Thai · Chicken
Stir-fried chicken with chillies & basil
About this recipe
Thai cooking balances four flavours in every dish — sweet, sour, salty, spicy — anchored to the day's market. Fish sauce, fresh herbs, chiles, citrus, and palm sugar are the constants; the rest changes with what's freshest.
As a chicken dish, Stir-fried chicken with chillies & basil is forgiving enough to roast whole, braise in pieces, or quick-cook for a weeknight dinner — chicken accepts most techniques without losing its character.
Use the scaler above to set the number of servings you actually want to cook — quantities resize with culinary fractions, units promote sensibly (three teaspoons become a tablespoon), and the result reads like the recipe was written for your table.
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Method
- Heat a wok or large frying pan until it is very hot, then add 1 tbsp of the oil. When it is very hot, add the chicken and stir-fry over a high heat for 8-10 minutes, until browned all over. Using a slotted spoon, take the chicken from the pan and set aside.
- step 2
- Reheat the wok and add the remaining oil. Toss in the garlic and shallots and stir fry for 3 minutes, until golden brown.
- step 3
- Return the chicken to the wok and add the chillies, fish sauce, dark soy sauce and sugar. Stir fry over a high heat for a further 8-10 minutes or until the chicken is cooked through. Stir in the basil leaves and serve at once.
Cooking notes
When scaling protein-led dishes, weigh the meat rather than counting pieces, and remember that the pan size limits how much you can sear at once.
For volume-to-weight conversions of any ingredient — flour, sugar, butter, salts — use the ingredient converter. To translate the recipe's oven temperature between °C, °F and gas mark, see the temperature converter.
When you scale this recipe up or down, remember that cooking time does not scale linearly. A doubled cake takes longer, but not twice as long; a doubled soup takes roughly twice as long. The cooking-time guide gives sensible starting estimates by dish geometry.
Scaling notes
Scaling Stir-fried chicken with chillies & basil
Stir-fried chicken with chillies & basil is written for around four servings as it stands on this page — scaling it up for a party or down for a meal-for-one is the small math problem most home cooks face every week. Here's how this particular dish responds to scaling, what changes linearly, and what doesn't.
Stir-fried chicken with chillies & basil scales gracefully because chicken is forgiving — both the cooking method and the timing apply per piece rather than per total weight. The non-linear rule still applies to seasoning: at 2× volume use 1.5× the salt and spices, not full double, because flavour concentration intensifies as batch size grows.
Skip the math entirely — ScaleRecipe's scaler rewrites every ingredient line above with proper culinary fractions and smart unit promotion the moment you change the serving count. Open the scaler →
Beyond the recipe
Substitutions & make-ahead — Stir-fried chicken with chillies & basil
If you're cooking Stir-fried chicken with chillies & basil for a future meal (or doubling up for leftovers), here's how this dish handles storage, reheating, and the timing decisions most recipes don't spell out.
Make-ahead, storage, and reheating
Stir-fried chicken with chillies & basil tolerates make-ahead better than most home cooks expect. Cooked chicken keeps 3-4 days refrigerated and freezes well for up to 3 months. Reheat in a low oven (around 300 °F / 150 °C) covered, with a splash of broth — microwave reheating dries out lean breast meat especially. If the sauce is dairy-based (cream, yogurt), warm gently over low heat and stir as it comes back together; high heat breaks the emulsion.
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Stir-fried chicken with chillies & basil
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Go deeper
Where this recipe sits in the wider tradition.
Each guide below is a real essay on the cuisine or the category — pillars, staples, techniques worth learning — paired with a curated grid of recipes filed under it.
Cuisine guide · Thai
Cooking the Thai way
Salt, sweet, sour, hot, bitter — balanced in a single bite.
Open the guideCategory guide · Chicken
How to cook in this category
The world's most universal protein — and the most often badly cooked.
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