Somebody's Great Aunt Maggie's Sweet & Sour Chicken

You know how you're just cruising around the Internet, reading blogs or clicking through Pinterest or whatever, and you come across, here and there, recipes you want to try?

This one came to me like that.

Except for, I can't recreate my clicking to find the original source. So! If this came from your blog, let me know and I'll give you credit for it! I do remember that the blog post said it was the writer's great aunt somebody (or maybe just her grandma) and that it was a family recipe. I adjusted it a little bit, so maybe one day this will be Great Grandma Amy's sweet & sour chicken recipe. I imagine I'll make it again!

Sweet & Sour Chicken

1 cup orange juice
1/4 cup soy sauce
4-6 chicken breasts
1 1/2 cups flour
1/2 tsp ginger
1 tsp salt
freshly ground pepper
olive oil
1 can Campbell's beef broth
2 cups brown sugar, packed
3/4 cup ketchup
1 1/3 cup vinegar
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/2 tsp ginger
red pepper flakes

Trim the chicken breasts of fat and skin and then cut into diagonal slices, 5-6 per breast. Mix the orange juice and the first 1/4 cup of soy sauce; marinate chicken for 3-4 hours.

Stir together the flour, ginger, salt, and as much freshly-ground pepper as you'd like. Dredge the chicken in the flour mixture. Heat a swirl of olive oil in a frying pan and brown the chicken slices. (Discard the marinade.)

While browning the chicken, make the sauce by combining the remaining ingredients in a sauce pan and heating until bubbly, stirring to dissolve the sugar.

Spray a 9x13 or larger baking pan with Pam. Pour some of the sauce in, then start adding the browned chicken pieces. If you have to layer, pour some of the sauce over the first layer before adding the second one. Pour the remaining sauce into the pan.

Bake at 350 for 1 hour. Serve with coconut rice. (Coconut rice = your favorite type of rice (except not Minute Rice because, ummm, EWWWW! little pieces of white cardboard!) made by replacing about half the water with coconut milk.)

I'm always hesitant to cook meals with vinegar because the potential for high acidity (and, later, heartburn!) is great. But this one had the perfect proportion to me. The only change I will make in the future is to use fresh ginger instead of powdered and, if I had it, stir some ginger ale into the marinade.

Let me know if you try it!

Comments

[Jamie]

mmm... sounds good. I have never found a sweet & sour that I LOVE so I'm always willing to try a new one.