It's been a while since I posted any pictures of my culinary experiments. According to the venerable Chang and Kutscher volume An Encyclopedia of Chinese Food and Cooking, the Chinese call this tien swan gee jiu (sweet and sour chicken). Since this is Independance Day, I'll just call it Chicken McNuggets with sweet'n'sour sauce.
The sauce itself was rather interesting. I made it from scratch. It's a concoction of vinegar, sugar, water, soy sauce, garlic powder, soup stock and the key ingredient, sub gum ginger. A little research on the Internet revealed that sub gum ginger is otherwise known as pickled ginger. I was able to find some Thai pickled ginger at an Asian supermarket this morning. I have to say that this particular sweet and sour sauce is actually rather subtle... not strongly fruity, like so many I've had. The ginger adds sort of a fruity pungency, that taken with the vinegar, sugar and some organic chicken stock makes for a very different sort of flavor.
I was running low on peanut oil, so I had to use common canola oil instead. I think that lent a certain basic flavor more reminiscent of fish'n'chips rather than Chinese cuisine. It was certainly very edible anyway though.
said drgeek
on 2005-07-04 at 10:52 p.m.
|
The Wayback Machine - To Infinity And Beyond
|