6-Ingredient Chinese Chicken: Easy Chinese Chicken Recipes for Dinner with Few Ingredients (2024)

FAQs

What is the most popular Chinese chicken dish? ›

General Tso's Chicken is a dish that originated in the Hunan province of China, and it's now a staple in Chinese restaurants around the world. The dish consists of crispy fried chicken that's tossed in a sweet and spicy glaze made from soy sauce, rice vinegar, sugar, and chili flakes.

You velvet chicken with baking soda, not baking powder. Baking soda works as a meat tenderizer on chicken because it changes the pH of the meat. This prevents the proteins from bonding tightly and gives it a soft and silky texture when stir-fried.

Kaitlin Leung of The Woks of Life, a blog dedicated to Chinese cooking, shares that a standard velveting mixture could include egg white and cornstarch, plus a few tablespoons of water – to help coat the meat yes, but also to make the meat extra tender and juicy.

Sweet and sour chicken, one of the most popular Chinese takeout dishes, is made of puffy, golden brown pieces of fried chicken nuggets with pineapple chunks, onion, bell pepper, carrot, and a side of iconic red, sweet and sour sauce.

The ideal old hen is at least 2 years old, preferably 3-4 years old—more time to develop the intense chicken flavor old hen is known for. Its older, stronger bones concentrate the savoriness and stand up better to stewing. The matured fat aromatizes into something altogether more… chickeny.

Though it's virtually flavorless, cornstarch is easily one of the most vital ingredients in a Chinese kitchen, with multiple uses, including thickening sauces, gravies, and soups.

Low and slow cooking methods like braising, stewing, or smoking are most effective when trying to create tender, succulent chicken.

Don't settle for dry, boring chicken breasts. One simple ingredient will add flavor and keep them from drying out every time: mayo. You read that correctly, mayonnaise isn't just for sandwiches and macaroni salads. Oh no, it's great for ensuring juicy, tender chicken too.

Authentic Chinese restaurant chicken cubes are coated with quite a lot of batter and fluffy. But I prefer my homemade recipe with less batter, so ours is a bit lighter and crisper coating texture. To make the batter mix, you will need plain flour ( all-purpose flour ), corn starch, salt, baking soda, and water.

Brining is basically soaking meat in a salt water solution, but the flavour doesn't stop at just salt. You can add all kinds of aromatics such as juniper berries, garlic, thyme and pepper to the solution to impart a different flavour. There are no rules – just use flavours that go together well.

How do Chinese make their meat so tender? ›

This is how to tenderise beef with a Chinese restaurant method called “velveting beef”. Also used for chicken, it's a simple, highly effective technique using baking soda that transforms economical beef so it's incredibly tender in stir fries and stir fried noodles.

In a medium saucepan, combine pineapple juice, rice vinegar, brown sugar, ketchup, and soy sauce and bring to a boil over medium heat. Stir in cornstarch slurry and cook until thickened, about 1 to 2 minutes. Remove from heat and use immediately or store in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks.

General Tso's chicken (左宗棠雞 Zuǒ Zōngtáng jī) is a sweet and spicy deep-fried chicken dish.

Some authors say that the original sweet and sour sauce (traditional Chinese: 糖醋醬; simplified Chinese: 糖醋酱; pinyin: tángcùjiàng) came from the Chinese province of Henan, but the sauce in this area is a light vinegar and sugar mixture not resembling what most people, including the Chinese, would call sweet and sour.

“GrubHub order data proves that General Tso's Chicken is, indeed, the most popular Chinese dish in the country," said Allie Mack, a GrubHub spokesperson. "In fact, it's among the top five most popular dishes on GrubHub, period. This dish has transcended ethnic food categories to become a staple of the American diet.”

Butter chicken, also known as Murgh Makhani, has recently claimed the top spot in the "Top 100 Chicken Dishes in the World" list by TasteAtlas, (an online guide for traditional food) solidifying its place as a global culinary sensation.

Chinese Amazing Chicken is usually prepared by marinating the chicken in a mixture of soy sauce, ginger, and garlic. The chicken is then stir-fried or pan-fried until it is cooked through. It is often garnished with green onions and sesame seeds for added flavor and presentation.