General Tso's Spicy Hot Chicken
Recipe from Lawrence C.C. Chu
General Tso1, a famous Chinese general from Hunan Province, is reported to have concocted this dish over 100 years ago. It's hot, spicy, and quite tempting. You'll probably enjoy it as much as he did.
Yields:
6 servings
Time Required:
- 10 mins. cooking time
Ingredients:
- 1 whole chicken breast, split, boned, and skinned
Marinade
Sauce
- 1 Tbsp. (15 mL) white vinegar
- 1 Tbsp. (15 mL) soy sauce
- 1 Tbsp. (15 mL) dry sherry
- ½ tsp. (2 g) sugar
- ½ tsp. (3 g) salt
- 1 tsp. (5 mL) cornstarch paste3
- Vegetable oil, for blanching
- 3 dried red chili pods, broken, and seeds from pods
Seasonings
- 1 green onion (white part), chopped
- ½ tsp. (1.3 g) minced fresh ginger
- 1 clove garlic, minced or pressed4
- 2 tsp. (10 mL) sesame oil
Preparation:
Pound chicken slightly with a mallet to tenderise; then cut into ¾-by ¾" pieces. Combine MARINADE ingredients with chicken in the order listed; set aside. Combine SAUCE ingredients thoroughly; set aside.
To oil-blanch, set wok over high heat for about 1 min. Add 2 cups (475 mL) oil and heat to 350°F (175°C) Add chicken and blanch for 3 or 4 mins. until golden brown. Remove and drain, reserving oil.
To stir-fry, remove all but 2 Tbsp. (30 mL) oil from wok. Reheat, swirling pan to coat sides.
Add chili pods and seeds; stir-fry for about 30 secs. until browned. Return chicken and add SEASONINGS, stir-frying for another 30 secs.
Pour in sauce, and cook until thickened. To serve, stir in sesame oil.
Author's Notes
Chili pods are browned to produce the aroma, while the seeds are used to make the dish spicy and hot. Take care not to burn the seeds or let them get too dark.
1 Tso Tsung-t'ang (1812-1885) — using the now-deprecated Wade-Giles Romanisation — statesman and army officer of the late Qing Dynasty, didn't actually have anything to do with General Tso's Chicken, other than Peng Chang-kuei, a Taiwanese chef specialising in Hunan cuisine, having named the dish in honour of him at a Manhattan restaurant, circa 1973. Anyway, the real-world General Zho (to use the preferred 21st C. Romanisation) was a formidable character.
2 Quarts, pints, cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, and fl. oz. are as defined in US Customary Units, not to be confused with differing British imperial, "legal", "coffee", Commonwealth of Nations, Canadian, Latin American, Japanese, Russian, or Dutch definitions — further proof that everyone needs the metric system.
3 "Corn starch" is powdered starch processed from the New World grain maize (from Spanish, orig. from Nahuatl), which grain the USA/Canada call "corn", unlike the rest of the English-speaking world, which reserves "corn" to mean cereal grains generically. This starch product, needed here in its customary role as a thickening agent, is called "corn starch" in the US/Canada, but "cornflour" in the UK and most other anglophone lands — not to be confused with whole maize grain: That product — not a thickening agent — is called "polenta", "corn meal", or "corn flour" in the US/Canada, depending on how finely milled, and called "maize flour" in the UK and most other places. Australians should beware that their "cornflour" is starch extracted from wheat kernel, sometimes more-helpfully labelled as "wheaten cornflour". As if that weren't confusing enough, the maize-based thickener may be labelled (in Australia) either as "corn flour" or as "corn starch", so beware. Further, the maize flour product, there, is labelled as "cornmeal".
Note that whole-maize grain is traditionally, in Meso-American cultures of origin, wisely soaked in alkaline solution ("nixtamalised") to increase bioavailability and thereby prevent niacin deficiency (pellagra), among other important benefits, yielding "masa" (lit. dough) aka "masa de maíz" (lit. maize dough), also available in dried & ground form as "masa harina" (lit. dough flour) aka "harina de maíz" (lit. maize flour), and in its unground form, hominy. As further complication, Americans distinguish "corn flour", meaning prepared from maize endosperm only, from "maize flour" for use of whole maize — the former, neutral-flavoured; the latter, much more nutritious.
Origin of the naming mess: Originally, North America shared with Mother England the language's original meaning of "corn" to mean cereal grains generically (from Old English "corn" meaning single seed of any cereal plant, orig. from Proto-Germanic "kurnam" meaning small seed). The colonists got the gift of maize from native peoples, therefore at first calling it "Indian corn". Later, in the USA and Canada, "Indian corn" got worn down to just "corn", while the original meaning of "corn" was lost, locally. "Maize" is thus now the least-ambiguous term in international contexts, though many Americans either don't know that word or reserve it for variants from Latin-American (and Spanish) cooking.
4 Cornstarch paste is a thin paste made from equal parts of cold water and corn starch. It is essential in many Chinese dishes (but be careful not to over-thicken). Stir just before using. Store covered in the refrigerator for 1 or 2 days.
5 Minced is better. Crushing vegetables breaks all of the constituent cellulose-rich cells' walls and has unfortunate consequences to the food's tastes, particularly in the case of garlic, the crushed paste of which easily becomes bitter, lacking flavour nuance, and sometimes picking up a metallic aftertaste.
So, think of this as your motivation to get a nice, really sharp 8" (20 cm) chef's knife for mincing (producing 1⁄16" = 1.5 mm cuts), and a good cutting board.
Taken from: Lawrence C.C. Chu's classic cookbook Chef Chu's Distinctive Cuisine Of China, page 70, published 1980 by Harper and Row, which can be checked out in scanned format at Internet Archive. Thank you! (Chu's the chef / restaurateur of beloved local restaurant Chef Chu's, in Los Altos, California.)
Collected and re-published at http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/recipes/generals-spicy-hot-chicken.html by Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> on Oct. 4, 2026. Individual recipes are free from copyright. Share and enjoy!
(If I have any copyright title in my own very minor contributions to this page — not my intention — they were created in 2026 by Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> and licensed for use under CC0. I have thereby waived all copyright, compilation copyright, and related or neighbouring rights to this work. This work is published from: United States of America.)