Mmm tastes like chicken.

In the vein of cooking all those greasy-chopstick takeout classics that so happily populated my childhood, here is General Tso’s chicken. I got the recipe from Fuchsia Dunlop’s Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province. There are two versions – I used the Americanized one, which had more cornstarch and sugar.

I don’t own a deep fryer, so I had to shallow fry small batches of chicken. It was really, really awful. I ended up with oil covering everything in a two foot radius, along with being splattered several times. I even wore an unwieldy floral oven mitt on my left hand and a heat-resistant glove thing on my right, while wielding red tongs. I looked pretty ridiculous.

Didn’t have tomato paste, so made do with ketchup. It was a good call.

The finished product wasn’t half-bad. Sure, it didn’t quite have the thick, crunchy crust to accompany the sweet-savory sauce, but my shallow fry fared alright. For the culturally curious, Jenny 8. Lee investigated the mysterious origins of the famous General in her book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

Related posts:

1. Lemon risotto, shrimp, split pea soup, and strawberries – Lingbo cooks her first real dinner
2. Crunchy cartilage-laden chicken
3. See my GoodEater.org post on crayfish + chicken hearts on a stick
4. Ma Po Tofu
5. See Lingbo Cook: Pad thai!