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Text Chapter 3551 General Tso¡¯s Chicken

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    For a cook like Lao Zhang, of course he is a good cook. At the same time, he is also a cook with great national pride.  ¨Rw.Why do you say that?  Because he would rather die than cook something like General Tso's Chicken!  What the hell is this?  Can the Chinese make such a dish?  That¡¯s not to say that you can¡¯t cater to American tastes, but to cater to American tastes, your cooking methods and concepts still need to be Chinese!  Even if the Chinese make sweet and sour chicken like General Tso's Chicken, do they use such a large piece of chicken?  Will the meat not taste good at all?  Totally impossible!  When we Chinese want to cook, we will do it according to Chinese cooking concepts!  Even if you want to cater to Americans, you should do it by exploring the corresponding flavors in China, rather than inventing a weird dish that only foreigners eat out of thin air!  In Lao Zhang's opinion, this means that he is completely unworthy of being a cook!

    There are so many sweet and sour dishes in China, okay?  It's like kimchi, and it's the Sichuan kimchi kind. Isn't it sour, sweet, and refreshing?  Just like scrambled eggs with tomatoes. Although the way in the north is sour and salty, in the south of the Yangtze River, there are sweet and sour ones, so it can be made into sour and sweet flavors!  Then sweet and sour pork, isn¡¯t this just sour and sweet?  And the Northwest-style hot and sour potato shreds, although not sweet, are hot and sour Americans also eating it, right?  The Dongbei Guobao Pork is sweet and sour, right?  Sweet and sour fish, is it sweet and sour, right?  Even the simplest cucumber salad can be made into sweet and sour dishes in China!  This makes it very appetizing!  There are so many sweet and sour dishes in Chinese cuisine. Is it necessary to invent such weird dishes?  It can be said that people who cooked Chinese food in the United States in the past were basically immigrants. They were not professional cooks themselves, they just knew how to cook.  Therefore, even the dishes from several major domestic cuisines are not opened directly to foreigners, so it is possible to create such weird dishes!

    Lao Zhang and five old guys came to the United States with Jia Hongjian and the others. These six people spent the whole day studying how to cook dishes suitable for American tastes.  These old guys all used to work in the kitchen of the state banquet. They were all about the same age, so they also retired in batches.  Working in the kitchen of state banquets, sometimes foreign heads of state would bring groups of dozens or even more than a hundred people to discuss national affairs and attract investment.  Therefore, there cannot be fewer people in the state banquet kitchen.  These old guys have been working together for a lifetime, but at least they have no problem cooperating with each other, and even the tacit understanding can be said to be great.  These people are not with Jia Hongjian, they are not even in New York!  Where are they?  They are following Ye Jing in Los Angeles, studying the recipes and constantly trying them out for the people Ye Jing has found!

    Who did Ye Jing find?  All kinds of celebrities in Los Angeles!  Don't forget that Jia Hongjian and the others have already integrated into Los Angeles. In his early years, when he was canvassing votes for the Oscars, Jia Hongjian would entertain various Los Angeles celebrities every day.  It can be said that all the celebrities and politicians in Los Angeles know Jia Hongjian!  So their method was to study the recipes here in Los Angeles, and then ask Ye Jing to invite people over to try them!  When Lao Zhang and his old brothers tried it, they made another transformation of the so-called "American Chinese food" that exists now!  This transformation is first of all aimed at the so-called "General Tso's Chicken".  The way General Tso's Chicken is made here in the United States is to remove the skin from a large piece of boneless chicken thigh, then wrap it in batter and fry it. After deep-frying, add sweet and sour sauce and add green peppers and so on.  This approach seems to Lao Zhang and others.  That is simply heresy!  He should be burned at the stake!

    Who invented this General Tso¡¯s Chicken?  It is said that it was invented by a chef who came to Daiwan after the Liberation War.  This chef is from Flemish, and he learned Lingnan cuisine.  So the taste of this dish is a bit stringy, Lingnan style but spicy.  As for General Tso's Chicken, he later developed it when he opened a restaurant in the United States.  On the one hand, it has the sweet and sour taste and deep-fried food that Americans like, and on the other hand, it is spicy and fits the chef¡¯s own Flemish taste. Originally, the sweet and sour spicy chicken nuggets could have been called it, but he insisted on naming it Zuo  Zongtang Chicken!  Later it was said that Kissinger had visited China.  Then I often go to such a restaurant to support it, so the popularity of this dish in the United States has greatly increased!

    Of course, this dish tastes good on the outside, with both sour, spicy and sweet flavors, and the chicken is crispy on the outside and tender on the inside.  The outside of the chicken is coated in batter and fried.  So the outer shell is still a bit hard, but the inside is very tender.  But the consequence of such an approach is that the meat inside basically cannot absorb the sour, spicy and sweet taste, causing the taste to just stay on the surface and not penetrate deep into the inside at all!  So how did Lao Zhang and the others re-Chineseize this dish?  How can they use various methods from China's eight major cuisines to recreate such a dish in line with Chinese practices?  First, they decided to cut the chicken legs into slices.  The thin slices of meat make it naturally easy to taste, and at the same time, the outside taste is eliminated.What a way to make batter.

    However, this chicken still uses the same frying process as Chinese food here in the United States, but the frying method is completely different from that here in the United States.  Generally speaking, fried chicken here in the United States is fried with high-temperature shortening - this shortening is an artificial blended oil, using refined animal and vegetable oils, hydrogenated oils, etc., and the effect is  The fried stuff is extremely crispy.  If ordinary people learn how to make fried chicken in street shops and make fried chicken at home, the outer layer of the fried chicken will definitely not be as crispy as other people¡¯s fried chicken. Why?  Because the shortening used in other stores!  This kind of shortening is a popular name in China, but in Europe the official name is "mixed cooking fat".

    However, Lao Zhang and the others here are not planning to use this shortening. On the one hand, shortening can easily contain things like trans fatty acids, which are not good for health. Both of these things are foreigners.  Although Lao Zhang and the others have never used it, they are still used to cooking according to Chinese methods.  So in the end, they adopted a method of first frying the chicken in low-temperature oil, and then using high-temperature oil to quickly fry the outside of the chicken to achieve a crispy outside and tender inside!  Of course, the outside is not as crispy as after being wrapped in shortening and batter, but it is a bit hard. It tastes a bit like spicy chicken nuggets. It is hard, but the inside is not like spicy chicken.  The chicken nuggets are so hard but tender inside!

    After such a chicken slice is ready, then cut the tomatoes into thin slices, put them in a bowl and sprinkle with sugar and mix well. The concentration difference caused by the sugar will absorb the juice from the tomatoes. After a few minutes, the tomato slices will seep out.  Out comes tomato juice.  Combined with the original sprinkle of sugar, it is of course sweet and sour.  At this time, add some chopped green onion and minced garlic, put it into the oil pan and fry it. After the fragrance is released, put the tomato juice and slices in and cook it. After the juice becomes thicker, add it and fry it again.  Chicken slices and green pepper shreds.  Although on the surface it seems that the cooking method is no different from the so-called General Tso's Chicken, the tomato juice is different from their deliberately chosen sweet and sour sauce. When stir-fried with green peppers, the tomato juice tastes delicious.  Very!  And it¡¯s basically just a little spicy, but the overall taste becomes very fragrant!

    Then this improved Zuo Zongtang chicken, because of the large juice, put the cooked rice before leaving the pot, and after so many minutes of heat, the rice sucked into some juice, and the rice tastes it!  Finally collect the juice and put it on the plate. It looks very nice that way!  The overall orange-red juice covers the rice, and then there are chicken, green peppers, tomatoes and other things on top. The color also looks good!  With a bit of Chinese carving decoration, this plate of vegetable rice looks no worse than Western-style Italian seafood baked rice!  After Ye Jing invited twenty celebrities from Los Angeles to taste such an improved so-called "General Tso's Chicken", everyone really applauded!  Except for a person of Mexican descent who said the spiciness was not good enough, everyone else ate it all and almost ended up licking their plates!  Just by looking at someone's behavior, you can tell what they think of this dish!

    Finally, Ye Jing conducted a survey with these people and asked them how much they thought was appropriate for this plate of "staple food" to be sold in a high-end restaurant.  And these people all said that they could accept it for $50 a plate!  Damn, according to the exchange rate these days, a plate of 50 US dollars is more than 300 RMB!  Did they accept more than 300 yuan?  Yes, these people are not short of money!  And relatively speaking, they were a little tired of eating steaks, pasta, and baked rice. Although every restaurant made the same dishes with slightly different tastes, the overall taste was still the same after all.  Now when I eat this high-end Chinese food, my taste buds immediately feel excited!  Suddenly there is a sense of freshness and an unprecedented taste impact!  So it suddenly felt to them that the $50 per plate was more worth the money than buying a steak!

    In addition to the "General Tso's Chicken", Lao Zhang and the others have also developed a variety of sweet and sour dishes, such as sweet and sour shrimps, sweet and sour short ribs, etc.!  There are even fish-flavored eggplants that are sweet and sour and slightly spicy. The cooking method of the fish-flavored eggplants is really similar to the so-called General Tso's Chicken. In other words, the eggplant pieces are wrapped in half flour and half provincial batter, fried, and then used  Stir-fried tomatoes and green peppers taste great too!  Especially the eggplant pieces are stuffed with a bit of meat filling. The meat filling has been specially prepared. The final product tastes really meaty and has the delicious taste of eggplant vegetables. I really like it!  Celebrities in Los Angeles who have eaten such dishes all told Ye Jing - don't open a restaurant in New York, open it in Los Angeles. We will definitely come here often, and we can't wait!  Look, our flagship store hasn¡¯t even been opened yet, and our first store hasn¡¯t even been opened yet, but people are already asking us to open a branch!  (To be continued, please search Piaotian Literature. The novels will be better and updated faster!
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