Rediscovering two gustatory delights
When looking about for something to eat for dinner, I noticed an old bottle of Trader Joe’s General Tsao’s Stir Fry Sauce in the fridge. By ‘old’, I mean seven months or so. Don’t worry, it (apparently) keeps well. General Tsao’s is, perhaps, the material good I miss most from my days in Rochester. I think it was statuatory that all Chinese restaurants make it, make it well, and give it to you free if you phone in a sufficiently large delivery. I bought the sauce on a whim many moons ago to see If I could recreate the delicious dish I had grown to love. The answer: no. But I could make something pretty tasty nonetheless.
Cook up some chicken on George, slice up some arbitrary vegetables (tonight I found tomato and red pepper in the kitchen [uh… yeah, yours Paul.za]; broccoli and/or snow peas would have been awesome), and mix the lot together in your favorite metal stir frying object. Best served over sticky rice, but pasta serves well in a pinch (by ‘pinch’, I mean I was lazy).
A damn fine dinner.
The other rediscovery is quicker to explain but no less delicious: Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream. I feel no description is necessary.
MDA, wow. I ate General Tsao’s chicken for dinner at least 4 times a week my senior year in college. Amazing how hard it is to find out here, must be an East Coast thing. I did the same thing when I saw it at Trader Joe’s and I wasn’t able to recreate it either. We must be doing it wrong. I’m sure there is a recipe out there somewhere! Until then, I can only dream.
I’ve never seen it out here, which is terrible. In my mind Chinese Restaurant = General Tsao’s.
I think the main thing lacking from my experiments is that clever way in which the chicken is fried. All I did was grill it. Anyone know how to fry stuff like that? If you’re unfamiliar with General Tsao’s (!), it’s the same sort of frying as is done to sweet and sour pork.
Yeah, it kind of has a shell around it. Perhaps if you dipped it some kind of flour then dipped it in the sauce and fried it in your frying pan.
If you want a nice, thick shell you need to batter-fry. I did a quick search on the web and found a frying batter recipe that looks just about right: Batter-Fried Vegetables [Sweet Baby Media. There are variants that use beer in the batter that are particularly good with fish: Beer-Battered Fish [cooks.com]. If you don’t want a thick shell, you can use plain flour mixed with spices. I often use chili powder, garlic, paprika and white pepper to do fried chicken and it usually turns out pretty yummy. I can’t see that this technique would be unsuitable for chinese.
I also just found another promising recipe on the web: General Tso’s Chicken [S John Ross]. Maybe we should experiment in June when you come down with Mom and Dad?
Sounds good. I’m in. Thanks for the research.
Yes, thank you. I just bought some of the Trader Joe’s sauce so I think I’ll have to give this a try.