Sweet and Sour Chicken

This Sweet and Sour Chicken is filled with onion and bell peppers exploding with tangy flavor, just like your favorite takeout! Instead of spending loads getting it from a restaurant, why not try and make it yourself?

For more sweet and sour recipes, why not try and make some Sweet & Sour Chicken Shish Kabobs? Or this Sweet and Sour Meatballs Recipe instead?

Sweet and Sour Chicken

Chinese takeout has an incredible amount of choice at most restaurants, but sweet and sour chicken is obviously one of the most popular and more commonly bought.

It isn’t hard to see why; as the name says, it is sweet, it is sour, and it is chicken – what’s not to like?

Alongside being super tasty and addictive, sweet and sour chicken is actually incredibly easy to make from scratch at home.

As long as you don’t mind using a few cheat ingredients, you can end up with something just as good as takeout.            

Sweet and Sour Chicken Ingredients

Make sure you look at the recipe card at the very bottom for the exact amounts so that you know exactly what to buy for this recipe.

• Chicken breasts, boneless & skinless

• Salt & pepper

• Cornstarch

• Eggs

• Flour

• Vegetable oil

• Granulated sugar

• Brown sugar

• Ketchup

• White vinegar

• Apple cider vinegar

• Soy sauce

• Minced garlic

• Red & green bell peppers

• Onion

• Pineapple chunks

How To Make Sweet and Sour Chicken

• Cut the chicken breasts into bite-sized pieces and season them all over with the salt & pepper

• Beat the eggs in a medium-sized bowl and set aside

• Add the cornstarch to a large Ziploc bag and add the chicken

• Seal the bag and shake the chicken around, coating all of the pieces completely with the cornstarch

• Remove from the bag, and then dip the chicken pieces into the egg mixtures, and then into the flour, set aside on a plate until the pan is hot

• Heat vegetable oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat and cook the chicken for about 2 minutes until browned on one side, and then flip until the other side is also browned

• Remove the chicken from the pan, and then add the onions, bell peppers, and pineapple to the skillet and cook for about 2 minutes, or until the desired tenderness is reached

• In a medium-sized mixing bowl, combine the sugars, ketchup, apple cider vinegar, white vinegar, soy sauce, and garlic

• Pour it all into the pan over the cooked vegetables

• Add the cooked chicken back into the pan, stir gently to coat everything, and then serve it over rice 

Should This Recipe Really Have Ketchup?

One of the most controversial ingredients in most at-home Chinese recipes is ketchup. Purists will argue that American ketchup has no place in classic Chinese dishes; however, sweet and sour chicken isn’t really a Chinese classic at all.

If anything, it is a classic Western dish, as it isn’t really something that comes from China. Whoever heard of pineapple in China?

However, this fact doesn’t make it any less delicious or the perfect Chinese takeout meal.

In fact, ketchup is actually sort of a traditional Chinese ingredient, in that it has been used since the 1800s in Chinese cooking.

Ketchup is sweet, acidic, and rich in tomato flavor, perfect for adding in sauces like sweet and sour, so why wouldn’t they use it?

Never feel bad about using inauthentic ingredients because honestly, ketchup is just too useful not to use in a recipe like this.

How To Turn This Sweet & Sour Chicken Vegetarian / Vegan?

This recipe is obviously the most traditional when it contains chicken, as it is basically a saucy fried chicken – who couldn’t like that?

Vegetarians and vegans, however, will need a good substitute for the meat to be able to eat it.

A great meat substitute for this recipe is to use either mushrooms or tofu.

Tofu would probably be the most traditional thing to use so as to stay on the theme of Chinese cooking. Try and use medium firmness tofu, and make sure to thoroughly soak it before using it, and then dry it off afterward.

Mushrooms are a good alternative – those little button mushrooms are perfect for this, so long as you have completely washed them and trimmed down their stems.

Coated in the dry mixture and fried, they will make for the perfect thing to cling onto the sauce.

Looking for more delicious Chicken recipes? Try these out:

• Mushroom Soup Chicken & Rice Casserole

• Garlic and Herb Marinated Buttermilk Chicken

• Bisquick™ Chicken and Dumplings

Happy Cooking

Love,

Karlynn

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