Name: Sweet-and-Sour Chicken
Yield: Serves 4
Cuisine: Chinese
Ingredients: 2 teaspoons Shaoxing rice wine or dry sherry; 2 teaspoons light soy sauce; 3 tablespoons Chinese black rice vinegar; 1 teaspoon salt; 1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil; ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper; Groundnut oil, for deep-frying; 2 tablespoons sugar; 450 g (1 lb) boneless, skinless chicken thighs, or 675 g (1½ lb) with skin and bones; 1 teaspoon dark soy sauce; 1½ tablespoons light soy sauce; 120 ml (4 fl oz) water; 2 teaspoons toasted sesame oil; 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda; 1 teaspoon baking powder; 35 g (1¼ oz) unbleached plain flour; 65 g (2¼ oz) potato flour or cornflour; 1 teaspoon Shaoxing rice wine or dry sherry; 1 teaspoon cornflour; 3 tablespoons slant-cut spring onions, to garnish

Preparation info

Serves
4

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

Easy Family Dishes

By Ken Hom

Published 1998

About

I am convinced that this dish is a concoction of some Westernized Chinese restaurant. In China, chicken is considered to have such a delicate flavour that it would be a travesty to flavour it with a sweet-sour sauce: beef, yes; pork, yes; chicken, and especially chicken breast, no. Again, I imagine a proprietor thinking, ‘Westerners love sweet-and-sour pork; why not chicken, of which we have many leftovers?’

Here I offer a more balanced, more authentically Chinese approach: the swee