How One of NYC’s Best Chinese Chefs Makes General Tso’s Chicken

General Tso's chicken.

Takeout hero, beloved dish.

Should be sweet, tangy, savory,

and it has to be hot and crispy, all those things.

And in a perfect world, it would survive

being in the takeout box for 20 to 30 minutes.

Hi, I'm Eric Huang.

Today, I am going to make my perfect General Tso's chicken.

[light upbeat music]

Great, restaurant-quality General Tso's chicken

relies on three things:

balancing the sweetness with the soy sauce

and all the other seasonings is really important.

Two, it's getting the sauce viscosity down.

We're gonna thicken it with corn starch,

getting it just right so it clings without being soggy.

And then, finally, the texture of the meat.

We're gonna velvet and marinade our chicken.

That's going to give it that nice slippery, smooth texture

that you get with awesome Chinese takeout.

Today, we're gonna cook with chicken breast.

So when we're looking for a chicken breast at the store,

ideally, the tender is intact.

It's not too shredded up back here.

There's not too many kind of bruises or discoloration,

and the front is nice and smooth as well.

So as you can see, this chicken breast is tapering,

and we just want the pieces to be as uniform as possible.

So we're conscious of the fact

that the chicken breast gets thinner over here.

It's never gonna be perfect,

but you try your best to make this cut

as uniform as this cut.

So I like flipping it rib side up

'cause that way I can see

where the natural grains of the muscle are.

So here where the tenderloin was.

You can use a cleaver, you can use a regular knife.

But when cooking Chinese food, I like to use a cleaver.

It just feels right.

So I cut along here, the tenderloin part,

and then I kind of cut another line here.

And that way I have three even pieces.

So we're gonna cut this

into roughly one-and-a-half-inch cubes, chunks, if you will.

I think that's the perfect size to where the ratio

of sauce to batter to protein is just right.

I grew up in a Chinese restaurant,

still there on Long Island.

My mom's still doing it.

She probably should slow down a little bit,

but she's in there.

When I was a kid,

I was the kid doing homework at the counter

and the bar, you know?

But not really doing homework.

I ate a lot of sesame chicken and General Tso's chicken.

Placating children with fried sweet things

is a tale as old as time.

We're gonna velvet this thing.

So velveting, by my definition,

is mainly the addition of some sort of starch,

a pure starch like corn starch or potato starch,

and a little bit of baking soda.

The corn starch forms a matrix of sorts.

It gets into the meat,

and it binds with all the water in the meat.

And that way when you cook it,

the starch helps it hold onto moisture,

and it gives it that slippery texture.

The baking soda, it raises the pH.

Slightly basic things tenderize proteins very quickly.

So that's why you have this very tender bite.

You can add seasonings here.

You can add soy sauce, wine, sesame oil, garlic, ginger.

I choose not to at this phase

because I think they have a tendency

to burn on the first fry.

So I build all the flavor into the sauce.

So all I'm going to use here is salt, egg whites,

oil, corn starch, and baking soda.

We're gonna use baking soda, not baking powder,

'cause we don't want any leavening.

So you just need a little bit.

Really don't need to measure it.

Just eyeball like, let's say, a dash.

You can do too much.

It will make the meat very mushy and you're gonna taste it.

It's gonna taste like baking soda.

Gonna add some eggs.

I'm gonna just add egg whites.

Egg whites also are part of the velveting process.

The egg white adds a little bit of protein

to help the starches cling to.

And egg whites are very ever so slightly basic,

and they add moisture,

which is gonna improve the viscosity of the batter as well.

I'm gonna add a little bit of oil.

You can add any sort of neutral oil,

just not extra virgin olive oil.

So we're gonna mix this all together.

It's gonna feel kind of slippery, slimy,

but that's what you want.

It should be kind of lightly coating everything

with like a thin, kind of milky layer, if you will.

It doesn't need to marinate for long.

Again, we're not marinating for flavor at this stage.

We're marinating for texture.

And it happens pretty quickly.

In a perfect universe, you do like six to 10 hours,

but you will notice an improvement

to the texture of your meat within 10 to 15 minutes.

And then adding a little bit of oil

is going to help prevent these

from sticking to one another when you fry them.

And then that's really it, you know?

Does that look right to you? That looks right to me.

So we're gonna make our General Tso's sauce.

The important thing here is balancing the sweetness.

My mother's recipe in her restaurant is like 50 ingredients.

We don't need to get that crazy.

These things are already pretty balanced

on the savory, salty, sweet scale.

So that way we don't have to get too crazy

with all sorts of measurements.

You know for the most part

that these things taste good on their own.

We can just put them together.

These are all things

that might already exist in your pantry,

and we make a great sauce from there.

So we are gonna start with ketchup.

Give it that nice red color.

I've always loved ketchup.

I think it's perfectly balanced between all the flavors.

So this is gonna be a big part of the sauce.

[Eric hums]

A1 sauce, I just like it.

It is actually in my mom's recipe.

You can use Worcester sauce also,

but this already has all the good flavors.

Savory, sweet, has some viscosity.

Hoisin sauce.

Most hoisin sauce these days is, it's a lot of sugar.

Number one ingredient, sugar.

It's sweet, it's savory, it has viscosity,

and it's gonna be tasty.

And we're just gonna use

what most people have in their home.

Kikkoman is a really nice all-purpose soy sauce.

It's gonna add a lot of the salt and the savoriness.

I'm gonna give it a little whisk.

See how viscosity-wise we're doing.

Obviously, we're gonna adjust the viscosity here later

when we add it to the pan with our corn starch.

This is rice vinegar.

That's gonna add the tang.

Also helps to balance all the sweetness.

Yeah, you can pretty much use anything.

I just wouldn't use any vinegar that's like too dark

because you already have a lot of dark things in here.

In a lot of Chinese takeout restaurants,

they'll put red food coloring

to give it that like striking red color.

We don't have to go for that,

but you don't want it too brown.

You want it definitely a distinct redness to it.

We eat with our eyes, folks, you know, it's important.

We're gonna add a little bit of wine.

This is Shaoxing wine.

This is like your standard store-bought version

that has salt in it

to prevent chefs from drinking it on duty.

This is a very strong aromatic.

It's kind of an unmistakable aroma,

but you can't use too much of it.

You just really want to splash.

Alcohol, it wafts a lot of aromas towards your face,

towards your nose when you eat.

So you just need a little bit to carry the extra flavors.

All right, is it time for the MSG soapbox?

MSG, it's perfectly fine for you.

Billions of people eat it every single day,

including yourself, whether you realize it or not.

Do not fearmonger.

Do not get in the comments here

and tell me how this is bad for you because it's not.

There's no scientific research that says that.

We don't need a ton.

But adding a little bit, it's gonna give you

that authentic Chinese restaurant flavor, my friends.

It's really important and it's perfectly fine for you.

And then sugar.

So like we said,

there's a lot of sweet things in here already.

Let's see where we're at.

Pretty umami, salt-forward.

So we definitely do need a lot of sugar.

It's gonna look like a lot.

But, again, we're using very little sauce.

We're gonna add some ginger and garlic at this phase.

We're also going to add it into the stir fry

when we build the sauce.

It doesn't need to be a ton,

you just kind of want it to be there.

Ginger can be very dominant.

You don't wanna get too crazy with it.

We're just gonna peel it up a little bit.

And nice thing about a cleaver is you can just smash stuff.

And then, you know, stuff's ready to go

and then you just chop it up.

You pick it up so nicely.

See, these things are so useful.

Can't do that with a regular knife.

You could, it doesn't look as cool though.

[chill music]

While I'm here,

I'm gonna prep everything for the final stage.

Because once we begin cooking,

everything happens really quickly.

This is broccoli.

It adds really nice color,

and we're just gonna steam it simply,

put it in on a ring around our chicken.

So, you know, you're eating some vegetables too.

We just want florets.

You want them to be relatively even.

You don't want 'em too big, obviously.

You want these to cook fairly quickly.

And then we're just gonna blanche them in salted water.

So I'm gonna slice some scallions.

Finely minced ginger and garlic.

Those are gonna go into the pan

while we're building our final sauce.

First things, chilies.

I just keep chilies in my pocket apparently.

All right, so we're just gonna cut these chilies

into little bite-sized pieces.

They're really just to add aroma and flavor

and warmth to the oil.

Not really supposed to eat them, but you can.

You can add the seeds if you want.

You can leave 'em out.

Just gonna add a few of them.

We're not gonna get too crazy here.

All the capsaicin,

all the heat in chilies are in the seeds.

I mean, there's some in the chili itself,

but if you remove the seeds,

you're removing probably like 70% of the heat.

Scallions.

There's the dark greens, the light greens, and the whites.

We're gonna use the whites and some of the light greens

to flavor our oil

and while we're building our sauce.

And then we're gonna use the dark greens for garnish.

The white light green parts of the scallion

have a lot more allium in them,

makes them a little bit more pungent and spicy.

You don't need to super thinly slice these

'cause you don't want these to disintegrate.

You want these to be in the sauce,

but give up some of their oil.

So that's like a good size for me for when I'm cooking them.

And then this stuff you can slice a little thinner

'cause this is gonna be for garnish.

We're gonna do garlic and ginger again.

We're gonna be a little more intentional

about mincing this very finely

'cause it's going to be built into our sauce.

We were more just flavoring before using Aromat.

So you can use a microplane, you can use your cleaver.

Just kind of smash these up here.

Same thing with the ginger.

Ginger, obviously, very powerful, very distinct flavor.

You just want it to kind of perfume the oil

as you build the sauce,

but you really don't need a lot.

Smashy, smashy, Hulk smash.

It's so fast, you know?

All right, we're just gonna finally mince this.

I would say about a ratio

of like two to one garlic to ginger.

♪ Look how handy the cleaver is ♪

Veggies are prepped.

These are all the things we need

to build our sauce in the pan.

We're just gonna put it all together.

[upbeat jazzy music]

All right, so it's a little unorthodox,

but I'm actually going to dredge this chicken.

It's not normally how you would do it

in a Chinese restaurant,

but it's much more dependable and consistent this way,

especially when you're using home equipment.

So I just built a little bit of a dredge here.

Flour and corn starch.

And we're gonna go wet marinated into dry,

shake off, then fry.

We're just gonna add a few pieces at a time here.

Very lightly dredged.

It's really important to shake off all the excess.

You want this to be a very light, delicate dredge

as much as possible.

Okay, now we're ready to go to the fryer.

This is gonna be a double fry.

So there's gonna be two different temperatures.

The first fry, the objective is get the crust set

and the protein cooked.

And we're gonna let it rest.

The second fry is gonna be a higher temp,

gets really crispy, real hot, real quick.

And then we build the sauce.

Everything comes together very quickly.

So this first fry, do it between like 325 and 350.

So we're gonna start a little higher than that

because home ranges drop temp a little more intensely

than commercial fryers, as you could imagine.

So I'm frying in canola oil.

Any sort of neutral high-smoke-point oil is great.

And I'm gonna move these around

just so they're not sticking to one another.

All right, so the first fryer,

we're looking to fry about like five to seven minutes.

You want the crust to be set,

you want the chicken to be cooked through, obviously.

The corn starch and the velveting

is gonna help it retain some moisture.

Once they start floating, that's a pretty good sign

that they're pretty close to being cooked.

And then we're gonna drain these.

I'm gonna put these on a wire rack

so that they don't get all soggy.

Otherwise they sit in their own moisture,

they're gonna steam,

and you're gonna ruin all that crust you worked so hard for.

So after the first fry, crust is set, it's fully cooked.

You could eat it now, but we're not going to.

And we're gonna do our second fry.

The only goal we have here

is to make this chicken super crispy.

Deliciously hot.

So this oil is hotter than it was before.

It's about 400F.

I'm just gonna keep the spider in

so it doesn't get the sediment from the bottom.

All right, you really only needed like a few seconds there.

Very quick.

Ooh yeah, nice and hot.

We're cooking broccoli.

I'm gonna season the water with a bit of salt,

but we just got some boiling water here.

We're gonna blanche these for just a few minutes,

arrange them nicely on a plate.

And it's gonna visually be very striking

next to our General Tso's chicken.

So I'm gonna do salt.

Nice heavy dosage.

I have broccoli florets here,

awfully uniform in shape.

You don't have to get too precious with it.

I'm making sure there's not too much stem.

That way, these will cook pretty quickly.

Maybe just two minutes in boiling and salted water.

All right.

So we're looking for super bright green, beautiful color.

That way when the chicken, which has like,

you know, a slight redness to it,

they're gonna look really awesome together.

You know, like you see

in the Chinese restaurant on the menu

when they have pictures.

You want to eat that.

Blanches the broccoli really quickly.

So these are gonna be good here.

We're gonna serve them with some rice

and our really awesome General Tso's chicken.

Hot and crispy chicken on the second fry.

Got the broccoli.

We're gonna build the sauce.

Sauce time.

[upbeat jazzy music]

We're gonna use a saute pan

just like you'd find in your home.

You can use non-stick.

You can do whatever you want.

You don't need a wok to do this.

You don't need giant fireballs and volcanic heat either.

Obviously, that's how they do it in a restaurant.

But you can have great Chinese food on medium heat.

It's gonna be just fine, y'all.

Got all my ingredients ready.

It's gonna come together pretty quickly.

I'm gonna bring in some oil,

bloom my aromatics in a little bit of heat.

Got my sauce.

I have corn starch slurry here.

Gonna adjust the viscosity of my sauce.

We're gonna get some neutral oil here,

a little bit of ginger garlic.

Do some chilies.

You're not trying to get any color,

you're just blooming them up.

And then we're going some scallion whites.

All right, I'm gonna turn this burner on high.

Just smells good, there's no color whatsoever.

And then I'm gonna go with the sauce.

You don't need a lot.

All right, gonna stir the sauce in now.

We use ketchup, A1.

All those things have modified starches in them.

So sometimes you don't even need the corn starch,

but maybe we'll just do a little bit.

You don't want it to be too gloopy.

You can see it's still kind of running, it's flowing.

Take that off the heat for a second.

And we're go in with our chicken.

So we're gonna toss.

As you can see, we don't have too much sauce here.

You want to toss it to coat.

If you need a little bit more, you can add more.

Maybe a little bit.

You just want that nice like orange, red, vibrant color.

And you just want enough sauce to coat.

As you can see, not a lot of excess sauce in the pan.

All the aromatics, nicely clinging too.

Hot, crispy, sauced.

Let's go plate, my friends.

[chill music]

We are gonna do this

real Chinese restaurant lunch special style.

We're gonna get some steamed broccoli, steamed white rice,

and our General Tso's chicken on the plate.

14.95 with a Diet Coke and an egg roll maybe?

I don't know.

I don't know what the going rate is these days.

So the broccoli, at least at our family restaurant,

just needs to form a beautiful semicircle,

as if cupping the dishes to be.

Mound o'rice.

And we gotta go chicken.

And get some of the aromatics in there.

Some chilies, some scallion.

This looks great, nice and crispy.

Nice and saucy, nice and shiny, beautiful color.

Steamed broccoli arranged ever so artfully.

I wanna eat that.

[light upbeat music]

Mm-hmm.

It's like a little warm, heat, but nothing crazy.

You can taste the sweetness,

but it's still balanced and savory.

Eat a little white rice.

Essential to balancing out the intense flavors.

And broccoli?

Hmm.

Tastes just like home.

So, as you see, very easy to do at home.

I know Chinese cuisine can seem a little intimidating

'cause you think you need the big fire-breathing wok

and the special equipment and yada yada.

You don't.

These are all very pedestrian ingredients

that probably exist in your home already

in some form or another.

And if you don't have it, it's not a huge deal.

You can leave a couple things out.

The key is just learning how to do it, eating it fresh,

knowing how to sauce and build flavor.

That's really the key to making great Chinese food at home.

Yeah, here we go, General Tso's chicken, y'all.

[light upbeat music]