Old Beijing Chicken Wraps
老北京鸡肉卷
English: Old Beijing Chicken Wraps
Chinese: 老北京鸡肉卷
Pinyin: lao Beijing ji rou juan
These wraps are an old street-food classic from Beijing. This is what locals proudly call Chinese ‘fast food’. A lunch that you used to be able to grab from little hole in the walls all across the city. There is a generation of older Beijingers that love these wraps, a taste that takes them back to a simpler time before gridlocked traffic, trendy hutong bars and flashy malls.
It’s a multi-step process when cooking at home: making the pancakes, frying the chicken, mixing the sauce and chopping up the veg. You can speed up the process by buying soft flat breads, something chewy ideally.
Chinese cooking is surprisingly open to new ingredients, adopting flavours from all around the world fairly quickly, and merging it into the cuisine: think pizza with durian fruit, KFC with Sichuan spice, cucumber potato chips. Likewise, somehow, Orleans marinade powder made it into the street kitchens of China, the ‘secret ingredient’ of many curb side cooks.
Makes 6-7 wraps
Ingredients
For the Pancakes
360g flour - 180g
3g salt - 1.5g
150g warm water - 75g
For the Fried Chicken
4 boneless chicken thigh (about 600g)
3 teaspoon Orleans marinade powder
2 teaspoons light soy sauce
1 teaspoon shaoxing wine
1 teaspoon white sugar
50g flour
50g corn starch
1-2 cups of cooking oil
For the Sauce
30g sweet bean sauce (tian mian jiang)
90g warm water
10g corn starch
5-10g sugar
For the Veg
1 cucumber - julienned
3 green onions - julienned
Method
First make the dough: add the flour, salt and water into a bowl, mix into a dough and knead for five minutes. If the dough is looking too dry and add bit more water. Cover with plastic wrap and leave for 20 minutes or so.
Cut the chicken thighs into strips 2-3cm wide and add to a mixing bowl. Add the Orleans marinade, soy sauce, wine and sugar and mix well. Leave the chicken in the fridge for at least an hour.
Prepare the sauce: in a small saucepan, add the corn starch and sugar and pour over the water. Mix until the corn starch has dissolved. Then add the tianmian sauce and heat over a low heat until the sauce starts to bubble and thicken, then set aside.
Back to the dough. Cut the dough into about 7 pieces (about 50g each), and roll each one into a thick pancake. Brush the top of one with a layer of oil and then press another pancake on top of it so the oil is squished in between. Repeat with all the pancakes. Then roll the double pancake as thin as you can.
Put a frying pan over a low heat. When it’s hot, add a pancake and heat until it starts to blister. Then turn the pancake over and heat the other side. Remove from the pan and repeat with all the pancakes.
When they are still hot, peel the two pancakes that you stuck together earlier. Cover and keep warm.
In a dry bowl, add the flour and corn starch. Heat a saucepan or wok with about 1-2 cups of cooking oil for deep frying over a medium-low heat.
Whilst the oil is heating up, remove the chicken from the fridge then drop into the flour. Coat the chicken strips and drop into the oil.
Cook for about 3-4 minutes, then remove with a slotted spoon onto kitchen paper. Repeat until all the chicken is cooked.
To assemble the rolls, take one pancake and smear it with a liberal helping of sauce. In the centre, place 2-3 pieces of fried chicken, and then make two lines of cucumber batons either side, and finish with a few slithers of spring onion.
Serve it up. They’re best fresh but in Beijing you often get then an hour or so after they’ve been made and although not super crispy, I still enjoy them.
