My friend Barb made an incredible feast for Chinese New Year, she had so many delicious things it was really difficult to choose just one. But when I saw the Lemon Chicken plated out, I knew I had to try it because, believe it or not, I happen to adore the not so good for you version at Chinese fast food stalls! It turns out that lemon in savoury dishes is not one of JT’s favourite things, although he did say he didn’t hate it. Well, what he actually said was he prefers the taste of lemons in desserts! Go figure. I really enjoyed this recipe because I adore sour and sweet combos. And I have to admit, I reduced the sugar for our dinner and if I were to make it again, I would reduce it even more as I found it a little too sweet for my taste (I have adjusted the recipe below to reduce the sugar). I also baked the skinless, boneless Chicken breasts instead of pan frying to be a little healthier.
Lemony Chicken
Original Recipe from House and Home
Serves 2, 100 g portions
Ingredients:
- 1/2 cup water
- 1 tbsp sugar (I have reduced this from my pictured recipe already)
- 1 heaping tbsp grated ginger root
- Juice of 1 lemon
- 1 tsp lemon zest
- 1/2 tbsp cornstarch
- 200 g boneless, skinless chicken breast
- 3 tbsp flour
- 1/4 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 2 egg whites
- 1/2 tbsp cold water
- 1/2 tsp soy sauce
- 1 clove garlic, finely minced
- 1 cup panko-style bread crumbs
- 1 tbsp toasted sesame seeds
- Mix of greens such as shredded romaine lettuce.
Directions:
- Preheat oven to 350°F.
- Combine water, sugar and ginger in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for a few minutes to infuse the water with the ginger.
- Stir in the freshly squeezed lemon juice and zest and quickly return to a boil.
- Dissolve the cornstarch in about 1 tbsp cold water and stir well into the lemon mixture. Cook on medium neat until thickened, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and set aside.
- Remove all residual fat from the chicken. Place in a zip lock bag and pound so that the breasts are even thickness. Cut each breast into similar thickness stips.
- Combine flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl, stir well. Set aside.
- Whisk egg white, water, soy sauce and garlic in another bowl, set aside.
- Pour Panko into a third bowl and mix in the sesame seeds.
- Set up your breading stations so that the flour mixture is first, the egg whites second and the panko last.
- Dredge the chicken strips in the flour mixture and shake off excess, then dip into the egg whites and lastly coat with panko/sesame mix. Repeat with all the chicken strips until all have been breaded.
- Bake on a parchment lined baking sheet for about 12-15 minutes (turning about mid way) or until chicken has an internal temperature of 165°F or 74° C.
- Reheat the sauce. Fill a bowl with mixed greens, place chicken strips over the greens and dress with the hot lemony sauce.
- Enjoy!
Hi Eva! This is a great recipe. I love chicken strips and I’m sure the sweetness really gives them a unique flavor.
I see you served them with salad. I’m just wondering what other side dishes do you think would go well with it?
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Hi Tudor, thanks for your comment. Any type of white rice would work, or even a coconut sticky rice would be nice. If you feel like a rizzy bizzy would be good too (white rice and peas, a Hungarian treat). I eat a lot of protein on greens to help mitigate the calories.
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Looks great Eva! Much healthier than the fast-food version.
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Definitely, thanks Amber.
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I love eating protein over greens now a days in place of carbs, though that gets a tab difficult with the Indian dishes. This is a great recipe, and I think my kids will love it.
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Thanks Minnie, might want to use Barb’s recipe, she left the full sweetness in.
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Nothing to complain about here. 😉
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Glad to hear it Jed, we’re looking forward to seeing you soon!
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Hey, Eva … I made the lemon chicken today. I had to do some extra fiddling with the sauce since I accidentally added the juice of 1 1/2 lemons (don’t ask) to the water, then had to add more sugar then more water, then more cornstarch. Well, it was exciting. I didn’t assemble the dish or taste it since I made 4 other dishes today. I’m sure you can picture the pandemonium. 🙂
My only concern was that I didn’t get the lovely golden brown colour on the panko that you did even after baking at least 20 minutes.
I’ll have to think of an appropriate side to serve with the dish when I finally get a chance to taste it
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Hi Maria! I’ve done something like that before when I get distracted in the kitchen. I hope it worked out in the long run. Rice would be a great side to this dish too, maybe even sticky coconut rice!
I have a double oven where one is about 1/3 the height of the large oven and the elements are quite close to the food; you can try broiling a bit to get a similar effect to my oven.
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I sliced the lemon in half to get the juice out then realized that I needed the zest too. Zesting half a lemon is a lot of fun when you’re trying not to press too hard or you end up with lemony fingers. 🙂
I should have thought of that (broiler, I mean) but combined with the thinner lemon sauce than I wanted and all the other things I was making … the brussel sprouts turned out great anyway. And the chicken satay wasn’t bad either. 🙂
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Glad it worked out.
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Hi Eva, it seems that JT and my wife share the same view. Not fans of lemon in dishes like this. My wife isn’t a fan of orange chicken either, sadly (I find it delicious!). This looks like a wonderful dish – crispy chicken, a fresh, lemony sauce – yum! I tend to cook my chicken first, before coating it. I find it doesn’t tend to make it tough, and then I can focus on stopping cooking as soon as the crumb is to my liking, instead of having to worry about the chicken not being cooked! I noticed your post URL… did you originally intend to write about the party you attended in this post instead? 😀
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Thanks for your comment Charles. Yes, orange chicken would be very tasty too, I’ll have give that a try. Great idea to cook the chick through, doesn’t it dry out? Because the strips aren’t that thick, I found they cooked reasonably quickly.
Yes the URL was messed up, I’ll have to check it at home, it’s not so easy to do on my iPhone.
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It’s probably best to leave the URL as it is now – once it’s published, changing the post URL, while possible, will mess up all the links people have to it in search engines and feeds.
As for the chicken – I guess people might think it’s more “dry” than normal, but I like my chicken really dry. I really can’t abide “moist” chicken… I want it to squeak between my teeth, lol, but you can obviously still pre-cook it and adapt the cooking method/time to ensure it’s not too dry if you’re not a fan of “squeak chicken” 🙂
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Thanks Charles, I wondered about that, re URL.
I had the same issues with moist chicken (I thought it was raw) until we got our BBQ which makes the most incredible moist chicken fully cooked chicken, now there is no going back.
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Heh, to be honest I can eat it moist – I don’t worry about it being raw usually, I’m usually very careful about that, I just love the texture of dry, very fibrous, “squeaky” chicken. “DRY CHIKKEN FO LIFE, YO!” 😉
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To each their own! Squeaky chicken just isn’t my thing, I guess!
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This I MUST try!
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Baking your chicken and reducing the sugar are such easy ways to make this dish a bit healthier. Your heart will love you for these little changes. I have been craving salads lately as the humidity is really starting to soar in HK so your dish sounds perfect. I have removed all refined sugars from my diet and it is amazing that I don’t even crave sweet things anymore. However, it was really hard to do. It seems like nowadays there is hidden sugar in everything. I have to make everything from scratch but I guess that is healthier for my family as well. Wishing you a really special day.Take Care, BAM
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Hi Bam, thanks for your comment. Yes, taking out refined sugars is difficult but once you do it, you feel so much better. It’s gotten really cold again, in fact, we had snow and hail yesterday so I’m very jealous of your summery weather. I’m back to wearing my winter coat! Hope you have a lovely day too.
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Looks scrumptious, Eva. Bill would love this, too…he loves lemon chicken. And your baked version sounds just divine.
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Thanks Liz, it’s pretty easy to make too so it’s perfect for a weeknight meal.
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Yummy. I love crispy chicken with lemon sauce. Make it quite often. I’ll try out your recipe next time I do.
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Thanks Ilan, it was pretty darn tasty.
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Mr. N and I would adore this meal Eva. The more sour the better. Miss A would probably prefer it a bit more sweet, but she’d enjoy the lemon flavor too. Mike…I think he’d fall in line with JT. I’ll have to give this one a try on our salad night. It would make for a great salad topping. 🙂
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Thanks Kristy, I’ll definitely use the technique for oven frying again but for JT I might switch up the sauce to a reduced blueberry & balsamic.
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Eva it’s interesting that when you try to eat healthy, how many things become overly sweet. I have a lemon chicken recipe, but it’s not breaded, it’s more like a stew. Was your friend’s lemon chicken breaded? My own exposure has been through a restaurant and it wasn’t even a Chinese one. I would be interested to know the original Chinese way of doing it.
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Hi Zsuzsa, yes my friend’s version was breaded. I find the less sugar you eat, the less you crave sweet.
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I love lemon chicken! My recipe is a bit different from yours (no baking, no panko, only stir-frying), but I can very well imagine how your crunchy version must be wonderful. It looks so appetising! I have never tried baking breaded meat, so thank you for the inspiration and the proof that it does work.
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This sounds delicious! I love lemony chicken. Give me a bowl of rice and I’m a happy camper!
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Thanks Uni, a bowl of sticky rice would have been perfect.
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I don’t recall ever having lemony chicken, Eva. but that’s not so surprising, given my sheltered life. I do enjoy chicken with lemon, however, and this does sound very good. If and when I do give it a try, I think I’ll follow your lead and keep the sweetness in check. That, too, is a great tip about using baking powder when oven frying. I’ll be sure to keep that in mind when I oven fry other dishes, as well.Thanks!
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Thanks John, I think you would like this. I’m glad Norma ask about the baking powder because it forced me to find out why, great little tip!
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Mmm this looks SO good and I haven’t had lemon chicken in the longest time!
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Thanks Lorraine, I loved the panko crust, it was so crispy and lovely.
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Oh now this sounds delicious! Licking my lips as I type.
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Thanks so much Lizzy, it was quite tasty indeed.
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Healthy and delicious. Just curious, why do you add baking powder in the flour?
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Hi Norma, I’m not entirely sure, Barb’s recipe had it so I thought I would add it too. I just googled it and apparently baking powder draws out moister when ‘oven frying’ and it makes the coating crunchy.
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Thanks, Eva, next time I oven fry I will add baking powder to the flour also.
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Now that I’m no longer afraid of deep frying I was prepared to say I could see myself making this dish at long last. However you baked it! And, even though my nephew still claims he likes my fried chicken strips better than the baked ones, it would be great to be able to produce this dish without the mess of frying. 🙂 I might still be tempted to mist some cooking spray over the strips though.
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Your nephew’s compliment must make your dish the absolute best! I wouldn’t mess with it for sure. Glad you got over your deep frying fear, but it’s not the he skirts way to cook, although oven fries just don’t cut it. I really enjoyed this chicken and would surely choose oven frying over deep frying.
How would you make gulab jamun before getting over the fear?
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He loved the deep fried chicken nuggets and strips that I made the last time. I had a few with Charles’ potato salad… the only kind of potato salad I make.
As to deep-frying, I would grit my teeth and only do it once or twice a year max … usually making pakoras/onion bajiis, samosas and gulab jamun at the same time, starting with the gulab jamun and ending with the pakoras.
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I’m not huge on deep frying either, but packing all those things at once is a great idea!
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I love the sweet and sour flavours! These tangy chicken must be very tasty.
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Thank you Angie, it was tasty for sure.
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I love the combination of sweet and sour too Eva and lemon chicken probably ranks up there in my top 10 all-around fave dishes (one of the first meals my hubby made for me when we were dating… seems so long ago now ;-)). Thanks for the tip re: slicing the chicken into strips – I agree, a thick breast can take forever to cook. Sounds like you hit just the right flavor note here and the chicken itself looks really lovely and spring fresh!
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Thank you kindly Kelly; at my age I’m constantly balancing the fat/glycemic/calorie count so greens are the perfect balance for me.
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I hear y’a sister! (you’re still younger than this old lady ;-)).
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Lovely that you think so, but I doubt it by your beautiful photo! 😉
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This sounds really good, Eva, and especially over greens! Love that you didn’t fry it.
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Hi Betsy, we put a lot of our proteins over greens as opposed to carbs, saves on calories. Thank you for your kind words.
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Big fan of lemon chicken and I like the idea of baked rather than fried. I too tend to lean toward tangy rather than sweet with the sauce, yours sounds perfect. 🙂
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Thank you so much, things tend to seem sweeter since we’ve been cutting back processed sugars.
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I too have a habit of ordering this lemon chicken. I have a sweet tooth and would probably leave it as it is.
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Thank you Maureen, we’ve been cutting back our sugars, so things seem sweeter.
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Funny but I must be a sugar-coholic because I found the sauce to be just right as it was. I’m always adding honey and sugar to sauces to make them “kid-friendly” so maybe that is why I’m so heavy-handed with honey now. Your version looks lovely Eva. The strips might be an option for me when not making so many different dishes and I have more time. 🙂 (Thanks for the mention.)
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I totally get the sugar thing with kids, Barb—I’ve been reducing/eliminating processed sugars so when I do eat sweets they are super sweet to my tastes! When we had my niece and nephew over a couple of weekends ago, I realized some of the challenges parents must face, and was immediately grateful to be an Auntie! Plus, I’m sure I would put on 20lbs!
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I love Chinese lemon chicken. It’s one of my most favourite things to order. When it’s done well, it’s very good but the ordinary bastardised versions are shocking. I love your healthier version of this wonderful Chinese dish xx
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Thanks Charlie, I would have this again for sure!
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