Best of the Chinese Chicken Marinades to Try Out Anytime

Chinese chicken dishes with a marinade in its recipe have a very high gustatory appeal over the global food enthusiasts. If you scan through the recipes of most popular Chinese chicken dishes like Kung Pao Chicken, General Tso’s chicken, and Chinese chicken curry, you would find that all of them feature a marinade at one point in its preparation.

If you go into an in-depth analysis of Chinese chicken marinades, it is very evident that most of them have soy sauce or other soy products as an inevitable primary ingredient. The traditional ‘sweet soy’ flavour has encapsulated the Chinese choice of taste to a great extent historically, which later started claiming the taste buds of the food lovers on a global level as well.

Many Chinese condiment brands have several marinades and sauces suitable for cooking chicken dishes in their long list of products. Most of those recipes of marinades are inspired from the age-old traditional Chinese chicken dishes. Apart from that, generic Chinese marinades can also be found in their list of products that can be used to make traditional chicken dishes, although they are designated to go well with any meat.

Let us try evaluating a number of Chinese chicken marinades and other condiments, which go well with chicken:

1. Lee Kum Kee Chicken marinade

Find the Lee Kum Kee Chicken Marinade here. 

This is a special Chinese chicken marinade made by the popular Lee Kum Kee brand. Just like any popular Chinese marinades, this product is also a soy sauce based one. The salt, soy and glucose combination of this marinade gives it a special sweet and savoury touch when it blends with ginger extract. Apart from being a great soy-based marinade, this variety can be used as a braising sauce as well as a dipping sauce.

Chicken can be easily marinated using this marinade. Add some water into this marinade and apply on cleaned fresh chicken meat, before keeping aside for 30 minutes or more. This time-lapse will help the marinade to be absorbed by the chicken meat and as a result, the meat will become tender. A general rule says, longer the chicken kept soaked in the marinade, the better the taste. Although it is not ideal to keep the marinated meat for days, it is good to keep it in the refrigerator overnight.

The marinated chicken can be grilled in barbecue style, or it can be cooked in a pan containing a boiling mix of the same chicken marinade and water.

2. Lee Kum Kee Drunken Chicken Marinade

You can get Lee Kum Kee Drunken Chicken Marinade here.

The curious name ‘drunken chicken’ refers to the alcoholic ingredients added to the recipe while making this chicken dish. A traditional Shanghai-style chicken dish, drunken chicken is known for its deep flavour attributed by the special Chinese style drunken chicken marinade. Apart from the usual soy sauce, the Shaoxing rice wine also is added to the marinade in order to give the ‘drunken’ quality to the chicken dish.

The Lee Kum Kee drunken chicken marinade is made using soy sauce, rice wine, sugar, water, salt and spices. It constitutes 25% of rice wine, which gives the marinade its unique Shanghai flavour.

As per the traditional recipe, the chicken is first steamed and then cooked with scallions, ginger and salt. This cooked chicken is then marinated in the drunken chicken marinade and kept in the refrigerator for overnight marination. The delicious dish is now ready for serving. It is usually served chilled. 

3. Amoy Hoi Sin Sauce

Find here our Amoy Hoi Sin Sauce.

Hoi Sin sauce is a thick sauce that originated in the Cantonese tradition of cooking. Hoisin sauce is an excellent ingredient to make the conventional chicken hoi-sin stir-fry dish. Hoisin sauce is made of thick fermented soybean paste, with additional ingredients such as chilli peppers, garlic, fennel, vinegar, sugar and five-spice powder, etc. This variety of Chinese sauce has been an essential ingredient in many classic dishes such as Cantonese Roast Duck, Char Siu Roasted Pork and Barbecued Pork Spare Ribs.

The name ‘hoi sin’ refers to this sauce’s application as an accompaniment in the consumption of seafood dishes. The best-known use of hoisin sauce as a marinade with meat, especially chicken and pork.

4. Kikkoman Teriyaki Marinade

Here is the Kikkoman Teriyaki Marinade and Sauce.

The teriyaki is known as a traditional Japanese cooking method that employs a grilling technique of marinated meat or seafood. The marinade used in this technique is called the teriyaki sauce. Although it is nowadays believed to be of Japanese origin, this cooking method has huge Chinese as well American inspiration behind its inception.

However, this method is popular worldwide as a delicious barbecue technique. The teriyaki sauce is known for its distinctive, striking aroma and flavour as it is made of soybeans, mirin, wheat, water and salt. The term ‘teriyaki’ refers to the ‘glazed grilling’ effect while using the sugar-rich sauce to marinate the meat or seafood. The teriyaki sauce gives appealing sticky characteristics to teriyaki chicken wings.

5. Wah Loong Mixed Spices Chinese Marinade 

Click here to find the Wah Loong Mixed Spices Chinese Marinade.

This is a spice mix for Chinese traditional marinade for making favourite meat dishes like Chinese stew. This can be used with any meat like chicken, turkey, beef, pork, duck and so on. This traditional Chinese spice mix is a combination of eight exotic Chinese spices. The list of spices contains fennel, ginger, clove, cinnamon, star aniseed, licorice, cardamom, and farchiew pepper.

To make a traditional Chinese marinade, one may simply mix this spice mix with soy sauce, vegetable oil, and salt. This marinade mix can be used on chicken or other meat to tenderise the meat and to add special spicy flavours and aroma to them. The meat can be kept in the marinade overnight in the freezer, but for quick use, a minimum of 2 hours of marinating is recommended.

6. Jimmy’s Satay sauce

Jimmy' Satay Sauce is featured on this page.

Although chicken satay is originated in Indonesia, it was heavily inspired by the Chinese traditional flavours. Satay chicken is prepared using an exquisite marinating technique which uses a blend of peanut butter and soy sauce along with other ingredients like coconut oil, sugar, chilli and onion. More satay sauce variants are possible by using additional ingredients like shrimp extract, spices and so on. The method applied in the making of Jimmy’s Satay sauce makes use of additional ingredients apart from the basic ingredients in the Indonesian variant.

Satay sauce is used as a traditional chicken marinade to prepare the satay chicken. The chicken slices are to be immersed in a paste of satay sauce mix, if possible, overnight in the fridge. The next day, the marinated chicken meat can be grilled to make the traditional satay chicken.

Although the number of Chinese chicken marinades listed above is just five, the actual variety and quantity of them are not limited to such a few. Every Chinese locality may have a Chicken dish variety, and most of them may feature a marinade which is unique to that region only. It may take the sincere efforts of more dedicated food researchers to bring those unknown flavours to the global population.

Written By Tom Thomas for Asia Market.