acts as a thickener. I'm just a little concerned that we're going to have
05:12a very liquidy dish here, but there's a way to fix that called reduction. If we have to
05:22do that, we will do that, but I'm going to turn it down for just a little bit. I'm going
05:26to go ahead and let this just cook and we will just see what happens to it.
05:30All right, so the scene we just transitioned out of into this scene, the scene that I wanted
05:36to film, I forgot to turn the record button on, so this is a re-recording of that scene,
05:42so if it looks a little bit different, trust me, I'm not trying to deceive you in any way.
05:47I just want to be honest with you and let you know that I forgot to hit the record button,
05:50so this scene is with what I caught out of editing, so I have to redo it, but it's the
05:56same process that we're going to do. We're going to teach you how to thicken this up
05:59with a cornstarch slurry. You want to make sure that you've got enough heat going, and
06:06you can see that with the bubbles from your flame coming up off your burner. Now I've
06:10got my pineapple that I've got. I've got a lot of liquid in there, so I'm just going
06:14to take a heaping tablespoon of some cornstarch here. I'm just going to put it right on in
06:19there and mix it up, and then I want to pour this cornstarch slurry right into the center
06:27of the pan where all that heat is, and then we're just going to see if this tightens it
06:33up at all. It should, but I don't think it's going to be enough. Yeah, it's going to tighten
06:40it, but it's not going to be quite enough, so I am going to do another heaping tablespoon
06:48into this little bowl. I'm going to add just a little bit of chicken stock that we've got
06:59there. I'm going to make another slurry with that. I'm going to pour that right in. That
07:07should do the trick. Yep, you can immediately tell. So that's how you fix that if you've
07:21got too much liquid. It doesn't compromise the flavor, but it does help thicken it up
07:28so it will adhere to that rice and look nice when you go to plate it up. All right, so
07:34we're going to let this simmer some more. Let it reduce just a little bit and that will
07:38help tighten it up as well, and then we will go to plate it up. All right, let's go to
07:43plate this up. We've got our rice right here. I'm going to just put it right in the middle
07:49of the bowl, and we'll take our wonderful chicken, and we're going to plate it up.
08:05Right in the center, you've got some leftover cilantro. You can shred it up, throw it right
08:14on top, along with the pineapples. There you go. Wipe that off. That's ready to go out
08:22of the window, as they say. All right, we're going to photograph this with some music,
08:38and then we're going to come back and taste it. Don't go anywhere.
08:52All right, those are some lovely, beautiful pictures there, so I'm going to go ahead and
09:12give this a bite here. Yeah, this looks fantastic. You can get a little bite of everything here,
09:19that chicken. For one thing, that chicken is totally tender. First thing I'm getting
09:27is the creaminess and the texture of that sauce with the coconut milk in it, and the
09:32umami of that chicken stock. You can taste the red peppers in there, and the jalapenos.
09:38Give it a little bit of a bite. The pineapples, I'm going to try to get a little bite of the
09:44pineapple with the rice. You definitely taste the pineapple, along with that garlic and
09:56onion in there. They give it that nice little subtle kick. It's not a spicy dish. It's really
10:05good. The chicken is very tender. I'm going to get one more bite, and then we'll close
10:10out our ... Very good. Very easy to make. Now, the wonderful thing about this, and cooking,
10:19recipes aren't written in stone. Recipes are sometimes not right. We found out with this,
10:23my instincts were correct. It was too much chicken stock for this, so we solved the problem
10:30by thickening it up with a cornstarch slurry. We velveted the pineapples, and then we put
10:36it into the mix, thickened that up. It wasn't enough, so we used a little bit of that chicken
10:40base that we had left over. Sorry, chicken stock that we had left over, and we tightened
10:43it up a little bit more. It came out perfect, as you can see. It's just the right consistency
10:48to match the rice, where it's not soupy. The rice is good. I don't know really how good
10:53it is, because it's mixed with everything, but it had the right consistency and the right
10:57texture when I took it out of the pot to plate, and it smelled fantastic, too. All right.
11:01Well, I appreciate you watching. We made Sri Lankan chicken. I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks
11:06a lot for being here. I hope to see you again real soon. It's Only Food with Chef John Polite.
11:11Thanks a lot for watching again. Take care of yourself. God bless. We'll see you again.
11:15Bye-bye.
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