Chicken with Vietnamese lemongrass: the secrets of the tart and fragrant recipe by Couteaux & Tire-Bouchons.
When your girlfriend has Vietnamese origins, even far away, it puts pressure on you when you cook the Vietnam classics. Sometimes you think, “Oh, I’ll make some rolls”, and then you remember his lost origins in the Dragon of Asia, and you imagine the disgusting look of his ancestors staring at you as you roll your rice leaves… But sometimes courage takes hold of you, you bring yourself a good recipe and you go for it. That’s what happened to me with the Vietnamese chicken with the lemongrass.
Traditional Vietnamese Lemongrass Chicken
In fact, it was after seeing my darling enjoy this dish in a small viet restaurant in the dangerous suburbs of Bordeaux (the Binh Duong) that I decided for the first time to redo this emblematic dish of the Banh Mi country. A priori nothing extremely complicated in this chicken dish with lemongrass: well-grilled chicken, caramelized lemon juice, slightly candied onions, and white rice. We can serve this with some vegetables, cilantro leaves and fried onions and that’s it.
But here it is: the real problem, what makes this dish look like a trap of the Ǫiǫn Biên Phǫ, is to know precisely how to make this sauce with lemongrass, how to regain the taste of fresh citrus fruit characteristic of this dish, just sweet as it should be. And that’s the trouble. My first attempts with chicken with Vietnamese lemongrass were very unsuccessful, but as often with hyper-traditional cuisine, it is by going back to the basics that we find the solution. And as is often the case with this kind of cooking, it is by taking the time that we get there.
Come on, I’ll tell you everything!
Traditional Vietnamese Lemongrass Chicken Recipe
Be careful, the chicken with lemongrass is to start the day before, because you have to make a marinade. That’s the secret to getting the meat to taste like lemongrass.
Vietnamese Lemongrass Chicken Marinade
Ingredients
for 4 persons
4 stems of lemongrass
2 cloves of garlic
1 shallot
1 lime
1 small piece of ginger
2 c.s.s of peanut oil
1 c.s.s of liquid honey (acacia)
1 c.a.s de nuoc mam
600 g boneless chicken (white and thigh)
Preparation:
With a sharp knife, chop the lemongrass as finely as possible. To make it less boring, you can first crush your stems with a rolling pin, it will soften them. Remove the zest of a lime, then its juice, and mix with the chopped lemongrass. Add the grated ginger, chopped garlic, chopped shallot, oil, honey and nuoc mam.
Bone your chicken pieces, remove the tendons. Keep the skin and a little fat: the aromas in general are fat soluble, which means that they are better associated with the fatty molecules. If you remove all the fat from the chicken, or if you don’t put oil in your marinade, you lose flavor. Marinate these pieces in the marinade overnight.
The next day, you will have to cook the chicken and prepare the vegetables and sauce.
Chicken with Vietnamese Lemongrass: preparation
Ingredients
for 4 persons
Your 600 g marinated chicken
200 g of carrots
4 large yellow onions
50 g soya sprouts
some fungi (oyster mushroom type)
1 clove of garlic
bone and chicken fat
2 c.s.of palm sugar (or cane sugar)
fried onions
poultry stock (optional)
chilli powder
Preparation:
Start by draining your chicken, keeping the marinade (with all the ingredients).
The lemon grass sauce:
In a saucepan, heat peanut oil and add chicken bones and leftovers to brown. When the juices start to attach, deglaze with the marinade all at once. Add a little water, and if you have chicken stock (fresh, or even powdered). In another saucepan, heat the palm sugar until it melts and forms a light caramel. Add this caramel to your sauce, then filter it by pressing well to recover all the aromas of lemongrass, ginger etc… Cut your onions and add them to the sauce so that they are slightly candied. Reduce to simmer.
The vegetables are:
Meanwhile, prepare your vegetables. Grate your carrots into very thin sticks. Wash and prepare your soy sprouts. Wash your mushrooms and cook them in a little peanut oil with garlic.
Cooking chicken with lemongrass:
In a hot well-oiled wok, brown your chicken pieces. When cooked, deglaze with the lemon grass sauce.
Dressage:
Serve in a large shallow plate, starting with white rice, then add your chicken, carrots, soy sprouts. Drizzle with the onions, then add the cilantro leaves and the fried onions.
Here it is! Here we have the real taste of lemongrass, well soaked in chicken and sauce! I admit that in the photo I also put pieces of cooked carrots, just preserved for about 20 minutes in the sauce, and it was great! It’s the real Vietnamese chicken with lemongrass, a delight, a real taste trip.
Test it, you’ll love it. And besides, in the same genre, you also have the famous Vietnamese pork confit with lemongrass, or the beef sautéed with lemongrass, and that too, it blows up well enough!
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