EASY SWEET AND SOUR CHICKEN

A nice Chinese dinner you can make at home

Ingredients

(Serves 2-3)

Sauce

Procedure

  1. Cut up the chicken into bite-sized chunks.
  2. Combine ginger, egg white, 2.5 ml salt, 10 ml cornstarch, and 5 ml oil. Add the chicken chunks and stir until the chicken is well coated.
  3. Wash green pepper. Discard seeds and stem. Cut into strips 3 cm x 5 mm
  4. Peel carrots. If they are thick, cut in half lengthwise. Cut diagonally into pieces about 3 cm long. Cook the carrots in boiling water for 3-5 minutes, depending how crunchy you like your carrots.
  5. Drain pineapple chunks, saving 12 cl of the juice.
  6. Prepare the sweet and sour sauce by mixing sherry, soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, reserved pineapple juice, 15 ml cornstarch, and 5 ml salt. Stir well and set aside.
  7. Heat 50 ml of oil very hot in a wok or deep cast iron pan. Peanut oil is best since it has a high smoking point. Stir-fry the chicken by putting a small batch (e.g., 5 pieces) of the cubed chicken in the wok and stirring continuously until golden brown. Remove to a dish. Repeat until all the chicken has been cooked, adding small amounts of oil as it gets used up.
  8. Heat 15 ml oil in an empty wok. Stir fry the parboiled carrots and the green pepper for 30 seconds.
  9. Add the chicken and the pineapple chunks to the vegetables in the wok. Stir 1 minute or until well mixed and reheated.
  10. Add sweet and sour sauce to wok. Stir until thickened.

Notes

Serve with rice. I serve this recipe to company all the time and am amazed at how many people don't realize that you can cook Chinese food at home. It is always a big hit. The recipe works equally well with lean pork, tofu cubes, or soy beans instead of the chicken.

Don't forget to start cooking the rice so it will be done at the same time as the chicken.

Rating


Difficulty: easy.
Time: 45 minutes.
Precison: measure the sauce ingredients.

Contributor

 
Andy Tanenbaum 
Dept. of Math and Computer Sci., Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, HOLLAND 
ast@cs.vu.nl seismo!mcvax!cs.vu.nl!ast 
 
 
Recipe last modified: 2 FEB 87

Original header

Path: decwrl!recipes
From: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Newsgroups: alt.gourmand
Subject: RECIPE: Sweet and sour chicken
Message-ID: <10818@decwrl.DEC.COM>
Date: 10 Jul 87 06:06:09 GMT
Sender: recipes@decwrl.DEC.COM
Organization: Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Holland
Lines: 102
Approved: reid@decwrl.UUCP


 Copyright (C) 1987 USENET Community Trust
Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted
provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial
advantage, the USENET copyright notice and the title of the newsgroup and
its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of
the USENET Community Trust or the original contributor.