Chicken stir-fry with black bean sauce

Image from foodservicedirect.com

Um... yeah. This black bean sauce is REALLY SPICY. I'm no spice wimp and I could barely eat my dinner. Let me explain how it all happened...

I'm trying to find more Chinese, Thai, and Indian recipes to make for dinner since they are typically gluten-free (think curries over rice, pad thai with rice or bean noodles, etc).

And in our continued effort to eat only what's in the pantry, fridge, and freezer, I concocted an idea to make chicken with black bean sauce stir-fried with bean thread noodles (sometimes called cellophane noodles or glass noodles) for dinner. I have some bean thread noodles I picked up at the 17th Street market. Asian ingredients are easy to find there and cheaper than the grocery store. An 8 oz bag of bean thread noodles was $1.69, but I saw many varieties for even less.

Most of the recipes I found for black bean sauce stir-fry called for a couple of tablespoons of black bean sauce, thinned with some chicken stock and whisked with cornstarch. So we used about half of the jar pictured above, a can of chicken stock, and about half a tablespoon of cornstarch. We stir-fried some veggies, then added diced chicken breast, then the sauce and the bean thread noodles after soaking them in hot water for about 90 seconds.

WHOA. It was REALLY spicy. Next time I'd use about a tablespoon of the black bean sauce. I guess we should have tasted it, especially considering it is called "Black Bean Sauce with Chilli."

Maybe next time I'll learn and try a recipe like this one or this one.