Who doesn’t love the occasional night of Chinese takeout for dinner? It’s fast, affordable, and most importantly, flavorful with a wide mix of sweet and savory options for everyone to enjoy. But this wouldn’t be much of a recipe if it started and ended with me telling you to go order takeout, so instead we made a takeout classic with this General Tso’s Chicken that you can make for yourself, make it Halal, and it tastes even better when made from the comfort of your kitchen. So, if you’re craving flavorful takeout with juicy chicken and crisp veggies all in a savory sauce but want to skip the drive or the delivery fee, then this weeks recipe is just what you need.
Starting off, this is a great option if you’re looking for an easy recipe that provides a lot in the final product. If you’ve never made General Tso’s before then this is a great jumping off point in a deceptively simple recipe. We used Halal chicken thighs for ours, but if you’re more a fan of chicken breast then there’s no reason to not use your preferred chicken. We chose to use thighs for the more savory dark meat flavor to go with the sauce and broccoli that make up the rest of this recipe, but more on that later. We also didn’t use a heavy breading or deep fry our chicken, so it doesn’t have that extra crispy outside, but the light seasoning we do give it along with a pan fry are great for keeping the recipe simple, and it saves you the trouble (and smell) of frying in a lot of oil in your kitchen. What you do get instead are tender pieces of golden-brown chicken that have retained a lot of the natural dark meat flavor, with the added addition of the seasoning of a few spices like white pepper and sesame.
The only step to this recipe that isn’t straight forward is the broccoli. “How do you get broccoli that’s slightly tender but still crisp without overcooking it when mixed with everything else in the pan?” I hear you ask yourself. Well, with a quick blanch in boiling water for less than a minute, anything is possible. This way the broccoli starts to soften but will finish cooking when added to the chicken and mixed in the sauce at the end. After it’s done in boiling water, tossing it into a bowl with ice water will help keep it nice and green and crisp until you’re ready to use it at the end.
Now for the sauce, the real secret to this recipe that brings it all together. It’s a blend of some very savory, sweet, and spicy flavors all mixed into one very tasty sauce. The Halal chicken stock, soy sauce, and dark soy sauce all bring the savory, but the brown sugar really cuts it with some much-needed sweetness that makes for a deliciously simple but complex tasting base for the sauce. This is mixed in with a few red chillis and garlic toasted in the pan, and if you’re a fan of spice, feel free to add more chillis or some cayenne pepper to the mix to amp up the heat. But if you aren’t a fan of spice, don’t let the chillis scare you off as they only add a very small hint of extra flavor to the sauce without making it spicy.
If simmering the sauce isn’t enough to get it to thicken up, adding a couple tablespoons of cornstarch slurry with a 2 to 1 mix of water and cornstarch to the pan did the trick for us. Make sure when you make that to use cold water! Hot water will cause the corn starch to ball up and ruin that tasty sauce you’ve worked on. Afterwards, it’s ready for the chicken and broccoli to get added to the pan to get everything mixed together. The chicken should be fully cooked from its earlier trip to the pan and the broccoli should be too, so all you need to worry about is getting everything coated and sauce and warmed up!
What a treat this is, juicy chicken and crisp but slightly tender broccoli all mixed in a sweet-and-savory sauce and served over some white rice is exactly what you need when the craving for Chinese takeout strikes. Except this time, you’ve saved the money on dinner for one night and now you have plenty for tonight and more saved for leftovers, all with the added bonus that your house now smells amazing from your home cooking. That’s it for this week, we’re hoping you give this one a try and enjoy it until next week when we bring you another fantastic recipe. We’ll see you then!
