Sweet and Sour Chicken

A couple of months ago, Hadi made a sweet and sour chicken from a bottle of pre-made sauce. Since then, there have been some requests for a proper sweet and sour chicken recipe, but I haven't had the chance to look around yet. CookieMonster, listening to pleas on the chatbox, kindly posted up his version of sweet and sour fish. Yay~ I decided to try his version out, of course, substituting it with chicken instead. So here we go!

What you need:
Boneless skinless chicken, cut into bite-sized pieces

Cornflour, for coating

Batter:
1 cup flour
1/2 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon curry powder (we used curry paste)
Pinch of paprika and black pepper
One 330 mL bottle of sparkling water

Vegetables:
1 onion, sliced
1 clove garlic, minced finely
1 green pepper, cut into bite-sized chunks
1/2 cup pineapples, cut into bite-sized chunks

Sauce:
2 tablespoons tomato sauce
1 tablespoon oyster sauce
1 tablespoon sweet chilli sauce
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon rice vinegar
1 tablespoon light soy sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1/2 teaspoon sugar
Dash of black pepper
1/2 teaspoon chicken stock granules
100 mL water

What you do:

1. To make the batter, mix all the dry ingredients together, then mix in the sparkling drink. Mix until just combined and let rest for at least 15 minutes, but not for more than an hour.
   
2. Coat the chicken pieces lightly in cornflour, and shake off the excess. Dip into the above batter, and deepfry a few pieces at a time. To keep them crispy, keep the cooked chicken pieces in a warm oven.
3. Meanwhile, heat some oil in a wok. Stir-fry the onions until softened, then add the garlic. Fry for another minute or so. Stir in the sauce ingredients, and mix until well combined. Simmer until thick and syrupy, then add the green pepper pieces. Simmer for a couple of minutes.
   
4. Lastly, add the pineapple pieces. Mix quickly until coated in sauce, then turn off heat.
5. Pour sauce over the chicken pieces, and serve immediately.

I more or less followed CookieMonster's recipe for the sauce, but decided to leave out some of the vegetables, since they're quite expensive here. Any more spending, and I would have been over budget, haha. Well, not that we have a budget. But Hadi and Justin prefer to keep it under a pound per person per meal. :D Plus, some of the ingredients were not easily available. Oh well, never mind.

Also, I couldn't find unflavoured sparkling water, and decided to use a lime and lemon flavoured one instead. :$ You could taste this in the cooked batter, and it went with the sauce quite well, actually. Since that also has lemon juice, hehe. The batter was... very interesting. The baking powder made it really fluffy, while the sparkling water (I'm guessing) made it really really crispy! Nice! But it was so fluffy, that chicken pieces about the size of my finger would be about the size of 4 fingers by the time it was done cooking, hehe. Reminds me of cucur ayam a bit, onyl cucur ayam doesn't expand so much.

In fact, they were so big, that I decided not to use all the chicken I set aside for tonight's dinner. Which was lucky, because I was just barely able to mix in the chicken with the sauce. Which is why my picture above looks a bit dry, ahahaha.

Anyway, Hadi and Justin really liked the dish. It's definitely their kind of meal, what with the pineapples and green pepper. They were in fact surprised that I was making this kind of dinner, since I don't eat pineapples or green pepper, ahahaha. Their taste did manage to blend in nicely into the sauce though, so even though I didn't eat them, I could still taste them. And that was ok. :)

Hadi said that this kind of batter would probably go better on its own though, as in, without a sauce. Its more than fluffy enough already, haha. So I might just try frying the chicken in normal cornflour next time. I was just curious as to how CookieMonster's batter tasted like. ;) But thanks for the recipe! It was really yummy, and I'm sure I'll make it again someday, hehe. If you minus all the veggies, the sauce ingredients should already be in your kitchen. :D

Quote of the day: I can't cook. I use a smoke alarm as a timer