Chinese Fried Chicken (Without Sauce)

• servings: 4 servings
• active time: 20 minutes
• total time: 40 minutes

Ingredients

For the Marinade:

1 egg white

1Tablespoon dark soy sauce

1 Tablespoon regular soy sauce

2 tablespoons Shaoxing wine

2 tablespoons 80-proof vodka

3 tablespoons cornstarch

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 pound boneless, skinless chicken breasts , cut into 1/2- to 3/4-inch chunks

For the Dry Coating:

1/2 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 cup cornstarch

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

To Fry the Chicken:

1 1/2 quarts peanut, vegetable, or canola oil for deep frying

Directions

For the Marinade:

Beat egg whites in a large bowl until broken down and lightly foamy.

Add soy sauce, wine, and vodka and whisk to combine.

Set aside half of marinade in a small bowl.

Add cornstarch and baking soda to the large bowl and whisk to combine.

Add chicken to large bowl and turn with fingers to coat thoroughly.

Cover with plastic wrap and marinade for at least 4 hours.

For the Dry Coat:

Combine flour, cornstarch, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl. Whisk until homogeneous.

Add reserved marinade a little at a time and whisk until mixture has coarse, mealy clumps. Set aside.

To Fry Chicken:

Heat 1 1/2 quarts peanut, vegetable, or canola oil in a large wok or Dutch oven to 350°F and adjust flame to maintain temperature. Or deep fryer.

Working one piece at a time, transfer chicken from marinade to dry coat mixture, tossing in between each addition to coat chicken.

When all chicken is added to dry coat, toss with hands, pressing dry mixture onto chicken so it adheres, and making sure that every piece is coated thoroughly.

Lift chicken one piece at a time, shake off excess coating, and carefully lower into hot oil (do not drop it).

Once all chicken is added, cook, agitating with long chopsticks or a metal spider, and adjusting flame to maintain a temperature of 325 to 375°F, until chicken is cooked through and very crispy, about 4 minutes.

Transfer chicken to a paper towel-lined bowl to drain.

Notes

There are 40,000 Chinese restaurants in the country—more than all of the McDonald's, Burger Kings, Wendy's, and Kentucky Fried Chickens combined. And whether it's called General Tso's (as it is here in New York), General Gau's (the way I knew it through my college years in New England), Cho's, Chau's, Joe's, Ching's, or, as they call it in the Navy, Admiral Tso's, walk into any one of those restaurants and chances are you'll find it on the menu.

Its origins are still up for debate. Its namesake, General Zuo Zongtang, almost certainly never tasted the dish before his death in 1885 and, as Lee discovers, his descendants—many of whom still reside in the General's hometown of Xiangyin—don't recognize the dish as a family heirloom, or even as particularly Chinese, for that matter.

As my friend Francis Lam reported in this fantastic piece on the origins of General Tso's chicken, the late Ed Schoenfeld, proprietor of New York's Red Farm and one of the world's experts on Chinese-American cuisine, traced its origins to Chef Peng Jia, a Hunanese chef who fled to Taiwan after the 1949 revolution. Made with un-battered large chunks of dark meat chicken tossed in a tart sauce, it was more savory than sweet. It wasn't until a New York-based chef, T.T. Wang, learned the recipe from Peng in Taiwan, brought it back, added a crispy deep-fried coating and sugar to the sauce, and changed the name to General Ching's that it stuck, eventually making its way onto Chinese menus across the country and the globe. It's so popular that there's an entire feature length film on its origins.

It makes sense: As Lee says, we Americans like our food sweet, we like it fried, and man, do we love chicken.

The details may vary—you'll see everything from broccoli to canned water chestnuts to mushrooms to (eek!) baby corn added to versions around the country—but the basics are the same: You start with chicken with the kind of crisp, craggy, deep-fried coating that Colonel Sanders himself would be proud of (what is it with military men and fried chicken anyway?), then toss it in a sweet and punchy sauce flavored with garlic, ginger, scallions, and dried chiles. Throw it all on a plate with some steamed white rice and you've got one of America's most popular dishes.

It also happens to be one of the safer options on Chinese-American menus. Even the $5-with-a-can-of-Coke-and-egg-drop-soup lunch special at the sleaziest college take-out joint hits your taste buds in that sort of hangover-craving kind of way that a McDonald's Chicken McNugget dipped in Sweet 'N Sour Sauce manages to nail time after time. And yet, I firmly believe that it has the potential to be so much more than that. How great would a homemade version of General Tso's be, with a flavor that shows some real complexity and a texture that takes that crisp-crust-juicy-center balance to the extreme?

Nutrition

• Serving Size: Serves 4 to 6
• Calories: 372 kcal
• Total Fat: 21 g
• Saturated Fat: 3 g
• Unsaturated Fat: 0 g
• Cholesterol: 108 mg
• Sodium: 794 mg
• Total Carbohydrate: 25 g
• Dietary Fiber: 1 g
• Total Sugars: 9 g
• Protein: 21 g