Poached Chicken and Choy Sum with Garlic and Ginger Sauce

When I started food blogging I found plenty of advice designed to steer the novice away from the more common and pernicious sins associated with bad food writing. One of the most commonly encountered pieces of advice cautions against simply describing your food in terms of vague qualitative adjectives. Basically, nobody's captivated by writing that says "this is really delicious." But, like all rules (especially those associated with writing), exceptions need to be made.

This is really delicious.

Hopefully you're asking yourself why I'd feel the need to point that out. After all, one would hope that all the food I post here is delicious. Nobody wants to read a food blog called Mediocre Eats. But there's a word right there in the title that has become a bit of a culinary buzz-kill. I'm talking about the word 'poached.' Specifically when that word is attached to a meat.

Poached eggs may be the current darlings of the brunch/breakfast scene, especially if you can capture a photo of a creamy golden yolk oozing out onto the plate, but poached meat has a rather unfashionable reputation. Boiling meat is simple enough, and it can be a good way to tenderize a tough piece of meat. This made it a popular middle-class cooking method in Europe and North America, especially in the lean post-war years where good meats and tender vegetables were scarce. But boiling food can be problematic - it leaches a lot of flavour out of the food and into the water. It's also very easy to overcook a meat in boiling water, yielding a dry and mealy disaster. Baby boomers grew tired of bland boiled meat, and even more tired of horribly over-boiled vegetables, and culinary tastes shifted towards other methods of preparation.

But perhaps poaching (which is really just a very careful, fancy way of saying 'boiling') is poised to make a comeback. After all, sous-vide cooking (which, thanks to increasingly adventurous home cooks, has made the leap from Michelin-starred restaurant kitchens) is effectively just a VERY controlled form of poaching, albeit with a barrier in place designed to prevent flavour from leaching out into the pot. But even if you don't want to cook a steak in a bag for 9 hours using a thermostat, you can learn a lot about poaching from sous-vide cooking. I bring all this up because, I encountered a particularly intriguing approach to poaching from a wonderful book all about Chinese Hakka cooking, which I've adapted here. Now, I don't think it's a stretch to say that lean chicken breast tossed in a pot and boiled to perdition will not make for a good meal. But this is not that. This was one of the most tender chicken breasts I've ever tasted, and it was astonishingly easy to achieve. There are two tricks to success here - flavoured poaching liquid, and controlled temperature. The first bit is easy enough to understand - ginger, star anise, and pepper all contribute distinct but subtle flavours to the chicken. But it was the second trick that threw me a little. Basically, you bring the water to a boil, throw in the chicken, then turn it all off and let it cook slowly. You don't actually boil the meat - you just let it stand in really hot water. At first the idea seems odd - we associate boiling with sanitation and proper cooking, but, sous-vide cooking clearly demonstrates that food doesn't just start magically cooking when water is above 100°C. But cooking chicken this way was interesting for another reason - as I often do when testing out new recipes, I checked the temperature of the chicken with a thermometer while it cooked, and I was a little surprised by the way it looked when it was fully done. To put it simply, the chicken was a tiny bit pink. Now if there's a pair of words that sends both diners running for the hills, it's 'pink chicken.' But oddly enough, perfectly cooked chicken breast can actually be a tiny bit pink, especially when it's been poached. The thermometer doesn't lie. The same is true of a good pork loin - when it's perfectly cooked, it actually looks just a little bit underdone. Of course this is all about perception - we're used thinking that chicken is only safe if it's as white and dry as a conversation at the country club. But take a look at the photo - it really is a little bit pink, and incredibly succulent. If I'd kept them in the water much longer or boiled the water, I'd have ended up with something a lot paler, and much less texturally pleasing.

If you have any misgivings about this style of cooking, I really do hope you'll give it a shot and see just how easy and rewarding it really can be. The chicken is wonderful (just use a thermometer if you've got pink-trust-issues), the sauce is easy and packed with flavour, and the greens are so easy to prepare that it barely counts as cooking. The whole thing makes for a memorable and remarkable Chinese dish that... well, that tastes really delicious.