Easy General Tso’s Chicken is a simple to make flavorful Chinese-American style chicken dinner!
This dish includes crispy pieces of chicken breast coated in a savory-sweet-spicy sauce.
This homemade takeout is 100% pork-free, dairy-free, and made without oyster sauce.
And, since there is no shellfish-based or pork ingredients in this recipe, it’s not only delicous, it’s kosher too!
Also, if you don’t like spicy, you can leave it out!
Chinese takeout is an American favorite!
But you can have homemade takeout without sacrificing the flavor!
General Tso’s chicken is simple and quick to make at home and can be on your table in less time than normal takeout delivery!
And if you keep kosher, it’s so much less expensive to make it at home!
Also, chicken has health benefits!
A little about Chinese-American Food
Chinese-American cuisine is a style of Chinese cuisine that was developed by Chinese Americans. These dishes significantly differ from traditional Chinese dishes because Chinese-American dishes were adapted to suit American tastes.
Chinese immigrants arrived in the United States in large numbers in the mid-19th century in order to escape the economic difficulties in China, hoping to find work during the California Gold Rush and on the Central Pacific Railroad.
They mostly settled together in ghettos, individually known as Chinatown, and—since there were laws preventing them from owning their own land—they opened their own businesses, such as laundry services and restaurants.
Initially, the family-owned businesses catered to miners and railroad workers, and restaurants were set up in places where Chinese food was unknown. Food was based on the requests of the customers, and recipes were created to suit American tastes using whatever ingredients were available.
One major difference between traditional Chinese cuisine and Chinese-American cuisine is in the use of vegetables. Chinese-American recipes will use raw or uncooked ingredients and those not native to China. Traditional Chinese cuisine, on the other hand, rarely contains raw or uncooked ingredients and often uses Asian leaf vegetables.
While the new dishes were not traditional Chinese, these restaurants were responsible for the development of the ever-popular Chinese-American cuisine.
The little history of kosher Chinese-American Food
It is well known that Jews (especially those with ties to New York) love Chinese food. You can find at least one and, more often than not, several kosher Chinese restaurants in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods.
There is a popular joke, which has been passed around for many years, that describes the Jewish dependency on Chinese food: “According to the Jewish calendar, the year is 5749. According to the Chinese calendar, the year is 4687. That means for 1,062 years, the Jews went without Chinese food.” That was back in 1989, and who knows when the joke even started?
Jews as a group were probably first introduced to Chinese food in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where immigrants of various cultures settled in their own neighborhoods in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
By the early 1900s, approximately one million Jews from Eastern Europe and half a million Italians from Southern Italy shared the Lower East Side of Manhattan with only approximately 7,000 Cantonese Chinese, most of whom had moved from California.
Due to anti-Chinese laws and acts, which prevented them from competing with whites, many Chinese opened restaurants.
But Jews who kept kosher couldn’t eat it. That was until a Jewish kosher deli owner decided to be creative and, using Cantonese Chinese recipes and substituting kosher veal, beef, and chicken livers for pork, he began selling the first kosher Chinese food. This was Sol Bernstein, the eldest son of Schmulka Bernstein after whom he named his deli.
Sol continued to sell deli while he incorporated Chinese foods into the menu and did very well and the deli-Chinese became so popular that Sol decided to change the welcoming and homey name of his deli to one that reflected upper class Manhattan, Berstein’s on Essex.
However, everyone still called it Schmulka Bernsteins. The restaurant continued to prosper until Sol died in 1992, when it was sold.
Later, a similar deli with Chinese opened in Brooklyn on Coney Avenue called Essex on Coney. I can personally vouch for how good the food was! Unfortunately, that place ultimately closed as well.
Interesting piece of info about this dish:
General Tso’s Chicken is a Chinese-American dish believed to be named after General Tso Tsung-t’ang (Zuo Zongtang), a nineteenth-century general.
Other homemade Chinese-American dishes
For a lot of people, making homemade Chinese-American dishes may seem like a waste of time, espeically when takeout is so simple and inexpensive.
However, if you eat kosher, or don’t eat pork, restaurants and takeout places are harder to and often quite expensive.
So, the solution to that is to make them at home! Try some of these amazingly easy recipes for kosher Chinese-American food:
- Kosher Chicken Chow Mein
- Kosher Beef Chow Mein
- Kosher Beef and Broccoli
- Kosher Chicken and Broccoli
- Kosher Pepper Steak
- Kosher Mongolian Beef
- Kosher Corned Beef & Cabbage Egg Rolls
- Kosher Chicken Lo Mein
- Kosher Mongolian Chicken
- Kosher Beef Lo Mein
- Kosher Chicken Fried Rice
- Vegetarian Fried Rice
- Easy Egg Drop Soup
Easy Kosher General Tso's Chicken (No Pork, No Oyster Sauce)
Easy and delicious, kosher savory-sweet Chinese-American chicken dish made without pork, dairy, or oyster sauce.
Ingredients
Chicken
- 1 pound kosher chicken breast or thighs, cut into 1 inch chunks
- 1/4 cup cornstarch or flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- sesame seeds (optional)
- oil for frying
Sauce
- 3 tablespoons soy sauce
- 3 tablespoons rice vinegar
- 3 tablespoons brown sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
- 1/2 teaspoon granulated garlic
- 1/2 teaspoon red chili flakes (optional)
- 1 tablespoon cornstarch or flour
- 4 dried chili peppers, sliced into piece (optional)
- 1/4 cup water
Instructions
- Mix cornflour or flour with baking powder.
- Place in chicken chunks and coat very well.
- Pour oil into a frying pan just to cover the bottom and heat on medium.
- Fry coated chicken pieces on medium heat until they have browned and are crispy. Do not crowd the pan - fry in batches if necessary. Set aside prepared pieces.
- In a bowl, mix soy sauce, rice vinegar, brown sugar, ginger, garlic, red chili flakes, and 1/4 cup water. and a tablespoon of cornstarch.
- Pour mixture into a frying pan (if you are using dried chili peppers add them now) and cook on a medium heat just until the mixture becomes a thick sauce.
- Turn off heat.
- Add coated chicken pieces.
- Toss or gently stir until evenly coated.
- Place on a dish and sprinkle with sesame seeds (optional)
Notes
FOR THIS TO BE KOSHER, ALL INGREDIENTS MUST BE KOSHER.
Nutrition Information:
Yield:
4Serving Size:
1Amount Per Serving: Calories: 701Total Fat: 20gSaturated Fat: 4gTrans Fat: 0gUnsaturated Fat: 14gCholesterol: 159mgSodium: 1085mgCarbohydrates: 71gFiber: 4gSugar: 10gProtein: 57g