Masterclasses

I want to cook you my chicken and cashew nut stir-fry. It's a popular British takeout favourite, and it's also found all across China.

I've got here about three chicken breasts. Just cut up some slithers of chicken, quite thin slices, and it may look a bit barbaric with this cleaver, but it's a very useful tool, and it's sharp, so you just have to be careful - mind your knuckles - and then just scoop the meat, and a quick wash of the hands.

When you go to a Chinese takeaway, you may think: 'Wow, the chicken is lovely, it's delicious, it's juicy, and it's bouncy'. And the trick to that is we coat the chicken in cornflour. So I've got about a tablespoon and a half of cornflour and one egg. And just whisk the egg together with the cornflour. This technique in Chinese cooking is called 'velveting', and what it does is it just seals the juices in the chicken and just gives it a gorgeous, bouncy texture. Then just put the chicken into the mixture and coat the chicken really well.

Wok on, get that nice and hot. So in with about 200-300ml of oil. What we want to do is shallow fry the chicken. Now, this is the best time to prepare your vegetables. I've got here an onion, red pepper, yellow pepper and some spring onions. So I want to slice the onion into nice long thin slices. If you start to cut your vegetables in a certain shape in Chinese cooking, it's very important you keep the rest of the vegetables in line with that shape. So, yellow pepper, just de-seed that, get rid of the white bits - they don't taste very nice - and then just slice - perfect!

Ok, how is the oil doing? It should be getting there, lovely and hot. And you know when the wok is hot enough when you've got smoke rising from around the wok. So, a few slithers at a time, because the cornflour is really sticky, you just want to help separate the pieces.

Now what's happening now, is that the cornflour and the egg is giving the chicken a lovely golden coating and the heat is actually cooking the chicken inside, so it's keeping all those lovely juices inside. You need to cook the chicken for about 4-5 minutes.

It's turning opaque white and the outside will be lovely and crispy and brown. And then just drain any excess oil on some absorbent paper. And then all you need to do is just drain some of this oil into a heatproof bowl, just retain about a tablespoon in the wok, and that'll be for stir-frying the vegetables.

Great, so heat back on, in with the onions. I'm going to add peppers. And it's really colourful. Actually red in Chinese culture is very symbolic, it's the luckiest colour you could get, and yellow signifies gold, so this is quite a good symbolic and lucky dish. So give that a good shake and now back in with the chicken and toss all the ingredients together.

Now, not forgetting the spring onions. At this stage I'm going to add the whites of the spring onions, because they just need a little bit of time to cook, they're quite strong. And then I love adding the green of the spring onion at the end, so keep that to one side. Give that a good stir.

Now for extra flavour, I'm going to add a couple of tablespoons or splashes of a good chicken stock or vegetable stock. So now in with the spring onions, a couple of splashes of some light soy sauce - the Chinese use light soy sauce like salt. And maybe a little pinch of ground white pepper, because it's a lot more delicate than ground black pepper. And if you have some toasted sesame oil, now's a good time to add a few splashes too. Finally, some salted toasted cashew nuts, or you could use dry roasted peanuts. And what I've got here is some jasmine rice.

Ok, so, time to serve up. This is a good portion to serve about four. That's it - that's my chicken and cashew nut stir-fry.