Sauces for White Cut Chicken!
The dipping sauces are a must when making Chinese White Chicken. I have 3 sauce recipes including scallion and ginger, fish sauce with kaffir lime leaves, and a spicy soy sauce. The Chinese poached chicken is a staple at Chinese restaurants and made in many households (recipe for Instant Pot poached chicken). The chicken is typically cooked in a master stock with aromatics which lightly flavours the chicken. The chicken with the glossy skin is often seen paired with a ginger and scallion dipping sauce.
My post will tell you how to make the famous dipping sauce, as well as two other incredible sauces that I grew up eating. The one sauce has a fish sauce base, while the other one has soy sauce. The sauces pairs well with other proteins, as well as rice and noodles.
What’s in the famous sauce?
The scallion and ginger sauce is made of finely minced ginger and scallions, mixed with oil and salt. The sauce is simple, yet it pairs well with the chicken pieces, giving it a much-needed punch. The minced ginger is surprisingly not overpowering with the added ingredients but gives the sauce a wow factor to brighten up your senses. The technique on how to make it can vary per person, based on their preference. Some people use hot oil while others don’t, and even the oil used differs per person. Some enjoy the taste and consistency of extra virgin olive oil while others like a more neutral and lighter oil such as vegetable oil. The amount of salt is really adjusted to taste, but typically the sauce is on the salty end, so a little goes a long way.
My version uses hot canola oil to submerge the ginger and scallions to help flavour the oil, with the addition of freshly minced ginger and scallion when the sauce cools. This maximizes the flavours of all the ingredients. I also change up the oil depending on what I have available.
Other must-have sauces!
Growing up, my family also paired white cut chicken with a pungent and flavourful sauce made of fish sauce, sugar, lemon juice, and kaffir lime leaves. To this day, we serve this sauce alongside the ginger scallion sauce whenever we have poached chicken. Kaffir lime leaves can be found in many Asian grocery stores and the leaves can be stored in the freezer. The edible leaves provide a strong citrus aroma and a bright flavour like no other.
And last, I wanted to showcase a sauce using soy sauce as it pairs well with the poached chicken. The spicy soy sauce uses your favourite supermarket chili oil for the heat and is balanced out with black vinegar.
Here are the recipes for:
- Ginger and scallion sauce
- Fish sauce with Kaffir lime leaves
- Spicy soy dipping sauce
Ginger and scallion Sauce
Ingredients
- 3 scallions, green and white parts, minced
- 1 ginger, peeled, minced (1 x 3 inch piece of ginger)
- ½ cup of canola oil, or oil of choice
- ½ tsp of salt, or more to taste
Instructions
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In a bowl, add the ginger and scallions and mix gently. Remove 1 teaspoon of the mixture and keep aside.
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In a pot, heat up the oil and pour it on top of the ginger and scallion mixture. Make sure the oil submerges the mixture. Let the oil cool off.
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Before serving, add the reserved teaspoon of the ginger and scallion mixture.
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Add salt. Taste, adjust and serve.
Ginger and scallion sauce
Fish sauce with Kaffir lime leaves
Ingredients
- 1 tsp of white sugar
- 3 tbsp of lemon juice (juice of half a lemon)
- 4 tsp of fish sauce
- 6 kaffir lime leaves, stems removed, thinly sliced
- 1 Thai chili, thinly sliced (optional)
Instructions
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In a small bowl, add sugar and fish sauce and mix well until the sugar dissolves.
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Add lemon juice and submerge the finely chopped lime leaves.
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Taste, adjust and serve.
Fish sauce with Kaffir lime leaves
Spicy soy dipping sauce
Ingredients
- ⅛ cup of soy sauce
- ½ tsp of chili oil
- 1 tsp of water
- 1 tsp of sesame oil
- 1 tsp of Chinkiang black vinegar
Instructions
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Add all ingredients and mix.
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Taste, adjust and serve.
Recipe Notes
Can use any other brands of black vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, Chinese red vinegar, or red wine vinegar.
Spicy soy sauce
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3 Comments
John Needham
January 5, 2023 at 12:00 amWell done Mary Tang. I have made a few dipping sauces. The hot oil brings a brand new and vastly improved flavour to the spring onion and ginger sauce and much better than others I have made and the others are also well balanced and impressive. In fact, three top notch dipping sauces which I shall be returning to and the highlight of my day. Thanks so much for going to the trouble of posting this. All a huge success. Bon appetit !!
Mary Tang
February 12, 2024 at 9:39 pmThank you so much John for trying out my recipes and the kind words!
NG Dang
October 11, 2022 at 1:46 pmThe fish sauce with kaffir lime leaves was modified for keto to use monk fruit instead of sugar and was delicious with chicken drumsticks steamed for 30 minutes in my Emerald brand multi purpose cooker that I bought on eBay. Now that I have discovered this sauce for the poached chicken I shall never want to have air fryed chicken again.