Chicken Lettuce Wraps

I know what I am ordering before I walk into PF Chang’s. It is always the chicken lettuce wraps, which is why I wanted a copycat version I could make at home.

The hot, saucy chicken filling comes together in one skillet, ready to spoon into cold lettuce leaves and eat with your hands. It is the restaurant order I always want, made practical for a regular night at home.

A One-Skillet Take On The Restaurant Version

PF Chang’s puts mushrooms in theirs and serves it with crispy rice sticks alongside. For this copycat version I focused on what goes into the lettuce leaf: saucy ground chicken with water chestnuts for crunch.

I cook the filling straight through, with no mushrooms to prepare and no rice sticks to fry in a separate pan. That keeps it quick enough for dinner at home while still giving me the lettuce wraps I order every time.

The Best Lettuce To Use

Three kinds of lettuce will all technically work here, and the one you pick changes the shape of the wrap, how much crunch you get, and how much you taste the lettuce itself. I filled a leaf of each with the same chicken to see the difference side by side.

Butter lettuce is my first choice, because the broad, flexible leaves naturally form a cup around the chicken. It’s also my favorite taste. It has a mild, slightly sweet flavor that does not compete with the sauce. It may also be labeled Bibb or Boston lettuce.

Iceberg has the mildest flavor and the most crunch. It tastes cool and fresh against the warm, savory filling. The leaves can crack as you separate them from the head, so pull them away gently and use the larger leaves.

Romaine is the sturdiest of the three, with a greener, slightly bitter flavor that contrasts more with the filling than butter lettuce or iceberg does. The long leaves hold the filling like a boat rather than wrapping around it.

Ingredient Notes

Keep The Sauce, Adjust The Rest

Pull any one of the hoisin, soy sauce or mirin and you change what the filling tastes like, because the three of them together are the entire sauce.

The Sriracha and the green onions are the two you can leave out, and the filling does not miss either one.

Garlic and ginger pastes save you from mincing and grating. Look for refrigerated squeeze tubes labeled stir-in paste, but do not make a special trip if you already have fresh garlic and ginger.

• Garlic: Replace 1 teaspoon of paste with one medium clove, minced.
• Ginger: Replace 1 tablespoon of paste with a 1-inch piece of fresh ginger, grated.

The fresh versions add a few minutes of prep, but nothing else in the recipe needs to change.

Change The Meat, Not The Crunch

Ground turkey or ground pork can replace the ground chicken without any other changes. Ground beef works too, although it gives the filling a richer flavor. The sauce stays the same whichever meat you use.

I’d recommend keeping the water chestnuts. The cooked ground meat is soft, and the water chestnuts put a clean crunch into every bite. Subbing in carrots or celery adds texture, but neither gives the filling quite the same contrast.

Try my Korean beef for another quick ground-meat skillet dinner, or browse the copycat recipes roundup for more restaurant favorites to make at home.

Fill Them As You Eat

Keep the filling and lettuce separate until you’re ready to eat them as it will ensure the lettuce doesn’t wilt. This way, the chicken stays hot, and the leaves stay cold and crisp until you need them.

Turn Them Into Dinner

In our family, chicken lettuce wraps need something more beside them if we’re serving them as dinner rather than a lunch or appetizer.

I serve them with homemade fried rice and Asian cucumber salad. The cucumber salad can be made before you start, and the rice cooks in its own pan while the chicken filling is in the skillet.

Rice makes the meal filling, and the cold cucumber salad gives you something fresh beside the warm chicken. Two sides are enough without turning a quick dinner into a much bigger job.

Store The Filling And Lettuce Separately

The filling is worth making with tomorrow’s lunch in mind, and the only part that will not keep is a leaf you have already filled.

Refrigerate the leftover filling and lettuce in separate containers, then warm the chicken on its own and spoon it into cold leaves when you are ready to eat.

Kept apart, the leftovers make a lunch that still has the crunch in it.