General Tso's Chicken

[canyonwalker]

A few nights ago I made General Tso's chicken at home. General Tso's is my favorite Chinese* dish. It's my go-to dish when it's on the menu in restaurants. I've tried a few ready-to-eat versions of from grocery stores. They've never measured up.

Here's what I cooked at home:

Comments

[canyonwalker]

I put an asterisk next to the description of this as a Chinese dish because really it's Chinese-American. Though the dish is of Hunan style (Hunan is a province in China) and shares ingredients, flavors, and techniques similar to various Hunan dishes, there's no record it originates from China. The wikipedia entry for General Tso's Chicken shows competing accounts of two restaurants in the US run by Chinese immigrants who claim they invented it in the 1970s. Indeed, during my many trips to China ~10 years ago none of my colleagues there were familiar with General Tso's Chicken. (We discussed it when they saw I was comfortable eating Chinese food and asked what dishes I liked best.) They didn't even know who General Tso was. He was a real person, though; a military leader in the Qing Dynasty in the mid/late 1800s.