Sweet and Sour Chicken

Its fair to say most people love Chinese food. There’s enough on the menu to suit all tastes. Ask someone what their favorite Chinese takeout is and there’s a good chance they’ll say crispy sweet and sour chicken. We’ve assembled our ingredients, dusted off our wok and today we are going to talk you through how to make sweet and sour chicken.

Homemade sweet and sour chicken mixes quite a few flavors and textures to make a mouthwatering dish. As the name would suggest it has a sugary element, but the background taste of the sauce is ever so slightly vinegary. When this is poured in thick lashings over crispy fried chicken it is a dish to behold. If you’re wondering what is sweet and sour chicken and how do I make it, we’ve got you covered below.

How To Make Sweet And Sour Chicken

When you read how to cook our Chinese sweet and sour chicken with pineapple recipe, you’ll realize why it’s served as a fast-food takeout recipe. It takes longer to prepare than it does to cook. If you have guests coming over get the ingredients ready in advance and wow them with your culinary expertise.

This easy sweet and sour chicken recipe is actually made in two parts. The first part is achieving perfectly crispy and tender chicken. The second part is making the sauce and drenching your chicken in it.

The key to this recipe is to create a little chicken production line. Arrange your three bowls in a line with your wok on the heat at the end. Start with the corn flour as the first bowl, your egg as the second and your flour as the third. By organizing yourself in this way you will make it so much easier.

Oh, and cook the chicken in batches. If you overcrowd the pan the oil temperature will drop and the coating wont fry quickly enough and may even stick together.

You will need a wok, a slotted spoon and a little time. Oh, and maybe a few small bowls.

When it comes to making the chicken crispy, some recipes will suggest using batter. Whilst it is nice, batter takes longer to make, is difficult to get perfect and also tends to go soggy when it soaks up the sauce. We prefer to coat our chicken in seasoned cornstarch and flour. It’s super simple and guarantees perfect crispy results every time.

When it comes to making the sauce, everyone has a favorite takeaway and we have tried to get the taste as close as we can to our own, however yours might be different. Feel free to tweak the ingredients, to get it to your liking. The things we suggest changing to get the flavor balance just right are the amounts of sugar and vinegar used in the recipe. Add or remove a teaspoon or two as you see fit. And keep tasting it until you’ve got it right.

 You will want to keep your vegetables chunky too. Whilst finely sliced vegetables are nice, due to the sugar content of this dish, it gets hot very quickly. If the vegetables are too thin then they will cook really quickly and end up mushy and soft when it comes time to serve your sweet n sour chicken recipe. By leaving them bigger they are slightly more robust during cooking and should have a nice bite when you dish them up.

Sweet and Sour Chicken

4 from 35 votes

Recipe by Laura Ritterman Course: MainCuisine: ChineseDifficulty: Easy

Servings

4

servings

Prep time

15

minutes

Cooking time

10

minutes

Calories

600

kcal

This is the best Sweet and Sour Chicken recipe combining the crispiest chicke with pineapple and peppers that will make your night in extra special.

Ingredients

• For the chicken

• 4 chicken breasts cut into bite sized pieces

• 1/2 cup 1/2 cornflour

• A pinch of salt

• 2 eggs mixed with a pinch of pepper

• 1/4 cup 1/4 white flour

• 500 ml 500 of cooking oil (we really like peanut oil)

• For the sauce

• 1 can 1 of pineapple chunks

• 1 red pepper sliced into thick pieces

• 1 green pepper sliced into thick pieces

• 1 small onion, quartered

• 1/2 cup 1/2 sugar

• 1/4 cup 1/4 brown sugar

• 1/2 cup 1/2 rice wine vinegar or white wine vinegar

• 1/3 cup 1/3 of ketchup

• 2 tablespoons 2 of dark soy sauce

• 1 tablespoon 1 of minced garlic

Directions

• Over a medium to high heat add the cooking oil to your wok and leave to heat.
• Whilst the oil is heating take a small bowl. Add both of the sugars, the rice wine vinegar and the ketchup. Stir this together until it is all incorporated. Then add the garlic and soy sauce.
• You can test whether you oil is ready for frying by placing a wooden spoon into the oil. If lots of bubbles foam and appear then the oil is hot enough.
• Assemble your bowls in a line. Add the corn flour and salt to one bowl and then add your chicken pieces. Turn them until they are dusted all over. Using your fingers remove each chunk of chicken then dip in the egg, then the flour and then carefully drop it into the pan of hot oil.
• Fry the chicken for around 4 minutes until it is crisp and golden then remove and place on kitchen paper to drain slightly. Remove the oil from the wok. Don’t wipe it.
• Returning the wok to the heat, add you onions, peppers and pineapple. Stir fry for around 2-3 minutes until the onion begin to char slightly at the edges.
• Add the sauce to the pan and stir it around, covering the vegetables. Then add the chicken pieces.
• Give it all a good stir for another minute then serve immediately, maybe with some rice and prawn crackers.

Notes

• If you don’t want to use peanut oil we’ve got a list of substitutes for peanut oil.

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Nutrition

There’s a lot of steps but this Chinese style sweet and sour chicken recipe is actually quite easy to make. The trick to doing it right is to be super organized, especially with coating the chicken. Provided you follow our advice and have the right ingredients you’ll be knocking out a batch of this again and again, its so tasty!

We hope you enjoy this sweet sour chicken recipe as much as we did making. Let us know how it turned out for you in the comments below.