Sesame Chicken with Rice and Ginger Yoghurt

Tahini is the backbone, not a seasoning — it's what gives the sauce body before the cornflour even does its job, and it's why this tastes rounder than a basic soy-and-vinegar stir-fry. If you don't have it, any seed or nut butter with a bitter, roasted edge — like a light peanut butter — will stand in, though you lose the sesame echo that the seeds on top are meant to repeat. Don't reach for a sweet nut butter; it'll push the sauce toward dessert.

Soy sauce and apple cider vinegar are doing opposite jobs that need each other — soy for salt and savoury weight, vinegar to cut the fat from the tahini and the oil so the sauce doesn't sit heavy on the tongue. Any light vinegar with a clean, non-wine character works instead of cider vinegar — rice vinegar is the obvious swap and arguably closer to the dish's spirit, since this is built from a Chinese-American sauce logic even if the yoghurt pulls it sideways into something else.

Cornflour is there to prevent one specific failure: a thin, runny sauce that slides off the chicken and pools at the bottom of the bowl instead of coating it. Mix it with a little of the cold stock first — never straight into the hot pan — or it clumps into little gel beads that never fully dissolve. This is the step people skip because it feels fussy, then wonder why their sauce never thickens properly.

Ginger appears three times and each use is different enough to matter: in the sauce it's background warmth cooked down with everything else; with the leek and spinach it's sharper, more present, because it hasn't had time to mellow; in the yoghurt it's raw and bright, there to wake the whole bowl up at the end. Grate it fresh each time rather than using one batch for all three — the texture and bite change the longer it sits out.

Basmati rice specifically because it stays separate and light under a wet, sticky sauce — a stickier short-grain rice would turn the whole bowl into a single clump. If that's what's in the cupboard, rinse it hard before cooking to wash off surface starch, which at least gets you partway there.

The yoghurt and sriracha mix isn't a garnish, it's the counterweight to the richness of the tahini-sauced chicken — cold, sharp, a little fierce. Use a plain, thick yoghurt rather than a thin drinking one, or it just runs off into the sauce instead of sitting as its own ribbon across the top. If sriracha isn't to hand, any hot sauce with vinegar in it — not a dry chilli powder — keeps the same sharp-hot balance; a dry spice alone won't cut through the yoghurt the same way.

A wide frying pan stands in fine for a wok here — you're not tossing over high flame the way a kazan or wok setup allows, you're searing in batches if your pan or your hob's output is small. An ordinary UK hob rarely puts out the fierce, sustained heat professional burners do, so don't chase that — just don't crowd the pan, and let each batch actually brown before it moves to join the sauce.