General Tso's Chicken

After my recent trip to China, where I ate regional Chinese cooking morning, noon, and night, I returned to Iowa ready to make another attempt at cooking the same cuisine at home.  The unfortunate truth is that aside from a very good Szechuan restaurant, my home town has uniformly unacceptable Chinese food available.  So it is not just a desire but a necessity that I cook it myself.

I have been doing a reasonable job using jarred suace mistures with an array of vegetables from our summer CSA to make a good Chinese dinner once or twice a week.  I wanted to get some frequency down before I ent for more nuanced recipes.  Not so with my spouse--he dove right into trying to create something from scratch.  This was really good.

Marinade cubed chicken (1.5 pounds) in:

light soy sauce (2 TBS),

1 beaten egg,

½ tsp black pepper,

then stir in 1-2 T corn starch.

 

Next flour chicken pieces well, set aside--use your chop stricks to move the chicken from marinade to flour to a plate.  Deep fry chicken until browned--this can be done in a small pot in batches to minimize the oil you use.

 

Meanwhile make sauce:

2 T dark soy sauce,

2 T oyster sauce,

2 T brown rice vinegar (Chinaking vinegar) ,

1 T rice wine (Shianxing),

 3 T sugar,

¾ cup water, 

1 T corn starch

 

In wok, heat up a little (2 T) oil, then add 4-8 chile peppers, 1 T each of chopped garlic and ginger. Then add sauce and 4 T chopped scallions.  You can sprinkle the top with sesame seeds, and you can serve with steamed broccoli as well.