General Tso's Chicken

I read a bunch of recipes for this dish, watched a few YouTubed instructional videos, settled on Chef Tomm's (more or less, I tweaked it).



I made the sauce and started the meat tenderizing last night. I was surprised that instead of flour, his batter is egg whites and corn starch. He only does one chicken breast in the video, but I had a package of three and his mother sauce (according to Chef Tomm, there are three mother sauces that are the basis of the majority of the dishes in a Chinese restaurant) recipe was more or less a triple batch in terms of what you use. I hit the garlic a little harder than he does, and I didn't have any Szichuan peppercorns, so I used a combination of freshly cracked white and black pepper as a substitute for that.



I wondered at the sheer quantity of soy sauce in this recipe. A lot of them call for more chicken stock and just a bit of soy sauce. I decided I trusted him that the amount of rice wine and rice vinegar and whatnot would cut it down to size.



The baking soda in is a tenderizing agent working on the chicken overnight.

General Tso's Chicken
The Meat:
3 chicken breasts cut into bite-size pieces
1/2 tsp. ground white pepper
1-1/2 tsp. baking soda
Place meat in bowl, add the dry ingredients and mix thoroughly. Slam the meat (pick up handfuls of it and throw it back down in the bowl hard enough to cause a ruckus and get your kids asking what it is you think you're doing) ten to fifteen times. As Chef Tomm assures, you won't break the meat.
3 egg whites
Add egg whites and repeat the mix & slam act. Chicken breast meat is tender anyway, but it's fun to throw food.
1/4 cup water
1-1/2 cups corn starch
Mix the corn starch and water thoroughly to make a slurry, then add to the meat/egg mixture and happy slamming! You won't break the meat but you might spash some batter on yourself if you don't pay attention to the angle of attack. Ten to fifteen slams, though I cut it short when I realized I was splattering dough.
3 tbsp. oil
Add the oil and mix until incorporated. Cover and refrigerate 24 hours.

Yu Shong Sauce:
1-1/4 cup sugar
1 cup Kikkoman soy sauce
3/4 cup rice vinegar
3 tbsp. black vinegar
1/4 cup rice wine
1 oz. dark soy sauce (aka black soy sauce, it's a darker, thicker variation)
1 oz fresh grated ginger
1 oz minced & crushed garlic
1 tsp. fresh ground white pepper
1 tsp. fresh ground black pepper
Pulverize the garlic & ginger with the mortar & pestle, combine all ingredients stir, cover and refrigerate 24 hours.

The Veggies & Rice:
This is Day 2 stuff. While you heat 3 inches of oil in a pot to fry the chicken, start your rice & prep the vegies.
2 cups brown basmati rice
1 quart chicken broth
Bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat to medium low and simmer for 45 minutes.
2 heads broccoli
Cut into florets and blanch about two minutes, rinsing in cold water to arrest cooking. Should be super bright green but still have their crunch.
2 bunches green onions
Clean, trim and cut into 1/2" long pieces.
2 tbps. sesame seeds
Toast in a non-stick pan until partly browned and one of the seeds pops.


The Fry Thing:
You actually start cooking the meat as soon as the oil is hot, juggling the prep work above while cooking the chicken in batches to avoid crowding the pan. Drop the meat in the oil, using tongs or a spatula to kick the pieces off the bottom and un-stick them from each other. The meat cooks very fast with pieces this small, about five minutes per batch. Drain on paper towels or brown grocery sacks (according to Cooking Light the latter leaves the breading crisper).

Tso Get On With It:
1 tbsp. oil
4-6 dried chili pepper pods
2 cloves minced/crushed garlic
1 tsp. or so fresh grated ginger
1/2 tsp. ground white pepper
1/2 tsp. fresh cracked white pepper
1/2 tsp. fresh cracked black pepper
the Yu Shong sauce
1/2 cup corn starch in about 3 tbsp. water (mix into a slurry)
2 tbsp. toasted sesame seeds
blanched broccoli
fresh green onions
Heat a tablespoon of oil in the wok and add the peppers, white & black pepper, ginger and garlic and cook for about a minute, until fragrant. Don't burn it, burnt garlic is nasty, bitter stuff. Add the Yu Shong sauce, stirring and bringing to a simmer. Add slurry and keep stirring until sauce thickens thoroughly. Dump in the chicken, broccoli, onions and toasted sesame seeds. Keep things moving until everything is coated and hot.

Serve with the brown basmati rice and green onions, garnish with alfalfa sprouts if you love them as much as I do.



It's good but I will say I was right to be alarmed at the amount of soy sauce in this. I've noticed a lot of TV chefs seem to think there's no such thing as too much salt, from Alton Brown to Jill Santopietro (who salted her caramelized onions for a pizza that had bacon and Gorgonzola already contributing a big dose of sodium on top of a crust that is, IMHO, over-salted) to Chef Tomm. I'm not sure if it's a problem of professional palates getting desensitized to saltiness or what.



I like salt, salt is good. I use more of it than is probably healthy, but I don't like it to take over a dish. I think I'll cut that cup of Kikkoman's to a quarter cup and make up the difference with chicken broth next time. That way it won't be quite Tso salty.



The tenderizing step is not lost on the breast meat, by the way. Yes, chicken breast is tender, but beneath the crunchy, chewy breading on this chicken, was melt in your mouth tender meat. I sampled a piece before it went into the sauce, and if it wasn't for the fact I'd already gone to the trouble of making the sauce I might have just bellied up to the paper grocery bag and eaten the chicken as is.



I am pleasantly surprised at how easy all this is. There was a time in my life when the very idea of making my own Chinese food instead of heading to Bo Ling's or the Dragon Inn seemed like making my own particle accelerator. Some of the ingredients I used aren't on the shelf at Price Chopper and Wal-Mart, but this isn't high energy physics.



I'll bet you with some creative substitution you could even make a passable General Tso's without going to a funky Asian market. I don't know why you'd want to, it'd deprive you of a field trip, but it's probably doable. Plus, as much as Wal-Mart brags on its low prices, ethnic food stores beat them on stuff like whole black peppercorns. I've literally found pepper for my mill at about 1/8 the Wal-Mart price. Ditto for bulk bags of brown basmati rice and bottles of various sauces. The Asian Market guy is catering to a clientele that wants ingredients they recognize from home, but a lot of them are working for the kind of wages you get when you don't speak English well, and you can see the impact of that on his prices.



And in doing my research I learned that this dish isn't all that Chinese anyway. Yes, it's a staple of Chinese restaurant fare, but according to one source you can't even get General Tso's Chicken in his home town, where there is a statue honoring him as a great military leader.



These ubiquitous Chinese restaurants in America, we have something like 41,000 of them, they are owned and operated for the most part by Chinese immigrants who know how to make what Americans like. As with the way pizza has evolved in the United States, Chinese Takeout is in many ways an indigenous American cuisine.

But screw ordering takeout when you can have this much fun and get enough General Tso's Chicken to feed five to eight people for what the takeout joint costs for one.