This General Tso Chicken Recipe is a flavorful Chinese chicken recipe. Delicious, lightly fried, Chinese style chicken is crispy, sweet,. General Tsoâs Chicken is a perfect combination of sweet and spicy flavors. It is a very popular dish throughout the United States and Canada. This is probably one of the best and easiest recipes around, you will be surprised at how.
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General Tso's Chicken is a Chinese American and Chinese Canadian dish often associated with of China. Though the name of a dish may reference a specific general in China, possibly the 19th century Zuo Zongtang, most food historians conclude this dish was invented in the US because it is not commonly served in China. The legend surrounding the chicken and its connection to Zuo Zongtang is still fun to know. According to various sources the wife of the general created the dish for him after a great battle, and the dish then became a favorite. Unfortunately, this truly appears a legend since the descendants of the general express no familiarity with this spicy dish.Actually General Tso's Chicken may have been invented in New York City.
The restaurant Pengâs Restaurant claims to be the first to have served it. According to Pengâs, this dish is a fairly new invention, created in 1972 by T. An alternate story is that the dish was invented in Taiwan. The basic ingredients of General Tso's Chicken are dark chicken meat, shallots, white wine or rice, hot peppers and spices like and ginger. The chicken is breaded and deep fried than coated with a sauce made of tangy opposites like garlic, peppers, sometimes wine or sherry, and ginger. The dish has a spicy, sweet and sour taste that is a favorite of many restaurant goers.
Ingredients can vary depending on the restaurant preparing the chicken. Emphasis may be more on spiciness than contrast in sweet and sour flavors.The dish is very similar to other dishes like and chicken. Pieces of meat in Szechuan beef are also deep-fried and mixed with a sauce, green onions or shallots, and hot peppers. General Tso's Chicken may contain more sauce, though this too depends upon the restaurant or chefâs preference.You can eat General Tso's Chicken as a main dish, and it is excellent served over rice.
It may be listed on a menu, but some Chinese American and Chinese Canadian restaurants make it as a special or have it listed as a highlighted and frequently slightly more expensive dish. Given that it is no more labor intensive to prepare and has relatively inexpensive ingredients, the extra cost isnât truly justified. Some people vary the dish deep-frying white meat chicken or chicken tenders instead, and these typically are a little more expensive than pieces of dark meat.
General Tso's chicken (pronounced [tswoÌ], (also General Tse's chicken)) is a sweet deep-fried chicken dish that is served in North American Chinese restaurants. The dish is named after Zuo Zongtang (also romanized Tso Tsung-t'ang), a Qing dynasty statesman and military leader, although there is no recorded connection to him nor is the dish known in Hunan, Zuo's home province.[1]
Name and origins[edit]
The dish has been associated with Zuo Zongtang (Tso Tsung-t'ang) (1812â1885), a Qing dynasty statesman and military leader from Hunan Province, but Zuo could not have eaten the dish or known of it.[2] The dish is found neither in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, nor in Xiangyin County, where Zuo was born. Moreover, Zuo's descendants, who are still living in Xiangyin County, when interviewed, say that they have never heard of such a dish.[3]
There are several stories concerning the origin of the dish. Eileen Yin-Fei Lo states in her book The Chinese Kitchen that the dish originates from a simple Hunan chicken dish and that the reference to 'Zongtang' was not a reference to Zuo Zongtang's given name, but rather a reference to the homonym 'zongtang', meaning 'ancestral meeting hall'.[4] Consistent with this interpretation, the dish name is sometimes (but considerably less commonly) found in Chinese as å·¦å®æ£ é (Chung tong gai is transliterated from Jyutping[citation needed]; ZuÇ ZÅngtáng jÄ« is transliterated from Hanyu Pinyin).
The dish or its variants are known by a number of greatly variant names, including:
Peng Chang-kuei claim[edit]
Fuchsia Dunlop[1] argues that the recipe was invented by Taiwan-based Hunan cuisine chef Peng Chang-kuei,[5][6] who had been an apprentice of Cao Jingchen (æ¹èè£), a leading early 20th-century Chinese chef. Peng was the Nationalist government's banquet chef and fled with Kuomintang forces to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War.[5] There he continued his career as official chef until 1973, when he moved to New York to open a restaurant. That was where Peng started inventing new dishes and modifying traditional ones. One new dish, General Tso's chicken, was originally prepared without sugar and subsequently altered to suit the tastes of 'non-Hunanese people'. The popularity of the dish has led to it being adopted by local Hunanese chefs and food writers.[1][3] When Peng opened a restaurant in Hunan in the 1990s introducing General Tso's chicken, the restaurant closed without success, as the locals found the dish too sweet.[3]
Peng's Restaurant[7] on East 44th Street in New York City claims that it was the first restaurant in the city to serve General Tso's chicken. Since the dish (and cuisine) was new, Peng made it the house speciality in spite of the dish's commonplace ingredients.[1] A review of Peng's in 1977 mentions that their 'General Tso's chicken was a stir-fried masterpiece, sizzling hot both in flavor and temperature'.[8]
Peng died from pneumonia in November 2016 at 98 years old.[9]
Wang claim[edit]
New York's Shun Lee Palaces, located at East (155 E. 55th St.) and West (43 W. 65th St.), also claims that it was the first restaurant to serve General Tso's chicken and that it was invented by a Chinese immigrant chef named T. T. Wang in 1972. Michael Tong, owner of New York's Shun Lee Palaces, says 'We opened the first Hunanese restaurant in the whole country, and the four dishes we offered you will see on the menu of practically every Hunanese restaurant in America today. They all copied from us.'[2]
It has also been argued that the two stories can be somewhat reconciled in that the current General Tso's chicken recipe â where the meat is crispy fried â was introduced by Chef Wang but as 'General Ching's chicken', a name which still has trace appearances on menus on the Internet (the identity of its namesake 'General Ching' is, however, unclear); whereas the name 'General Tso's chicken' can be traced to Chef Peng, who cooked it in a different way.[3]
These competing claims are discussed in the 2014 documentary film The Search for General Tso, which also traces how the history of Chinese immigration into the USA parallels the development of a unique Chinese-American or American Chinese cuisine.
Recipes[edit]
General Tso's chicken
Close-up view of General Tso's chicken
Traditional basic ingredients include:
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Regional differences[edit]
The Taiwanese restaurant Peng Chang-kuei also serves the dish and is credited by some sources as the inventor of the dish.[5] Differences between this Taiwanese dish and that commonly encountered in North America are that it is not sweet in flavor, the chicken is cooked with its skin and that soy sauce plays a much more prominent role.[3]
![]() Nutrition[edit]
Though servings and recipes vary between restaurants, a typical restaurant serving of General Tso's chicken may include up to 1,300 calories, 11 grams of saturated fat, 3,200 milligrams of sodium, [11] and 300mg of cholesterol.[12] One serving will typically be about 4 oz. (approximately 100 grams) of chicken thigh meat, which contains 20-30 grams of protein,[13] greater than 30% of recommended daily niacin, and over 15% of recommended B6, phosphorus, and zinc.[12]
See also[edit]
Notes[edit]
References and further reading[edit]
External links[edit]
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=General_Tso%27s_chicken&oldid=948624710'
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