Buttermilk Chicken v2

I haven't made this in awhile :D I've made it a couple of times back in the summer - Syukri was quite a big fan :P Its only called a v2 because compared to the first write-up, I used condensed milk (susu manis) as opposed to evaporated milk. I'm just going to copy the whole recipe back here though, hoho. Just for fun ;)

What you need:
Boneless chicken, cut into cubes/strips
Cornflour
Butter or margarine, 4-5 tablespoons
10 curry leaves
Dried chillies, chopped, to taste (you can use fresh cili padi, if you want)
150ml water-milk mix (half water and half milk)
2 tablespoons evaporated milk
Salt and pepper, maybe some chicken stock

What to do:

1. Season chicken with salt, pepper and chicken stock. Coat with corn flour and fry. (deep fry or shallow, I just used shallow frying) Try and get it golden brown and crunchy. Set aside.
2. Melt butter over a gentle heat and fry chopped chillies and curry leaves until it starts to smell good.
   
3. Add water-milk mix and evaporated milk. Stir to combine well. Add a pinch of salt. Keep stirring until the sauce is nice and thick.
   
4. Add in fried chicken. Mix well to cover in the sauce. Serve immediately.
   

This particular one turned out rather well. I seasoned the chicken liberally with white pepper and this made it taste quite good, if I do say so myself! When I asked Hadi and Justin how the sauce was before I added the chicken, Hadi said it was not sweet enough and Justin said it was not spicy enough. As for me, I thought it was too sweet and too spicy! Figures. As a compromise, I decided to not do anything to the sauce. :P Hadi added more susu manis to his portion though!

The part where you add in the milk and stir until it thickens (step 3) always gets me nervous. I'm always thinking, will this work??? Will it be thick enough? I've tried adding cornflour before, to disastrous results. It made the sauce taste of flour instead. Avoid at all costs. What you should do is stir the sauce over as high a heat as you dare without boiling the milk. I don't know why. Milk should not be boiled, that's I know. ;)

That's not how Justin thinks though. When you tell him that milk should not be boiled, he would ask why. I hear so many questions from him in the kitchen. Sometimes I'd be able to answer, but other times (such as the milk one), particularly those tips that are passed on by word of mouth, I wouldn't be able to answer. I used to want to be a food scientist once though. It appealed to me. I liked the idea of working with food in a "scientific" way. I think my idea of what went on there was a bit wrong though, and luckily, I didn't enter that field. Otherwise, I might have been sorely disappointed.

However, I was rather pleased to see Blogger's news entry today, about this guy they knew who set up a blog ... on food! I was even more thrilled when I saw it was not about the cooking of food (as this one and many many others are) but about the science of food! The name of the blog is News for Curious Cooks. I suspect many of you would probably be bored within the first paragraph you read, but I thought it was funky combination of what I'm doing now (biochemistry with molecular biology and biotechnology - a mouthful, I know :P) and one of my many interests - food! It may not come out in any of my exams, but some of the concepts in there are similar to what we learn in lectures. Fascinating! And it even has journal references as well! Really fascinating!