Satay stir-fried chicken using peanut butter.

My niece told me that she tried to cook satay stir-fried chicken using a sauce from the supermarket, but that it ended up not tasty.  She was a little upset because she loves satay sauce.

"How hard can it be?" I thought.  It turns out, not very.

This was an initial foray so everything is pretty much malleable.  Anyway, first I marinaded the chicken using these ingredients:

Ignore the cat.  There is no cat in this stir-fried chicken.

The list of ingredients is:

• One chilli pepper, bog standard supermarket. 
• About a thumb of fresh ginger
• four(ish) garlic cloves
• Apple cider vinegar
• Light soy sauce
• Sesame oil (what is on display here is a special stir-fry sesame oil containing extra garlic and chili but ordinary sesame oil would suffice)
• Black pepper
• Chinese five spice powder. 

I deseeded the pepper and skinned the garlic and peeled the ginger.  I added all of these to a mini-chopper along with a glug of cider vinegar, a glug of light soy sauce, a good shake of five-spice, a pinch of pepper and a glug of oil and whizzed them until they had made a marinade.  It's possible that I used too much soy sauce, and I didn't actually use any salt, figuring that the soy sauce would be salty enough.  

I cut one chicken breast into strips and then tossed the strips in the marinade as shown below.

I covered the bowl with clingfilm and left the strips marinading for a couple of hours.  I would imagine that the minimum time needed for marinading is around 30 minutes.

A couple of hours later, I put the wok on to warm up while making the satay sauce.  To make the sauce, I used these ingredients:

• peanut butter
• apple juice (not from concentrate)
• soy sauce

Again, I was pretty much making up the amounts as I went along.  I used about a desert spoon of the peanut butter, about double the volume of apple juice and a glug of soy sauce.  Again, I could probably have cut down on the soy sauce (the finished dish was very salty), perhaps limiting it to one teaspoon.  The apple juice goes really well with peanut butter, having the right sort of sweet -sourness; if you had rice wine or cider of even dry sherry, that would also do.  I probably had too much liquid, so an equal volume of the juice would also have been fine. 

I put all of the ingredients in a small bowl, covered it with clingfilm and microwaved it for around 30 seconds so that I could mash them up into a liquid, as below.  It tastes much better than it looks. 

When the wok was pretty hot, I added about a tablespoon of stir-fry oil and then the chicken strips, reserving the marinade for later.  I fried the chicken strips for a couple of minutes.

Then I added half a packet of stir-fry vegetables (including bean sprouts).

I kept tossing and turning the chicken and the vegetables for about five more minutes.  About a couple of minutes from the end, I added the peanut butter mixture I had prepared earlier, along with the reserved marinade, and kept moving the mixture around until everything was heated through.

It doesn't look great, but it tastes good.  

Next time I make this, I'll cut down on the soy sauce and perhaps the chili - this was very spicy and probably would have worked with half the amount of chili.  If I had to use dry chili flakes, I'd use it in the marinade and use a good couple of shakes of the bottle. 

The core trio of tastes - peanut butter, sour apple juice / vinegar and spicy chili - work very well together.  It's just a matter of finding the right balance.

I think it is probably important to make sure that you do add vinegar somewhere but also to take care not to add too much, so a glug in the marinade is probably about right.