The chicken recipe Chris Morocco created for ourFamily Dinner Wins packagewill look familiar to anybody who frequents their local Chinese-American restaurant (or frequents that restaurant's take-out menu). It's a stir-fry that starts with oil-toasting the nuts, and ends with a sweet-and-salty sauce that gives a glossy finish to green beans, red onions, and pieces of boneless chicken breasts.
Like I said, it'll look familiar. Except for one part: the chicken may appear bigger than normal.
This is not an illusion. Morocco purposefully eschewed small pieces of chicken for this recipe. Instead, he favored 1/2-inch-thick slices. Why? I asked him, and he gave me three reasons.
"The philosophy behind the bigger pieces is that you're creating something with a relatively uniform size and shape but in a very easy way," he told me. Uniformity is always the goal when cooking pieces ofanything, be it chicken or steak or carrots. And indeed, that's where the idea of, say, the1/2-inch cube of chickencomes from—what could be more exact than a cube?
But while it's true that perfect cubes of chicken will all cook at the same rate, cutting perfect cubes just isn't realistic. You can be as careful as you like, but unless you're setting aside 30 minutes and breaking out a ruler, "your cubes will never be exactly 1/2-inch on all sides," Morocco said. Half-inch slices of chicken—while still requiring some careful cutting—is easier, because it requires only one cut instead of three.
And besides, Morocco actually thinks it's easier to cook chicken when it isslicedrather thancubed. Slices are "so much easier to season and cook evenly, because you're cooking on two very defined sides. Whereas if you break something down into cubes, at a certain point you're just tossing, and it's every cube for itself." (Hear that, cubes? You're on your own!)
Finally, there's the most pressing reason to use bigger pieces of chicken in a stir-fry: bigger pieces are "easier to not overcook." In the recipe we're talking about, the chicken is browned, then finished in the sauce. Small cubes of chicken would probably be done (or beoverdone) by the time the browning was complete. But here there's time to brownandsauce—and still have perfectly-cooked meat.
So: less slicing, easier cooking, and less risk of chewy, overdone chicken—that sounds like an ironclad argument to me. But Modest Morocco wouldn't go that far. Using big pieces of chicken in a stir-fry is "smart," he allowed. And a "way to get the best of every world."
