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The first time I made this sweet and sour recipe, I was surprised at how good it was. My past attempts at making Asian food haven’t gone well. At all. It has usually ended in me desperately opening up all the windows to air out the house and sending my husband out for a pizza. This recipe however, was a welcome surprise! It has since become one of our favorites. My husband even thinks it tastes better than restaurant sweet and sour chicken.
I have seen this same recipe on a number of other sites, but finally found that it originated from Mel’s Kitchen Cafe. Thanks Mel for sharing this amazing recipe! I love that it is completely made from scratch, and can easily be made gluten-free as well just by substituting a gluten-free soy sauce. I like using Braggs. We also like to have extra sauce to drizzle over our rice so we have doubled the sauce amount from Mel’s original recipe. The amounts that I give below for making the sauce are doubled, but feel free to cut it in half if you don’t want the extra.
I’ve also recently discovered that you can make this dish with all honey! A great substitution for making it healthier for our bodies! The surprising thing is that it tastes identical to the recipe that uses sugar! So which ever sweetener you chose will taste great!
- 3-5 bonelss, skinless chicken breast (Use 3 if they are large, and 5 if they are smaller)
- 2-3 eggs, beat
- 1 cup corn starch
- Salt and pepper
- 1/3 cup olive oil
- 1 1/2 cup sugar or honey*
- 1/2 cup ketchup
- 1 cup white distilled vinegar (or apple cider vinegar)
- 2 Tbs Soy sauce
- 1 1/2 tsp garlic powder
- 1/2 tsp salt
- Heat 1/3 cup olive oil in a large skillet.
- Cut chicken into 1" cubes. Season with salt and pepper.
- Dip chicken into cornstarch and coat all the way around and then into eggs.
- Cook chicken until browned. (They do not need to be cooked through. They will finish cooking in the oven).
- Place in 9x13 baking pan.
- Whisk all ingredients for sauce together until smooth. Pour sauce evenly over chicken.
- Turn chicken so the sauce gets on both sides and then put in oven at 350 degrees for 15 minutes. Then turn chicken and cook for 15 more minutes.
- Serve with rice.
- *If using honey instead of sugar you can use equal parts honey to sugar, but I tend to use 1/4-1/2 cup less. You also want to wait to put the sauce over the chicken until the last 15-20 minutes of baking so that the honey doesn't burn. I will usually bake the chicken without the sauce for the first 15 minutes and then pull it out and add the honey sauce (mix it so all the chicken gets coated) and continue baking for 15-20 more minutes. You can mix the chicken around in the sauce once more during the last 10 minutes of baking to help with coating as well.
- I have made this into a freezer meal by preparing everything as mentioned above, but stopping before pouring the sauce over the chicken. At this point put the chicken into a freezer ziplock bag and the sauce into a different freezer ziplock bag (don't forget to write the instructions on the bag, i.e. oven temperature and cook time, etc.). You can then store them together (I put the sauce bag inside the chicken bag to keep them together).
- When we prepared this a few weeks later it still tasted great! The only thing I noticed was I didn't think it was as crispy when prepared from the freezer, but my husband said he didn't notice a difference at all. Happy Freezing!
I just made this tonight I added some season to tho chicken and it was great. Making the chicken was a little difficult because I used flour instead of cornstarch. But it worked great. My kids ate all of it. I also made shrimp fried rice and white rice. Amazing food.