You might notice that my dad just pours everything in, but uses the ladle as a stopper to slow down the chicken to prevent splashing.
Let the pan heat up for 1 to 2 minutes until the oil is shimmering, or forming ripples. As I mentioned earlier, a common way to plate this is on a bed of cooked broccoli, so you can try that if you like : This also goes really well with rice! Also, I cordially invite you to eat with us and learn more about the dish, Chinese culture, and hang out with our adorable son. We get into a lot of detail on my parents' life in China and the best tips on how to perfect this recipe.
Our hope is that these posts give you and our future generations a glimpse into how great they are! Prep Time. Background Ingredients Steps Summary.
A Recipe by Daddy Lau My dad's been cooking Chinese food for over 50 years - as a kid fending for himself in Guangzhou, as the head chef of his own restaurant, and as a loving father in our home. Weight: US. Step 1: Prepare chicken. Step 2: Chop ingredients. Step 3: Create fried chicken batter. This helps the chicken turn out more shiny and helps to prevent the batter from clumping together.
Step 4: Heat up oil for frying. Step 5: Create sauce. Step 6: Fry chicken, twice. Mix the chicken with the batter, making sure each piece is evenly coated.
This is a popular Chinese-American dish that appears in suburban Chinese restaurants here in Australia under various other guises.
I can never resist a House Special! It is said to originate from the Hunan province of China and is named after a well-respected Chinese military leader, General Tso. While the accuracy of either of these statements is questionable — and in fact, rumour has it that it was brought into the US by Taiwanese Chefs!
Chilli — the spiciness in the sauce. I like using Sambal Oelak which is a type of chilli paste sold at everyday supermarkets in Australia but feel free to use your favourite brand preferably Asian, if you can! Soy sauce — light or all purpose, just not dark soy sauce way too strong flavour and will make sauce too dark.
More on different soy sauces and when to use which sauce, here ;. Best sub : White wine vinegar;. Brown Sugar — for the sweet in the sauce with a slight caramel note. Not loads — just 3 tablespoons. Many other recipes use way too much. Hoisin sauce — the secret ingredient! Adds a hint of extra flavour that takes this recipe from ok to yummo! Chicken stock — to give the sauce depth of flavour without using Chinese Cooking Wine Shaoxing Wine and to make enough sauce to coat all the chicken; and.
For the chicken, you will need two tablespoons of the Sauce we made above for marinating, as well as ginger and garlic for flavour. This technique offers some insurance against dry, overcooked breast notorious in recipes like this.
We do this in two parts. Marinate Chicken — Use 2 tablespoons of the initial Sauce mix to marinate the chicken for 30 minutes along with fresh garlic and ginger. Coat chicken in cornflour — just add it into the bowl and mix, making sure the pieces are separate so they are fully coated;. Shake off excess cornflour using whatever method works for you — I use a colander these days.
It still gives me a means to shake out most of the excess and some chunks settled at the base. Cook chicken using preferred amount of oil — either shallow fry as I do which is when the chicken is sitting on the base of the pan and the oil comes halfway up the chicken or deep fry which is when there is enough oil so the chicken floats around in the oil.
The faster you get it on the table, the crispier the chicken stays! Chicken cooked using this method ie. Serve on you rice of choice with some greens on the side. I wanted to add some vegetables so I added bell pepper and snow peas. When I was sauteeing the garlic, I added one chopped sweet onion.
Put everything over some brown rice and it was wonderful! This is just like you get in a chinese restaurant. My family likes it saucy, so I made it with double the sauce. Also I couldn't find the dry red peppers so I used a chinese red pepper paste which allowed me to adjust the hot spicy temperature up a bit my family likes it hot wish there was a way to deep fry the chicken with less mess, but it is worth it! Definatly will make again. I pan fried the chicken in just enough oil to cover the bottom of the pan well as to make is a touch more healthy and only did the frying once.
Otherwise stuck to the recipe and yum yum yum. Normally I give 5 stars to restaurant quality and although not quite that really good and satisfied my chinese need. Rating: 4 stars. I followed the recipes with only a few differences. Couldn't find a good price on thighs so I used breasts.
Didn't want to buy peanut and sesame oil for one recipe I didn't miss it. I loved it and so did the family but next time I will cut open some of the chilis and add more it just wasn't spicy enough for our hot mouths. I want more orange flavor but my husband doesn't. So until he makes this himself I will add more orange peel. I will use less soy sauce also I think it hide some of the other flavors.
Good recipe thanks. Your daily values may be higher or lower depending on your calorie needs. Amount is based on available nutrient data.
If you are following a medically restrictive diet, please consult your doctor or registered dietitian before preparing this recipe for personal consumption. All Reviews. Back to Recipe Review this recipe. Add Photo. What did you think about this recipe? Did you make any changes or notes? Thanks for adding your feedback. To start my chicken testing, I scanned through various books and online resources, pulling out recipes that claimed to solve some of the problems I was looking at—namely, a crazy crunchy fried coating that doesn't soften up when the chicken gets tossed with sauce.
Though similar, there were variations across the board in terms of how thick the marinade should be some contained only soy sauce and wine, others contained eggs, and still others were a thick batter , whether or not to toss with dry starch or flour after marinating, and whether to use light or dark meat chicken.
I put together a few working recipes that seemed to run the gamut of what's out there to test, including:. Here are a few of the results:. They all look alright, but none of them stayed crisp for long, even before they were added to the sauce. From testing, one thing was certain: a thicker, egg-based marinade is superior to a thin marinade, which produced chicken that was powdery and a crust that turned soft within seconds of coming out of the fryer.
Adding a bit of starch to the marinade before tossing it in a dry coat was even better. Better, but not perfect. The General may have won this battle, but he will lose the war, I swear it. The other takeaway? Dark meat is the way to go.
Breast meat comes out dry and chalky, a problem that can be mitigated with some extended marinating the soy sauce in the marinade acts as a brine , helping it to retain moisture , but the process adds time to an already lengthy recipe, and even brined white meat is nowhere near as juicy as dark meat. And who are we kidding? General Tso's is never going to be health food. Break out the thighs for this one and check out our guide to deboning 'em. None of the existing techniques I found gave me quite the coating I was looking for, so I decided to start expanding my search, pulling out all of the chicken-frying tricks in the book.
What about double-dipping? I started my chicken pieces in a thick marinade made of egg white, soy sauce, wine, baking powder and cornstarch I found that adding baking powder to the batter helped keep it lighter as it fried , then dipped it into a mixture of cornstarch, flour, and baking powder adding flour helps with browning. After that I moved it back to the wet mixture, and again into the dry, creating an extra thick coating.
Extra thick coatings produce extra crunchy chicken for sure. Too crunchy, unfortunately. Getting close to a quarter inch thick in parts, the coating made the General Tso's taste more like tough crackers than anything. Extra leavening didn't help. Next I went for a different approach, looking to Korea for some clues.
I had already spent a good deal of time perfecting a recipe for Korean fried chicken , and that recipe tackles a similar problem: how to get battered, deep fried chicken wings to stay crisp when coated in sauce. The solution there? Use a thin slurry of cornstarch that's been cut with vodka, an idea that I first saw in British chef Heston Blumenthal's Perfection series. The vodka can help fried foods get crisp in two important ways.
First, alcohol is more volatile than water and soy sauce, wine, and eggs are basically water. That is to say, it evaporates more readily, and since frying is essentially a process of evaporation, batters made with alcohol tend to come out crisper. Vodka also serves to limit gluten development.
Why is this important? One of the issues I was finding with my fried chicken chunks was that the coating, which started out crisp, soon turned leathery as it began to get cool or moist. This is a result of overdevelopment of gluten, the interconnected network of proteins that forms when flour and water are mixed.
You want some gluten in the mix without it, you end up with a powdery, papery crust , but too much can be an issue. Because gluten does not form in alcohol, vodka lets you achieve a batter that doesn't get leathery as it cools. I tried coating chicken thigh pieces with the exact same batter that I used for that Korean fried chicken before tossing it in sauce and tasting it. It was an improvement on the stay-crisp-when-wet front for sure, but it wasn't exactly what I was looking for in General Tso's.
It needed more craggy nooks and crannies to capture that sauce. With the idea of nooks and crannies in my head, my thoughts immediately jumped to my homemade Chick-Fil-A sandwich. The trick there turned out to be adding a bit of the wet batter to the dry mix before dredging the chicken in it.
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