Tso It, Make it Better

From the grand tradition of American bastardization of ethnic cuisines comes General Tso’s Chicken, and how. There are plenty of fair and balanced criticisms of this dish:

It is battered, deep fried, covered in sweet gunky MSG-laden sauce.

Uh, you call that stuff in the middle chicken?

That is most definitely not Chinese food, and I don’t know who General Tso is, but I guarantee he wasn’t winning any wars eating this dish.

While all true, these criticisms all miss the more important point–that General Tso’s Chicken is delicious. Now, of course there are different kinds of delicious. There’s foie gras terrine with Krug Champagne delicious and that would not be the same kind of delicious you’ll find in your average plate of General Tso’s Chicken. You will instead find the sort of delicious shared by things like funnel cake, Nathan’s hot dogs (at a baseball game drunk with $8 macrobrew beers) and pigs in a blanket, which is to say fatty, trashy, yummy food a fine genre indeed.

According to the know-all Wikipedia, the sauce consists of ginger, garlic, rice vinegar, soy sauce, sherry, sugar, sesame oil, scallion and hot chili peppers. It’s the hot chili peppers that give it its signature bite, and, in my book, the more chili the better. In effect what you have is a sauce that while totally cloying is otherwise balanced in its flavors: sweet, spicy, salty, sour and, you could even argue, umami.

In other words, the sauce is like crack on the palate; you can’t stop eating it. A friend of mine had General Tso’s Shrimp today for the first time, a long-time de facto fan of the more popular chicken variety. I asked him how it was and his response was, “It is now abundantly clear to me that one can improve the taste of anything by tso’ing it. G2gbb.”

Indeed.

Erin Hollingsworth

April 6th, 2009 by Food Guy | Posted in Tips | (0)