Hot Ginger, Gastronomic and Essential Oils from Aliksir, and a Recipe for Gung Bao Chicken

If you’ve never been to the expo before, it’s a weekend-long exhibition at the Palais de Congrès (metro Place d’Armes) where you can sample all sorts of health food, organic, local, sustainable, fair-trade, vegan, gluten free products.

The best part of the expo, though, is discovering a product you’ve never tried before, like these organic oils. The company’s line of gastronomic oils called Les Aromes de Saba covers flavours from bergamot to cinnamon to yuzu. It’s made from essential oils combined with sunflower oil, which sounds as though the ginger essential oil is getting diluted, but it’s plenty pungent. The oil comes in a spray bottle, and one squirt over a red lentil soup, teriyaki chicken or baked, caramelized sweet potato is enough to make it shine.

I chose the ginger oil because too often a piece of ginger rots in my fridge, or I forget that I have some in the freezer, or I freeze my fingers grating it. With this oil, all I have to do is add one squirt and boom – unadulterated ginger flavour without the work.

The other flavours in the Aromes de Saba line include everything from balsam fir, horseradish and basil to sweet fennel, grapefruit and rose. You could use a drop of mustard in a vinaigrette, a drop of ginger in your smoothie, a tiny bit of lime zest essential oil in your pad thai sauce, or a tiny bit of horseradish on a roast.

You can cook or bake with them (think the key lime-iest pie or a pastry spiked with ginger), or you can spritz it on your morning toast, granola, smoothie or yogurt. You use one or two drops at a time because it’s so pungent, or up to 10 drops when you’re cooking with them and they’re exposed to heat.

Each bottle is 15mL, which doesn’t sound like a lot but goes a long way since you’re only using a few drops at a time. Bottles range from $8 to $30 depending on the raw ingredient being distilled into essential oil – $8.43 for garlic oil to $29.12 for lovage, with ginger coming in at a very reasonable $13.

The recipe below is a seemingly fancier, but actually easier version of what’s probably China’s most famous Sichuan dish. Instead of (though you could do both) chopping ginger and adding it during at the beginning of the recipe, you can just spray a little oil on at the end, the same way you’d
season Japanese food with sesame oil at the end.

Gung Bao Chicken with Ginger Oil 

Have all your ingredients ready to go in advance or you’ll set off the fire alarm!

1 tbsp vegetable (or macadamia nut) oil
4 small dried red chilies, deseeded and torn into small pieces
10 Sichuan peppercorns
6 cloves garlic, peeled and thickly sliced
1-inch fresh ginger, thinly sliced (optional)
1 lb boneless, skinless chicken breast, cut ito bite-sized pieces
4 green onions, green and white parts, sliced on the diagonal into 1-inch pieces
2 tbsp toasted or dry-roasted, unsalted peanuts
3-4 sprays of Aromes de Saba ginger oil

Sauce
2/3 cups chicken stock
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp unseasoned rice wine or sake
3/4 tsp black Chinese vinegar or white vinegar
2 tsp sesame oil
1 tsp sugar
1 1/2 tsp cornstarch

Combine the sauce ingredients in a bowl. Heat the oil in a large skillet or wok over high heat. Add the dried chilhies and stir for 30 seconds, until they’re black and almost smoking. Remove the chilies to a plate and add the peppercorns and garlic to the wok and stir for one minute. Add the ginger (optional) and stir for 30 seconds. Add the chicken and stir-fry 3-4 minutes, until no longer pink on the outside. Add the green onions and the sauce. Stir to mix well. Bring to a boil then reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer for 2 minutes, stirring constantly. Add the peanuts and spray with ginger oil. Serve immediately.

There are two other recipes incorporated the ginger oil on the Aliksir website. One’s for a ginger-marinated steak and the other for oysters with a red pepper, ginger and orange brunoise and a mango vinaigrette.