6-Ingredient Chinese Chicken: Easy Chinese Chicken Recipes for Dinner with Few Ingredients (2024)

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by SkinnyMs.

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Published: January 25, 2024

This chicken will be on your plate faster than your delivery guy can make it to your front door.

6-Ingredient Chinese Chicken: Easy Chinese Chicken Recipes for Dinner with Few Ingredients (2)

It’s after 6pm. You’re struggling through rush hour, trying to make it home in time to fit in a workout, throw in a load of laundry, and maybe watch the latest episode of Scandal. How can you possibly be expected to cook dinner, too? You sigh, envisioning another evening rifling through the stack of takeout menus in your drawer, choosing a heavy, greasy, sodium-filled meal made with ingredients you don’t entirely recognize. It may taste good at first, but after the first few bites, you’ll be feeling weighed down and just a bit guilty.

But your evening doesn’t have to go down that road! At Skinny Ms., we’re happy to provide our readers with healthy, clean eating versions of their favorite takeout entrees. Our 6-Ingredient Chinese Chicken is one of our favorite easy Chinese chicken recipes for dinner with few ingredients. It’s a cinch to shop for and prepare. It’s a perfect weeknight dinner, even on those nights when your schedule feels hectic.

How do we make easy Chinese chicken recipes for dinner with few ingredients taste so good? Our marinade is so packed with flavor—it only needs 20 minutes in the fridge to flavor your chicken. Mix together light soy sauce, hoisin sauce, chili sauce, and minced ginger, coat your chicken, and let sit while you look through the mail or water your plants. Your lean, protein-rich chicken breasts only need a few minutes of cooking, and then you can add them to any whole grain you like for a complete and satisfying meal. We like to add a side of bok choy or broccoli for an extra dose of green!

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6-Ingredient Chinese Chicken

This chicken dish is a perfect substitute for those unhealthy takeout options and with very few ingredients, dinner will be served in no time.

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Prep Time 25 minutes minutes

Cook Time 10 minutes minutes

Total Time 35 minutes minutes

Yield 4 people

Serving Size 0.75 cup

Cuisine Chinese

Author SkinnyMs.

6-Ingredient Chinese Chicken: Easy Chinese Chicken Recipes for Dinner with Few Ingredients (3)

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Ingredients

US CustomaryMetric

Marinade

  • 1 tablespoon ginger peeled and minced (about 1 inch ginger root)
  • 1 tablespoon garlic chili sauce or chili paste
  • 1 tablespoon hoisin sauce
  • 1 tablespoon lite soy sauce

Chicken

  • 1 pound boneless and skinless chicken breasts sliced horizontally and then into small cubes
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons canola oil

Instructions

  • Whisk together the marinade. Put the chicken pieces in a bowl and toss well to coat evenly with marinade. Cover and place in the fridge for about 20 minutes.

  • Add canola oil to a sauté pan over medium-high heat. Once the oil is hot and shimmering (but not smoking) add the chicken pieces. Cook the chicken for 3- 5 minutes until cooked through and the juices run clear. If the chicken pieces are larger, cook longer.

  • Serve over brown rice, brown rice noodles, or quinoa. Garnish with chopped cilantro or chopped scallions, if desired.

Nutrition Information

Serving: 0.75cup | Calories: 190kcal | Carbohydrates: 3g | Protein: 25g | Fat: 8g | Saturated Fat: 1g | Cholesterol: 73mg | Sodium: 255mg | Fiber: 1g | Sugar: 1g |

SmartPoints (Freestyle): 4

Keywords Budget-Friendly, Diabetic-Friendly, Low-Carb, Paleo

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We love to make easy Chinese chicken recipes for dinner with few ingredients—they’re quick, healthy, and super satisfying—even when our strongest takeout cravings strike. The best thing about this 6-ingredient Chinese chicken recipe is that it’s easy to keep all of its ingredients stocked so that you’ll always have them on hand for busy weeknight dinners.

Enjoyed this post? Check out more:

  • Easy 6-Ingredient Sesame Chicken
  • 6-Ingredient Caprese Pasta Salad
  • 6-Ingredient Greek Pasta Salad
  • 6-Ingredient Mediterranean Salad
  • Healthy Orange Chicken Crockpot Recipe

Make sure that you subscribe to our newsletter, so that you don’t miss out on anything Skinny Ms. For more tasty recipes, healthy lifestyle tips, and whole- body workouts, check out our Facebook page and follow us on Pinterest.

What are your favorite easy Chinese chicken recipes for dinner with few ingredients? We’d love to hear what you think of this post, or what you’d like to see on our site. Leave us a comment in the comments section below.

6-Ingredient Chinese Chicken: Easy Chinese Chicken Recipes for Dinner with Few Ingredients (2024)

FAQs

How do the Chinese get their chicken so tender? ›

Typically there are a couple of different ways restaurants use to velvet their chicken most Chinese restaurants use baking soda and cornstarch for the best results. However, a couple of other methods include using: Chemical tenderisers. Egg whites.

What is the most popular Chinese chicken dish? ›

Kung Pao Chicken

A spicy, stir-fried Chinese dish made with cubes of chicken, peanuts, vegetables, and chili peppers.

How do Chinese restaurants get their chicken tender? ›

Velveting Chicken: Tenderise chicken the Chinese restaurant way! Here's how to velvet chicken: For every 250g/8oz chicken breast strips or pieces, toss with 3/4 tsp baking soda (bi-carb) Marinate for 20 minutes.

Why does Chinese fried chicken taste so good? ›

Marinade: Both the sauce and marinade work together to flavor the chicken. The marinade includes garlic, ginger, soy sauce, hoisin, sugar, sesame oil, chile, and vinegar for a sweet-spicy-tangy mixture that seasons the chicken prior to cooking.

How do Chinese people make their meat so tender? ›

While there are several ways to velvet, a pound of meat needs about two teaspoons of cornstarch and two teaspoons of oil, says Leung. You may also include two to three tablespoons of water. For beef, add a 1/4-teaspoon of baking soda for tenderizing. Additional seasonings are optional and vary from recipe to recipe.

What do Chinese soak their chicken in? ›

Velveting meat is a Chinese cooking technique used in Chinese restaurants. The process of velveting is one where you marinate raw meat in cornstarch and egg white or bicarbonate of soda to give it a soft, slippery, velvety texture.

How does Panda Express make their chicken so tender? ›

It is a common Chinese cooking technique called velveting the meat. Basically, the meat is marinated in egg whites and cornstarch (other optional seasonings may be added, depending upon what flavor you wish to achieve), then refrigerated for about an hour before cooking.

How to tenderize meat for Chinese food? ›

How to tenderise beef – easily! There are a few methods, but this is the easiest way: Sprinkle 3/4 tsp baking soda (bi-carbonate soda) on 250g / 8oz sliced economical beef cuts. Toss with fingers, leave for 30 minutes.

What are the Chinese 7 ingredients? ›

The seven necessities stem from the phrase "Firewood, rice, oil, salt, sauce, vinegar and tea are the seven necessities to begin a day". The items were known as early as the Song dynasty travel book, Dreams of the Former Capital.

What are the 5 basic tastes in Chinese food? ›

The Chinese categorise the taste of food into five flavours: sweet, bitter, sour, spicy and salty. Chinese medicine regards that eating certain flavours can help the function of the five organs to balance your health, as well as treat disease and recover from illness.

What is in Chinese food that makes it taste good? ›

A blend of cinnamon, cloves, Sichuan peppercorns, fennel and star anise, these five spices give the sour, bitter, pungent, sweet and salty flavors found in Chinese cooking.

How to make chicken extremely tender? ›

The best tenderizer though, is a salted yogurt marinade. The salt has the same effect as in a regular brine, but the lactic acid in the yogurt further tenderizes the meat. A 15-minute marinade with one cup of yogurt and one teaspoon of salt makes for the most tender chicken breasts imaginable.

Why is Panda Express chicken so soft? ›

Why is Panda Express chicken so soft? Chinese restaurants use a cooking technique called velveting. One method is to marinate the meat with cornstarch to create a moist, velvety soft texture. Another method is to coat the meat in baking soda for about 20 to 30 minutes, rinse, and use in the recipe as directed.

Does velveting chicken really work? ›

Velveting chicken is a fantastic technique for dishes with smaller pieces of meat. It unlocks restaurant-level meat tenderness in your own home! This technique can be used for all sorts of different dishes, such as: Remember, you don't have to limit this technique to chicken.

Why is chicken rubbery in Chinese food? ›

Because most of them are Boiled Chicken, hence you might have that feeling of rubbery, actually they are better than fried.

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