Almond chicken with gravy – it’s such an easy dish to make, my family just loves it! You don’t have to buy a lot of expensive ingredients to get that great taste. Using canned coconut milk, brown sugar, and almonds gives it a rich, creamy taste. It’s no surprise that almond chicken is by far the most popular dish in Chinese cuisine. In fact, the dish has become so ingrained in the Chinese culture that it has …
Easy Almond Chicken Gravy Recipe
This Quick and Easy Almond Chicken Gravy Recipe is made with boneless breaded chicken breast and makes an authentic tasting Chinese recipe, IN 15 MINUTES! Making Budget Friendly Meals and super quick recipes for families is my favorite thing to do!
I always use a hormone AND Steroid free frozen Chicken because with teen girls, we have enough hormones flying around here, thank you! LOL One of the more tasty frozen boneless chicken breast that I purchase is Tysons…but you can use any brand your family likes!
Almond Chicken Gravy Recipe {made in 15 Min.}
There is nothing wrong with using pre cooked foods that can be cooked just as they are BUT they can also be made into a super simple yet semi elegant meal in minutes!
Some days I just need quick and easy and I bet you do too! This Almond Chicken gravy was the perfect quick easy recipe that I created when I was craving almond chicken Chinese style!
Ingredients:
- Boneless Crispy Chicken Strips
- 4 tablespoons cornstarch
- 3 tablespoons water
- 3 cups chicken broth
- 3 tablespoons butter
- 2 teaspoons soy sauce
- chopped or sliced Almonds
Directions:
Heat Boneless Chicken Strips according to package directions.
While chicken is cooking, Make your simple almond chicken Sauce:
In a sauce pan mix together Chicken Broth, Butter and Soy Sauce. Bring to a simmer.
While that is getting up to simmer, mix together Cornstarch and 3 Tbls. COLD water.
Once your almond gravy comes to a simmer… slowly add Corn Starch mixture to Chicken Broth and whisk together. Keep stirring until mixed thoroughly. The gravy will begin thickening right away.
Stir until you have the thickness you like.
If You Want A Thicker Gravy Then You Can Just Mix In A Little More Cornstarch And Water Then Add. Make Sure It’s Just A Little Though Or You Will End Up With A Clumpy Mess.
Remove Chicken From Oven And Place On A Plate. Pour Gravy Over Chicken And Add Almonds.
This is a deelish and a super easy way to turn simple Foster Farms Crispy Chicken into a yummy Chinese/American meal!
If you want to make it super pretty serve on a platter of slivered cabbage and top with green onions. This of course is super yummy! Your family will think they’ve gone to an authentic chinese resturant!
Serve with white or brown rice and a veggie! YUM!
Tell me what other kinds of dishes do YOU make with frozen pre cooked chicken.
Enjoy!
Chopping, peeling, cutting, frying, baking, boiling, and mixing my way to Food Worth Coming Home To!
ALMOND BONELESS CHICKEN – THE GRAVY DEBATE
Back just over a year ago I posted a recipe for At the time, I wasn’t completely happy with the recipe, but satisfied enough to finally put the recipe to rest — at least for the moment. What I wasn’t completely sold on was the gravy. The breading portion of the meal was perfect, but the gravy was still not exactly like that when ordering this dish from any local Chinese restaurant.
Although the gravies that accompanied this dish may have differed slightly at various restaurants, they were all good, as was the gravy I made. In my mind however, I really wanted to recreate the meal perfectly here at home, so improving or changing the recipe has been in the back of my mind every time I’ve made it throughout the past year.
I think probably the main ingredient I was having trouble with was the oyster sauce. Although there was only 1 tablespoon of this in the 3 cups of sauce, it was really overbearing. Being that I am not a huge seafood fan and that any seafood dish that has the least hint of “fishiness” is typically not even considered to be eaten by me, this addition was really a thorn in my side. Hubby and the rest of the family thought my sauce was excellent, but then again, they had no idea what was on the list of ingredients. Perhaps it was just in my head, but even so, this was one thing that gave me pause every time I thought about making this meal.
Besides the oyster sauce, I also had issue with the vegetable ingredients included in my original recipe. Mushrooms, celery, bamboo shoots, and water chestnuts were all called for. I had eliminated the water chestnuts in subsequent preparations of the sauce and enjoyed the flavor more, but still, I didn’t know if the sauces I’d tried at restaurants contained all of these flavors. I knew I had seen mushrooms and/or bamboo shoots in some gravies, but not so with the celery. So, playing around a bit with these ingredients seemed like a viable option.
Finally, one flavor that truly made this dish pop was the addition of the finely chopped green onion when serving the dish. I wondered how adding the green onion to a basic chicken gravy would taste. Almond boneless chicken is one of the mildest dishes served at Chinese restaurants, so eliminating everything but the chicken gravy base and the onion flavor we all liked, might prove to be a winner.
With all this information to work with, I set to preparing three separate sauces. The first would be my original recipe, but without the water chestnuts again as well as cutting the oyster sauce down to 1 teaspoon instead of 1 tablespoon. The second sauce would be based again on my original sauce but this time eliminating all the vegetables except the mushrooms, all the oyster sauce, and introducing a little sherry to add a new flavor that could compliment the mushroom flavor and tone it down a bit so it wasn’t so poignant. The final sauce was going to be a basic chicken gravy with the addition of some soy sauce, sherry and green onion. The soy sauce and sherry would help give it more of an oriental flair and the onion would hopefully infuse the gravy with the flavor that made the dish pop.
Almond Boneless Chicken Sauce #1 (Modified slightly from original sauce)
- 1 1/2 Tbsp. Peanut Oil
- 1 Celery Stalk, diced
- 1/3 Cup Fresh Mushrooms, chopped
- 1/3 Cup Bamboo Shoots, roughly chopped
- 3 Cups Chicken Broth
- 1 1/2 Tbsp. Soy Sauce
- 1 tsp. Oyster Sauce
- 1/4 tsp. Salt
- 1 tsp. Sugar
- 4 Tbsp. Cornstarch, dissolved in 1/3 Cup Water
Heat 1 1/2 Tbsp. oil in wok or large skillet over medium heat. Add celery and stir fry 2-3 minutes. Add mushrooms and bamboo shoots and stir fry 3-5 minutes. Add chicken broth, soy sauce, oyster sauce, salt and sugar. Bring to a boil and cook 7 minutes. (At this point I strain out the vegetables, but if you like, these can be kept in the gravy.) Return strained gravy to wok and return to boil. Stir in cornstarch slurry and cook until thickened. Turn heat to low and keep warm.
Almond Boneless Chicken Sauce #2
- 1/3 Cup Fresh Mushrooms, chopped
- 3 Tbsp. Butter
- 3 Cups Chicken Broth
- 2 Tbsp. Soy Sauce
- 1 Tbsp. Cooking Sherry
- 1/4 tsp. Salt
- 1 tsp. Sugar
- 4 Tbsp. Cornstarch, dissolved in 1/3 Cup Water
Heat butter in wok or large skillet over medium heat. Add mushrooms and stir fry 3-5 minutes. Add chicken broth, soy sauce, sherry, salt and sugar. Bring to a boil and cook 5 minutes. Stir in cornstarch slurry and cook until thickened. Turn heat to low and keep warm.
Almond Boneless Chicken Sauce #3
- 2 Cups Chicken Broth
- 1/4 Cup. Chopped Green Onion
- 1 Tbsp. Soy Sauce
- 2 Tbsp. Cooking Sherry
- 2 Tbsp. Cornstarch mixed with 1/4 Cup Water
Combine chicken broth, green onion, soy sauce, and sherry in small saucepan. Heat to boiling. Add corn starch slurry and turn heat down to medium. Cook until thickened. Turn heat to low and keep warm.
The results:
Top left: Version #1, Top right: Version #2, Bottom: Version #3
I would love to say that my day working in the kitchen allowed me to finally put this recipe to rest, but alas, life is just not that fair. A consensus could not be met. Hubby and Zeb liked #1 the best, with #2 running a close second. Grace liked #2 the best because there were mushrooms in the gravy and she enjoyed eating them with the chicken. She still liked #1, but preferred a gravy that had vegetables in it. Everyone did agree that version #3 was definitely not a keeper. The only aspect of this one that was okay was the onion flavor, but it was too strong.
So what’s next? Well, I liked #2 the best, probably because it didn’t have any oyster sauce in it. Next time I think I will make only two versions of the sauce and hopefully come a little closer to a conclusion. I plan on making version #1 without any oyster sauce (hopefully Hubby and Zeb will still like it) and version #2 with the addition of 1 tablespoon of green onion. I have read some places that almond paste has been added to the sauce, but I don’t think that is a flavor that is missing.
Overall I have to say I’m glad I spent the time making all the different sauces. I was able to definitely determine I don’t like the flavor of oyster sauce, because even the 1 tsp. of it in version #1 was too much for me. That alone was worth the experimentation. Now we just need to continue tweaking until we’ve got a sauce everyone can agree on.
After everything was all said and done and Grace and I were cleaning the kitchen, I mentioned to Grace that I was really disappointed that none of my sauces truly duplicated the ones we’ve had from authentic Chinese restaurants. Grace told me she was glad that mine wasn’t the same. I asked her why?
She told me, “Because if yours was the same as the restaurants, when we went out, there wouldn’t be anything worth ordering on the menu. This way we can still enjoy something when we do go out.”
You know what? She’s right. I’m so focused on copying what we’ve already enjoyed that I’m missing out on enjoying what I’m making. Plus, it’s just like Peggy Buddy says, “You don’t want to make it too good for them at home or they’ll never take you out!” So true.
Chinese Almond Chicken Recipe
This Chinese Almond Chicken Is Just Like Your Favorite Dish At Your Local Chinese Restaurant.
Have you ever had Chinese Almond Chicken? It’s called something different in each individual restaurant, Boneless BBQ Chicken, Boneless Almond Chicken. No matter what it’s called though it remains one of my favorite Chinese dishes. Crunchy tempura battered chicken sets on top of wilted lettuce and then gets topped with an almond gravy, sliced almonds, green onions, and hot Chinese mustard. There’s nothing better.
I’ve been craving this chicken for awhile and knew that I had the perfect batter recipe but just needed to master the sauce. I found a pretty good looking recipe on Food.com and made a few tweaks. It tastes EXACTLY like the dish I remember! We had a bit of leftover gravy and I’m sitting here this morning having a bowl of wilted lettuce drenched in gravy with the almonds, green onions, and hot mustard for breakfast. That’s how much I LOVE it. Like I can’t get enough and I’m pretty sure I’ll be keeping this gravy on hand at.all.times. At least until I eat it every day for two weeks and then I’m tired of it and won’t make it again for a year because that’s what I do.
I use the same batter as with my Baja Fish Tacos except I used sparkling water instead of plain to give it more of a tempura like texture. Worked like a charm. This chicken is everything you want tempura chicken to be. Incredibly crunchy on the outside and moist and tender in the middle. I just use a bit of coconut oil to fry them in. I recommend using a wok because it’s shallow and you won’t need much oil. Just enough to come up half the side of the chicken. One flip and you’ve got perfectly fried chicken.
Chinese Almond Chicken Recipe
This Chinese Almond Chicken is just like your favorite dish at your local Chinese restaurant except that it’s Paleo! Almond fried chicken is allergen-free and delicious.
Course Main Course
Cuisine Chinese
Calories 407 kcal
Prep Time 5 minutes
Cook Time 15 minutes
Total Time 20 minutes
Ingredients
Tempura Chicken
- 4 medium Chicken breasts (flattened to 1/4 inch thickness)
- 1 cup Tapioca flour
- 1/4 cup Sparkling water
- 1 large Egg
- 1 pinch Sea salt
- Refined coconut oil (for frying – refined doesn’t have a coconut flavor)
Gravy
- 6 tablespoons Tapioca flour
- 3 tablespoons Water
- 3 cups Chicken broth
- 3 tablespoons Ghee
- 2 tablespoons Coconut aminos
- 1/4 teaspoon Almond extract
- 1 Chicken bouillon cube
- Sea salt (to taste)
- Black pepper (to taste)
Toppings
- Iceberg lettuce (shredded)
- Sliced almonds
- Green onions (sliced)
- Hot Chinese mustard (essential for the full flavor profile)
Instructions
More TIPS about this paleo recipe in the post above!
- To make the gravy: In a large saucepot over high heat whisk the tapioca starch and water together. Stir in the remaining ingredients and bring to a boil. Once boiling reduce heat and keep warm.
- Fry the chicken: Flatten the chicken breasts. Whisk together the batter ingredients until smooth. In a large wok over high heat, heat about 1/2 – 3/4 cup of refined coconut oil until very hot. Working in batches, dip the chicken into the batter and allow a bit of the excess to drip off before dropping it directly into the hot oil. Give the chicken a little nudge with a wooden spoon to loosen any bits that are stuck to the bottom of the pan. Let fry about 5 minutes per side until crispy and golden. Remove and drain on paper towels, repeat with remaining chicken. You can also cook the chicken using an air fryer.
- Assemble the dish: Place a bed of shredded lettuce on a plate and top with the hot chicken, pour gravy over top and top with almonds, green onions, and mustard.
Recipe Notes
Serving Size: 1 piece of chicken
FAQ
What is Almond Chicken Gravy made of?
- CORNSTARCH
- WATER
- CHICKEN BROTH
- BUTTER
- SOY SAUCE
How do you reheat almond chicken gravy?
If you happen to end up with extra Almond Chicken Gravy, you can reheat in a small saucepan over medium heat. It will heat up fast, so keep an eye on it.
Can you Toast almonds?
If you’d like to serve with toasted almonds, simply heat a skillet over medium heat. Put almonds in without any cooking spray…toss and watch carefully to make sure you don’t burn them.