Char Siu Chicken Tacos

Method

1. Stir the char siu sauce, the soy, the Shaoxing and the five-spice to a loose paste in a shallow dish. Slash the chicken breast on both faces at a slant, most of the way down but never through, and turn it until every cut has paste sitting inside it.
2. Fifteen minutes in the dish is all this one gets. Nowhere near an overnight cure, which is exactly why the slashes matter — they are the only road the paste has into the middle of a thick breast.
3. While it sits, run a peeler down the cucumber into wide ribbons, slice the spring onion the long way into hair-fine threads and drop those into iced water to curl, and pick the coriander into sprigs.
4. Wipe a heavy pan round with the neutral oil, set it over a medium flame and lay the chicken down. A char siu glaze carries enough sugar to weld itself onto bare metal, so the film of oil is not optional. Turn the breast every couple of minutes across twelve minutes, painting on whatever paste is left in the dish each time it comes over, until the deepest slash shows no translucency right down at its base.
5. Move it onto a board and leave it four minutes. Carve it straight off the heat and the juice ends up on the board instead of where you want it.
6. While the chicken rests, put the corn tortillas one by one onto a bare pan until they blister and smell of maize, then heap them inside a tea towel so they soften one another.
7. Carve the rested breast across the grain into thick slices; the lacquer will have firmed by now and sits on the edge of each one instead of sliding off.
8. Carry the board, the warm tortillas, the cucumber ribbons and the drained spring onion curls out together, and build each taco at the table as you reach for it, so no filled one sits around going soft. Coriander last.