Chinese Style Pepper Chicken – Quick and Easy

This Chinese style pepper chicken combines bite size pieces of chicken, green peppers and onion. All of this coated in a beautiful black pepper sauce and you have yourself a quick and easy dinner. Great for any night of the week!

Chinese Style Pepper Chicken

For this Chinese style pepper chicken to really be easy to make, it is best to prepare and cut everything you need before you start cooking. Once the food starts going in the wok or frying pan there is very little time to be doing other stuff. If you cut up the chicken first and start marinating it then you can then prepare the rest of the ingredients during that time.

Once it is time to start cooking heat 1 tablespoon of oil in a wok or frying pan on high heat. Add in a portion of the chicken and begin stir frying. Cook the chicken in batches so that the wok doesn’t cool down by adding too much chicken. Once the chicken looks well browned, remove it and put it aside for later. Wipe down the wok, if you need to, add more oil and repeat the process with the remaining chicken.

Using the oil remaining from the last batch of chicken, add in the onion and the green bell peppers. Stir fry until the onion has gone slightly translucent. Turn the heat down to medium low and add the chicken back in, mixing to combine. Lastly add in the sauce and mix until the sauce has thickened and is coating everything.

This is a super quick and simple dinner. Definitely a favorite. This recipe goes best served over jasmine rice, however any rice will be good. The chicken also goes great on its own, if trying to minimize carbs, although some may find it a tad on the salty side.

Chinese Style Black Pepper Sauce

The pepper sauce largely relies on oyster sauce and black pepper for the flavor. If possible try to use fresh black pepper for the sauce. I find a coarsely cracked pepper to be best for this recipe. To make the pepper sauce just mix all of the ingredients for the sauce together in a bowl.

Cornstarch is optional when making the sauce. It will cause the sauce to be thicker and coat everything a bit better. Not using cornstarch still turns out really well and decently thick though.

The cornstarch slurry in this recipe is not as thick as those commonly used. This is for 2 reasons. Firstly there is already cornstarch in the marinade. Secondly, oyster sauce (which is most of the liquid for the sauce) is already quite thick.

Dietary and Substitutes

I prefer to use chicken thigh for this recipe but you can use chicken breast if you are after something leaner. You can substitute or add any vegetables that you have at home or would prefer. Beans or baby corn would go well with it.

You can also substitute some of the black pepper (or even all of it) for different types of pepper. Examples of other types of pepper you could add are Sichuan pepper and white pepper.

Dry sherry can be used instead of the Shaoxing rice wine. Alternatively you can completely leave it out if you would prefer to not cook with alcohol. It does add in a nice flavor to the chicken though.

Hoisin sauce can be used in place of the oyster sauce. It can add in a new interesting depth of flavor which can be a good alternative.

Tofu can be used if you are wanting to make the recipe vegan. You will also need to make sure to use a vegan oyster sauce.

If gluten free, make sure you check your oyster sauce as it is not uncommon for there to be gluten in it. Same goes with soy sauce, you will need to make sure to use a gluten free version.

Check out other Chicken Recipes