Three Cup Chicken is one of my favourite veganizable recipes from Taiwan! And lucky for us, the vegan version is much easier and quicker to make than the meat protein version. You don’t need to stew tofu for a hundred years to get the sesame flavour to take, so this dish takes only 15-20 minutes max.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, vegetarians and vegans generally have cool or yin (阴) bodies. This is because a high percentage of our food is considered to have cooling properties. So if you find yourself pale and getting tired or cold easily, you could be “too cool”. To counter this, we can eat more food with heating properties, such as sesame oil, ginger, and chilli. And Three Cup Chicken has all three!
The “three cups” in this recipe are originally one cup of rice wine, one cup of sesame oil, and one cup of soy sauce. I have adjusted these proportions because sesame oil is expensive and kind of yuck when you use too much.
If you have access to good quality Taiwanese rice wine, such as Kinmen Kaoliang 金門高粱酒, you can drink while you cook. Otherwise, any bai jiu-style rice wine or Chinese cooking wine will do, really.
PS: Taiwan is not China, mmkay.
Ingredients
Instructions
Notes
The ratio for my recipe is rice wine 2 : soy sauce 1.5 : sesame oil 1.5 : sweet soy 0.5
You can expand to make as much sauce as you like as long as you keep to this ratio.