For Diana
This one is for my wife Diana -- this is from a local Adelaide restaurant in chinatown. Seems she has an AI knock off of the recipe.
The restaurant is T-Chow on Moonta Street, a Chiu Chow kitchen, and Green Peppercorn Chicken is one of its signatures. Their recipe isn't published, so this is not theirs. It is Diana's AI copy put through the full three-way blind review (Claude, Grok and Codex) in October 2026, to get as close to the plate she loves as we can, or better. It hasn't been cooked in this exact form yet.
What changed, and why. The copy's chicken got a teaspoon of cornflour and a hot wok, which gives you ordinary stir-fry. Here it's velveted with egg white and cornflour and passed through 150°C oil until just opaque, which is the silky restaurant texture. The black pepper and capsicum are gone: the green peppercorns lead, half crushed and bloomed in the oil, half whole at the end so they pop. The brown oyster gravy is cut right back to a short glaze with a little fish sauce and MSG, boiled before the chicken goes back so it clings instead of pooling. And it goes on fried basil, because reviews of T-Chow's plate describe the chicken sitting on a bed of fried leaves.
The one thing nobody could settle from a desk is the pepper. The English name says green peppercorns, and that's what this uses. But the old Chiu Chow version of this dish is made with Sichuan pepper. If the restaurant's plate numbs your tongue, the next cook swaps the berries for 1½ tsp toasted, ground green Sichuan pepper and keeps everything else.
