Crispy Honey Lemon Chicken

I stumbled across a great website containing loads of delicious Asian recipes, called Rasamalaysia and they have some of our favorite Asian dishes, made pretty simply.  I used a mixture of their orange chicken and the honey chicken to come up with this one.  I have never really tried my hand at the deep fried Chinese chicken dishes before but I thought it might be a good way to get the girls to try different sauces.  Let's just say we've had a big fry up this week... the girls LOVED it.  I suppose it was no surprise given it's flash fried chicken in a sweet honey and lemon sauce.  Mark and I really enjoyed it too, knowing the sauce wasn't full of MSG and the chicken was fresh and hormone free.

I made this twice this week, the first time in an orange and garlic sauce but we all liked this one better.  I may need to perfect the sauce I think and update it again as I ended up adding sugar to it last night because I didn't like the honey I used. I think if you choose a nice, not over powering honey, you should be right with these proportions.   The biggest winning aspect of this dish was the frying batter, so if you get that right you'll have them eating out of your hands!

Serves family of 4

Ingredients:
2 boneless chicken breast, cut into bite size cubes
season lightly with salt and white pepper

1/4 cup cooking oil for frying, vegetable or canola oil

Frying batter:
1 oz cornstarch
2oz all purpose flour
1/4 tspn salt
1/2 tspn baking soda
1/2 cup ice cold water
1/2 egg
1 tblspn cooking oil

Honey lemon sauce:
1/3 cup honey
2 tblspn lemon juice
1 tspn rice wine
1 tspn rice vinegar or apple cider vinegar
1 tblspn soy sauce
3 tbslpn chicken broth
1 tspn cornstarch
1 tblspn vegetable oil
sugar (if needed)

Method:

• Whisk all the honey lemon sauce ingredients together and leave aside.
• Make the frying batter in a large bowl and drop you seasoned chicken pieces in. 
• Prepare and start cooking your rice in a saucepan on the stove.
• Heat up the cooking oil in a large saucepan or wok
• Drop the chicken pieces into the oil gently and allowing enough space between pieces so they fry well and don't stick together.  Do them in small batches if necessary.  Cook on each side until golden brown about 4-5mins total I would say. Drain on paper towel and set aside. (I warmed my oven up to 300'F so I could transfer the cooked chicken to a baking tray to keep warm, only because I was waiting for my husband to come from work and wasn't sure of timing)

• In a small saucepan, heat the honey sauce and whisk gently until it begins to thicken. 
• When ready to eat, serve the chicken with a sprinkle of sesame seeds over steamed jasmine rice.
• I kept the sauce separate and poured it over the chicken and rice once it was dished up, to ensure the chicken stayed crunchy.  Many recipes call for stirring the chicken through the sauce in a large wok but I tried that and the crunchy batter turns soft and mushy... not what I was after.