Sweet and Sour Chicken Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is the correct way to eat sweet and sour chicken? ›

Taste the sauce and add more brown sugar or vinegar to suit your tastes, if you'd like. Serve hot with steamed white or brown rice.

Sweet and Sour Chicken Ingredients

For the sauce: water, pineapple juice from a can, white sugar, white vinegar, and orange food coloring. For the batter: cornstarch, self-rising flour, vegetable oil, an egg, salt, and white pepper.

While sweet and sour can be found in diverse forms in China, the American version builds upon the simple mixture of sugar, vinegar, and spices with the addition of fruit juice—most commonly pineapple—and ketchup, giving the sauce both its red hue and uniquely Western flavor.

Sweet and sour is particularly popular in westernised Cantonese cuisine and may be found all over the world commonly with pork or chicken. Several provinces in China produce various dishes that claim to be the ancestor including a traditional Jiangsu dish called “pork in a sugar and vinegar sauce”.

Storage Instructions

To store, place the sweet and sour chicken into airtight containers and place them in the fridge for up to 4 days and in the freezer for up to 4 months.

Dishes can either include the sauce as an ingredient in cooking or use the sauce as a pour-over or dipping sauce for the meal. Chinese restaurants in Western countries commonly serve battered and deep-fried chicken, pork, or shrimp with a sweet and sour sauce poured on top.

Sweet and sour sauce is not a good source of vitamins and minerals. It does however have 3 milligrams of vitamin C. This makes up 5% of the recommended daily intake of vitamin C. Sweet and sour sauce is a high-sodium food and provides 7% of the total recommended daily intake.

Add bell peppers and sauté with chicken until beginning to soften. Step 3Meanwhile, whisk together apple cider vinegar, soy sauce, honey, ketchup and garlic. Pour sauce into the skillet. Simmer together with the meat for 5 minutes, until the chicken is cooked through and the sauce has thickened slightly.

Lemon or lime juice are the two most common substitutes for white vinegar. You can also use rice vinegar, apple cider vinegar or malt vinegar but the taste of your sauce might be a tad different. Soy Sauce – I used low sodium. Ketchup – I used store bought.

What is the actual Flavour of sweet and sour sauce? ›

Sweet and sour sauce tastes just like it sounds. A little bit sweet and a little bit sour at the same time. You will also have notes from whatever you flavour it with. The sweet and sour tastes can be made with a simple sugar and vinegar mix.

From personal experience of not having canned/fresh pineapples in the kitchen, I just used a bit of lemon juice and an orange cut into large chunks. Chinese plum sweet & sour mix is one of my favorites.

The original recipe was Shanghainese and used black vinegar. It's not meant to be orange, but black. But somewhere along the way, ketchup replaced the vinegar and it turned orange in the UK. Now that dish is called Sweet and Sour Chicken—Hong Kong style.

The origin of sweet and sour chicken was in the 18th century or even earlier from China. It spread to the United States in the early 20th century after the Chinese migrant gold miners and railroad workers turned to cookery as trades. In some countries, the dish is known as Ku lo yuk.

Basically, the sauce is what distinguishes one flavor from the others, so when making orange chicken, the sauce base is orange juice, with lemon, lemonade, pineapple, pineapple juice, and sweet and sour is tomato sauce or juice and vinegar and sugar or honey.

According to Ayurvedic principles, the sweet taste should come first in a meal as it takes the longest to digest.

Proper etiquette is to cut the meat off the bones with a knife and eat it with a fork, however, if you see others around you picking it up to eat it I would too. Same with ribs. Its not that necessary to eat chicken bones at formal settings.

Being Polite While Eating

Usually, sautéed or boneless chicken is eaten with a fork and knife. Use the knife to cut the meat into smaller, bite-sized pieces. If you're eating chicken with bones in it, use the knife to hold the chicken in place while you pull the meat off with the fork.