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Gongbao Chicken With Cashews (Gongbao Jiding, 宫保鸡丁)

by Taylor Holliday · Published May 1, 2016 · Updated May 31, 2023

Chengdu Challenge #27: The Do’s and Don’ts of Kung Pao

The Mala Project (now The Mala Market blog) turns two years old this month. It hasn’t made me rich or famous (far from!), but that wasn’t the goal. The immediate goal when I started it was to be a better mom to my immigrant daughter by being a better Sichuan home cook. I did it in blog form because I thought that if I committed publicly I’d be far more likely to stick with it.

And it worked! Two years on, I’m a much better Chinese cook and I’ve got a significantly happier Chinese daughter. Fongchong still refuses to eat traditional American food, but her home, at least, tastes like China.

On top of that, in pursuing The Mala Project I got you. I don’t know what I expected when I started this, but I honestly didn’t expect the worldwide community of Sichuan-cuisine fans who have flocked to my blog with questions, comments, enthusiasm and encouragement. Without you I still would have been cooking Sichuan several nights a week, but I wouldn’t have expanded my repertoire as broadly or deeply or had the joy of sharing my adventures with mala lovers around the globe and hearing about yours in return. So thank you, dear readers, followers and commenters for taking this challenge with me and inspiring me to keep going.

(Oh, and if you follow The Mala Project only on FaceBook or Twitter, please consider signing up for my posts—rarely more than one a month—via email, since social media is very stingy in showing posts/tweets to followers.)

Having promised in my mission statement to look and cook beyond the usual Sichuan suspects, on the two-year anniversary I am nonetheless offering up the most obvious Sichuan dish of them all—gongbao jiding, better known outside China as kung pao chicken. I’ve just assumed all along that the world doesn’t need another recipe for kung pao chicken. But as I looked more closely at a lot of the recipes out there I began to think it does, if only because of one secret I learned about making gongbao chicken from my friend Chef Qing Qing in Chengdu that is seldom seen in kung pao recipes in the West.

Use a generous portion of nuts and Tianjin or, preferably, Sichuan chilies

What is the most important ingredient in a gongbao recipe, the thing that distinguishes it from other mildly sweet-and-sour, mildly mala dishes? That would be nuts, and usually peanuts. So why are they always an afterthought in recipes? Toward the end of the ingredient list will be the call for 3 ounces (or maybe 1/3 cup or 3 tablespoons) (pre-)roasted peanuts, which you will be instructed to toss in at the end of the stir-fry.

But I think that misses the point of the dish. In Sichuan, I learned that the first and most important step is to start with raw peanuts and fry them yourself until golden brown. It makes all the difference in the dish, because freshly cooked peanuts taste more fresh, more toasty, more peanuty, and don’t taste like you’ve tossed your freebie airplane snack into your otherwise lovingly constructed dish.

Fry the fresh nuts until golden and toasty

A couple of other things about the traditional recipe that I feel less strongly about: The chicken bites—always dark meat in Sichuan—should be small, in the realm of the size of the peanuts and chili peppers, not large and chunky. And though, like all Americans, I’m guilty too of trying to make any dish into a one-pot meal, there really shouldn’t be a lot of extraneous ingredients in there like bell peppers and celery (unless you love those ingredients, then, by all means, add them).

One change I do like to make to the classic gongbao, as Sichuanese themselves sometimes do, is substituting cashew nuts for peanuts—fried the exact same way!—because I love the contrast of the rich, buttery nut with the slightly acidic sauce. It’s the luxury version of gongbao.

As I’ve previously discussed, you can gongbao many things—my take on gongbao lotus root is here. You can also substitute shrimp to delicious effect. Just remember that different ingredients and amounts of ingredients might necessitate different amounts of sauce, which you can judge as you are adding it in at the end. There shouldn’t be pools of sauce on the plate, but you also don’t want to be stingy with this genius concoction. I use more sauce than many recipes. And more chili peppers, of course.

A uniform size to the gongbao ingredients helps them all play nice in the wok

A uniform size to the ingredients helps them all play nice in the wok

For more classic recipes with tips and tricks from real-deal mainland chefs, see posts like my Chengdu Stir-Fried Rice or The Queen of Mapo Doufu Recipes (Mapo Tofu) and Chongqing Chicken Like It’s Made in Chongqing.

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