Chicken with Hoisin Sauce

From Henan comes a dish that uses hoisin sauce (also called sweet bean sauce) to wonderful effect. Many northern chefs make their own hoisin sauce by blending yellow bean sauce with sugar until the correct level of sweetness is achieved. For this dish, you can choose the complementary ingredient to work with the chicken — water chestnuts, ginkgo nuts, lotus seeds or lychees, for example — all of which will give delicious results.