Chicken with black bean sauce is a popular restaurant dish. Too often, however, one is served overcooked vegetables with scraps of chewy chicken swimming in a gloopy sauce.
This version is a colourful dish of mixed bell peppers, onion, spring onion and bone-in chicken pieces in a light black bean sauce. Some diners might complain about the bones in the chicken but the meat tastes so much better that way.
This dish isn’t a simple stir-fry, because you need to oil-blanch the chicken first. Oil blanching – frying the chicken briefly in hot oil so it is partially cooked – gives the meat a lovely, silky texture.
Buy a fresh chicken from the poultry shop and have the vendor cut it up Chinese-style, through the bone into bite-size pieces. You won’t need the head or feet; they can be bagged up and frozen and, when you have enough bones and other parts, used to make chicken broth.
