 Today, we're making chicken stir fry with a technique called velveting. You know how your chicken stir fry when you buy it out is so tender and juicy and just flavorful and it's got this really nice mouth feel? Well, that's what velveting does for your chicken or your beef or whatever meat you're using. And I'm going to show you that today. It takes a little extra step, but I think it's well worth it. So I'm Rockin' Robin and I'm going to show you how to do it right after this. All right, let's start off with our chef joke today. Let me know down in the comments if you'd like one or two chef jokes per video. I'd like to hear what you think. All right, so here we go. What do you call a bird that's afraid to fly? A chicken. So we're going to start our recipe by getting into our velveting process, our technique. So I have some chicken. I'm using chicken breast. You can use chicken thighs if you like, either works. And we're going to begin with making our marinade. Now what this marinade is going to do is going to really tenderize that chicken and create a coating of starch around it so that it just stays nice and moist and the mouth feel is incredible. So, in our bowl here, I'm going to add some rice wine vinegar. Now that rice wine vinegar is an acid and that's going to help to tenderize the chicken. And I'm going to add an egg white to this. Make sure your hands are clean. And we're going to add some corn starch and this is going to give it that velvety texture or mouth feel that we love, right, and just a little pinch of salt. Take a whisk and just blend that up until the corn starch is fully blended in. And for some little bit of flavor here, I'm going to add some coconut aminos. This is the teriyaki sauce style that they have. You could use soy sauce, tamari sauce, you know, something along those lines. Now, like I said, I've got my two chicken breasts here and I'm going to slice these up nice and thin. So, with the chicken breast, you want to cut against the grain so you've got to find the grain the way it's running. I'm not sure if you can see it, but it's kind of going like this. So I want to cut this way and I'm just going to cut, you know, strips like this. And if they're too big, you can cut those in half if you want, if I think I will. You don't want them too thin, but you want them and not too thick. So you want it just right, Goldilocks style. And if you want to make it a little easier on slicing your chicken breast, you can pop it in the freezer for just a few minutes. It will firm it up and it will make slicing this very firm. It's kind of wiggly right now because it's a, you know, not quite room temperature, but it's, you know, soft. So that's something you can do if you want to and I'm just going with it. Now I'm ready to add the chicken to this and I'm going to go ahead and just use my hands to mix it up. And there's plenty of marinade in here for more chicken. You know, I'm making a very small batch. This is like 11 ounces of chicken, 12 ounces. And you could certainly, you know, get a whole pound in here. So we'll cover that with some saran wrap, place it in the refrigerator for a minimum of a half an hour, but an hour would be better. Now it's time to put together our marinade for the stir fry itself. Okay. So we're going to start off with some tamari sauce and I'll place it right here in my mason jar. That's a gluten-free version of soy sauce. So this recipe is gluten-free. Here's some more of the coconut aminos teriyaki sauce. We'll add some chicken broth. And you can get all these, you know, ingredient measurements down below in the description of the video. We'll add our garlic. I have some minced garlic here. We're going to add a teaspoon of some sesame oil. Adds tremendously good flavor to this. I'm going to add some balsamic vinegar here and to sweeten it up, we're going to add just a little bit of honey. I've got some ground ginger. You could use fresh, but I didn't have it, so I'm going to use ground. Last but not least, I'm adding some cornstarch to this to give it that nice glossy finish. And then we'll take our whisk and blend this up. You can even shake it. That smells amazing. So it's important with stir fries to prepare all of your vegetables, things that you want to put in your stir fry ahead of time and have it all ready to go, all your ingredients lined up. It just makes it go so much easier and so much quicker. So I'm going to start off with my asparagus. I'm using asparagus in this, some carrots and some onion. You can add whatever vegetables you like. I will be blanching my carrots and the asparagus for just like a minute and what that's going to do is going to retain the nice vibrant color and it makes your plate just pop. Those vegetables just pop in their colors. So I will trim off the edges of my asparagus and of course give them rinse and then we'll cut them into bite-sized pieces. Now with your carrots you're going to want to just peel them and then slice them into bite-sized pieces. Now with your onion you just want to slice it into slices that are about a quarter inch thick. So now we're going to do our velveteen technique. So we're going to blanch the asparagus and the carrots first and we're not going to do the onions because we're just going to stir fry those. So if you want to use other veggies like say broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, that kind of thing just group your vegetables together in terms of how you know how quickly they cook. So we'll place the carrots in first followed by the asparagus and we're going to test these at one minute. We want these to be al dente. I'm going to test the carrots at a minute and they're still just a little bit firmer than I would like because they are going to cook in the stir fry but not for very long. Let's check out the asparagus. Okay the asparagus are floating on top and they are done. I'm going to scoop them out. I have a colander right back here. I let the carrots go another minute and so they're done now and we're going to take those out as well. Now if you're wondering why I didn't just drain the carrots, I'm saving this water because we're going to use it and use the same technique with the chicken. Alright here's my chicken. I'm just going to place it right in the boiling water and this is only going to take like two minutes. Now you want to just kind of separate it a little bit so it doesn't clump up. You want the meat to cook about 65-70% of the way and that's it. And we're going to cook it again. We're going to stir fry it in the pan so it will finish cooking there. So it's been about two minutes so we're going to take it out and just set it aside. Alright it's time to start stir frying. I've got this pan over almost medium-high heat. You want it to be you know just sizzling hot. I'm going to add some avocado oil to this because it handles high temperatures very well. I'm going to toss in those onions and that's the noise you want to hear. I'm going to stir fry these a little bit until they get a little bit soft. It should take two or three minutes. So here's Chef Joke number two. You ready? What do chickens study at university? Eggonomics. These have softened up just enough. And now we're going to add the chicken to this and we're going to cook this for a couple of minutes. And I have my temperature it's almost done high and you can see that your chicken breast will start to brown a little bit especially if it's on the bottom of the pan. I'm going to turn the temperature down just a smidgen, go back to medium. It's time to add the sauce and we're going to cook this for about a minute or two until it starts to thicken up and that won't take very long. And that garlic gets a chance to cook a little bit. You can certainly serve this up with some white rice. You can eat it plain, you can top it with some cauliflower rice would be nice. So you can see this thickening up now, right? All right, we're ready to add the veggies that have been draining back here. Look at those beautiful colors and you could certainly add more veggies to this if you want. Now we just want to make sure that we get everything coated and that's basically it. This is ready to go. All right, let's taste this and see how that technique works out. I love the vibrancy of the colors of the green and the carrots. That chicken is so tender, so delicious. You've got to try this technique. I think it's really worth it. I think it's worth the extra step and a little bit of time that you marinate. You're going to love the results. Also if you'd like to see another stir fry recipe, you really like those. I have one for chicken fajitas, I'll leave a link for you right here. Go ahead and click that and it'll take you there and try that one out as well. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel, smash the like button and leave me a comment. All right, we'll see you next time.