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General Sos chunks of crispy dark meat chicken tossed in a sweet and spicy sauce. It's America's very favorite Chinese takeout item. It has a fascinating story behind its name. Check out the documentary, The Search for General So, to learn more. But today, I want to flip the script on what we normally do, which is increasing levels of chaos and difficulty. I want to see how easy we can make General Sos. How few ingredients, how few tools? How little time can you expend and still fall ass backwards into results better than the takeout place? Only one way to find out. Today we're doing five levels of general sews backwards with Babish.
Hey, what's up guys? I am so excited to announce that for the first time ever, you can try my cooking in the comfort of your own home thanks to Cook Unity. Cook Unity has been a longtime partner. I love their food and their business model, and I was overjoyed when they asked me to join their ranks of esteemed chefs. I've been working with them for months to test and develop my own menu, and the first four dishes are available now. General says chicken with Chinese sausage fried rice, crispy fried chicken with gooey mac and cheese and calabrian chili burnt honey. Spicy chili garlic noodles with chili crisp and red miso. And of course, the great American pot roast experience. That's what it's
actually called. Look at the box. They let me call it that. That's how cool Unity is. Supplies are local and limited to start, but we'll be expanding from the east coast as soon as possible. Head to one of the links in the video description to check your zip code availability and order yours now. You can buy them directly through my Babish storefront without a subscription, or you can get them for less if you subscribe to Cook Unity and select them as part of your plan. And new subscribers can get half off your first week when you use code Babish at checkout. I can't really explain how excited I am about this about working with Cook about making such beautiful, delicious meals and getting to share
them with you. So, we're going to start with the ultimate version of General Sos. There's very little difference between orange chicken, general so and sesame chicken apart from spice and orange sesame seeds really. So I like to take elements from all three, put them together for the highest expression of the medium. Even though this is the most complex version, it still pretty much comes together in about an hour. So let's get started. First up, the chicken. And you want relatively large pieces because these guys are going to fry pretty hot and fast. They will dry out. So, I'm going to take these guys and cut them into like two inch chunks. That's a good size right there.
You want something big enough that it's going to have plenty of meat inside that it's not going to dry out and you're not ending up with a big ball of just breading, which is so often the case when you order takeout. All right, we got that all chopped up. Now, we need to make our marinade. Okay, we're starting with two whole egg whites. Egg yolks are full of fat. They do not make for a crispy coating. Egg whites add structure and because they are virtually fatless, they work better. Just trust me. To these egg whites, we're adding 3 tablespoons of dark soy sauce, 3 tablespoons shaing cooking wine, and 3 tbsps of vodka. We're going to beat these guys together until they are frothy.
Once they're good and froth, we're going to pour out about half the marinade into another bowl. We're going to set aside this half for later use. And to this other half, we're going to add 3 tablebspoons of cornstarch and 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda. Whisk that together until no lumps remain. Now, this is going to be our actual marinade for the chicken. The rest is going to go in the dry breading to give us whole lots of little craggles and clumpers. So, we're going to let this guy sit at room temp for 30 minutes. Go any longer than that, it might over tenderize and become slippery, maybe a little mushy, a little just not a pleasant texture. So, 30 minutes. Now for the breading. In a
large bowl, I'm combining one cup each allpurpose flour and corn starch. I'm also going to throw in a little bit of salt. And in a recent fried chicken episode, I learned that commercially fried chicken often has wheat dextrin added to it to keep it crisp after it's fried. And wheat dextrin is widely and easily available as benapiber. So, not only does this give you a little bit of extra fiber, but it's going to help keep the chicken crisper longer. Last but not least, one teaspoon of baking powder. This is going to help give the breading some lift, make it lighter, airier, crispier. Whisk that all together. And then set this and the reserve marinade aside until it's frying time, which it
is right now. Going to be a very simple two-stage breading process. I'm going to start by re-whipping these. Getting these guys really frothy again. All right, that's almost all froth. So now I'm going to add I'm going to start with about half of it just to be safe. Let's just whisk that in there until we get some nice clumpers. Oh, that looks great. I think I'm going to stop right there because I'm full of wonderful little clumps and pebbles that are going to lend a great deal of volume and texture to our breading.
Shake off excess moisture from the chicken. Drop it in. You'll notice that I'm using an unseasonably large bowl, and that is so I can toss these rather than go in there with my hands and sort of massage them around, which can flatten out your breading. It can rub your breading off. I far prefer to toss. You need a big bowl to do that unless you want a big flowery mess everywhere. Couple little tosses. There we go. Beautiful. Ready for the fryer. Over on the stove top, I have a walk with about a quart of oil in it, which I'm going to heat up to about 375° F. We're going to do a shallow fry in the walk. This is
the traditional way to do it. Drain off the excess oil. Build your sauce in the walk. Toss it all together. Bing, bang, boom. You're done. Oil's clocking 375. It's time to drop in our chick. Wo. Don't drop it from that high up the way I just did. Don't do that. It's going to cook pretty fast cuz this is very hot oil. Just keep the temperature nice and high because there's not too much volume to it, so it will cool off fast. Get this second batch ready to go before this one finishes. Those are looking good. They're not going to get super golden brown because of all that starch, but they're already looking pretty
great. Hardly matters what color they are because of the gorgeous sauce that's being put upon them. To drain these, I'm doing something a little annoying that I just learned from Rachel, which I agree is annoying, but also I agree is brilliant. So, we've got a rack set and a rim baking sheet. half of which we're covering with paper towel. We're initially going to land the chicken here. We're just going to drain off excess oil, grease, and then once that's been absorbed by the paper towel, we move it over here. That way, we're going to get the crispiest possible results. This whole affair is going in a low 200° Fahrenheit oven just to keep it warm and crisp until it's ready to serve. And as
for crisp factor, you know, nice and crunchy, strong crust. It's going to soak up some sauce, but it's going to keep that distinct crunch on like the hard edges. You know what I mean? Now, for the sauce, try to look cool, but if I do that, then I can't talk to you. Now, I'm going to add a little bit of orange peel and juice. So, I'm going to grab a nice big swath of peel here, maybe two, just to show myself that I mean business. I'm just going to get a bunch of nice pithless orange rind. And I'm going to use this to get some juice. One thing you don't want in general sews or orange chicken or anything is big old pieces of orange. So I'm going to slice this comically thinly into little ittsy bitty tiny
itsybitsy teeny weeny strips. They're barely there. There we go. It's time to construct our sauce. And this is indeed a complicated one. I have four cloves of garlic and couple inches of ginger here. This one's frozen to make it super easy to grate. So, we got our garlic and ginger peeled and ready to go. We have our orange peeled and zested or whatever you want to call this. So, now what we want to do is pre-combine all the liquid ingredients. 3 tablespoons of rice wine vinegar. Four tablespoons of dark soy sauce. 1 teaspoon of roasted sesame oil. Four tablespoons of Shiaoing cooking wine. 4 tbsps of chicken stock. Now, normally I use sugar, but I think honey
is going to be a better answer here. So, I'm going to add about 3 tablespoon of honey. We're trying to hit the equivalent of 1/4 cup of sugar. So, I think this will probably net out. We can always add sugar if we need it, cuz that's the last of the honey, folks. And I'm also going to add a teaspoon each of oyster sauce and hoisan sauce. Then we're adding 1 tbsp of cornstarch. This is what obviously is going to thicken the sauce. Probably be more efficient to use a fulls size whisk in this case, but I've already started. Not going to stop. Give this guy a taste. Check it for sweetness.
I'm also going to add about a tablespoon of plain old sugar. There we go. We are ready to start building our sauce. I'm stealing a tablespoon or two of that delicious deep fry oil into which I'm going to begin grating our ginger. I just want like I don't know. Oh wow, that really does work better. Holy heck. Holy hecking All right. Well, always freeze your ginger cuz that is a freaking joy comparatively. Crushing in four cloves of garlic. To that, I'm also going to add some chilis arbol or dried Chinese chilies if you got them. Orange peel. Mix this up. Make sure everybody's getting some nice dry heat. Also, some scallion whites that Rachel was kind enough to chop for me cuz I forgot. Toss these guys around
and get some nice dry heat together. Now, it's time to add our liquid. This should start to immediately thicken. Now, I'm also slicing the scallion greens on the bias. I'm going to add a bunch of these to the sauce. Now, all we got to do is toss our chicken in there. Give that a toss carefully cuz this is basically just boiling sugar. And here comes what can only be called some General Sew's freaking chicken cuz look at that. It looks like food styled. It looks like, you know, the way General So supposed to look and they make it with motor oil and all kinds of horrible things just to make it look cool, but it's real. I didn't put the orange juice in there. Oh well. and garnish with plenty of
scallion greens and of course some toasted sesame seeds. Here we go. Sort of a hybrid orange general so and sesame chicken. No notes. Okay, one note. In retrospect, I would add some chili oil to the sauce because it's spicy, but if you want to get it righteously spicy, you need something throughout, not something that's just been infused into the sauce like these chilis. Chicken's perfectly cooked. The breading has soaked up a lot of the sauce, but it's still crunchy in all the right spots. It's hard to imagine General So chicken any better than that. But can we make it easier and still awesome? That's the whole premise of this episode. So, here's the next one. So, how do we make
an authentic tasting general so a little bit easier with fewer ingredients and steps? Now, I was really intrigued by this method from the Walks of Life, an acclaimed Chinese American cooking blog that uses ground chicken instead of chicken thigh. This way it stays juicy and you end up with the same sort of chunks that are easier to fry in a shallow pan than the traditional deep fry that's necessary for general sews. First up, the ground chicken. Just eyeballing here. 2 tsps of soy sauce, a teaspoon of roasted sesame seed oil, 2 tsp of shaing cooking wine, little teaspoon of rice wine vinegar, and some garlic powder. Just going to mix that
up. And that's all there is to it for the chicken. If anything, we don't want to let it sit around for too long. Otherwise, it's going to start to get sort of bouncy and tough as ground meat is want to do when you introduce salt. Now, for the sauce, I'm pre-combining 1 tbsp of dark soy sauce, 2 tsps of rice wine vinegar, 1 teaspoon of roasted sesame seed oil, a teaspoon of chili flake, half a cup of chicken stock, and 3 and 1/2 tbsp of brown sugar. This is the recommended sauce from the walks of life. Tiny whisk all that together till the sugar is mostly dissolved. It's going to finish dissolving when it cooks. So, not a big deal. And finish building the sauce right in there. Super
super easy. Now, for the dredge, we've got 1/3 of a cup of cornstarch with 2 tbsp of allpurpose flour. I'm also going to hit that with some salt. And for some extra crunch, sometimes when I'm frying chicken like this, I like to add some sesame seeds. So, I'm going to add some sesame seeds straight to the dredge. Get all that mixed up. General so sized chunks of chicken. Press them together. Drop them in the dredge. Toss those around a little bit. Look at that. They look like breaded chunks of chicken. How about that? Now, to fry the chicken, we're just going to do a shallow fry in a non-stick pan.
Take each one of these pieces, drop them in, shaking off the excess. Just going to pseudo stir fry these bad boys till we got some nice color. on one side. Give them a flip. And that's that. You can see it's already starting to crisp up here. Yink these guys out. Put them on a platter while we fry up the rest. They're nice and crispy. All right, that's our chicken. Nice and crisp. Made from ground chicken, no less. So, that's that's really cool. That's really impressive. I'm leaving about 2 tsp of fat and flour in there to which I'm going to add my scallion
whites, some grated ginger. Again, frozen. This really makes all the difference. Instead of ending up with a ginger goo, you end up with just actual ginger flakes, which is really cool. Crushed garlic. Give that a little sauté. Give our sauce one last tiny whisking. Add it to the pan. Should start to thicken up nicely with all that flour in there. Let's see. It's still a little too thin. So, what's cool is I could probably just grab some of this flour oil mixture here and let that take it the rest of the way. So, I'm going to add my chicken.
Toss it around to coat. Oo, making a little bit of a mess. See the way it's thickening up even more as soon as the chicken hit because of that starch on the outside of the chicken. Now, we can actually toss it without making a huge mess. Beautiful. Look at that. Oh, our bed of rice is ready. Let's just dump on the chicken. Hit it with the scallions. Maybe some sesame seeds just to have a little fun. Look at that. A super quick and easy general so made from ground chicken. Like that came together in about 20 minutes. It looks gorgeous.
Smells really good. Let's see what it tastes like. There's a little bit of crisp. If you didn't let it simmer as long in the sauce, you probably end up with more. Mostly I'm getting the crisp from the sesame seeds they added to the breading. But the sauce is like really nice. It's nothing super complex, but it's got the fresh garlic and ginger, so those flavors are showing up. Ground chicken is quite healthy, and no deep frying means less fat. This is a quick and easy way to make a really lovely General Sos. Yeah. Is this real General Sos? Not really. Is it delicious and quick and easy and taste just like General Sos look like it, feel like it? Yeah. And a slightly easier, slightly healthier way to make
General So in a flash. All right. So, how do we make General So even easier? At this point, it's really about frying the chicken. And the only way to make fried chicken easier that I'm aware of is the humble air fryer. I, like so many other YouTubers before me, hated air fryers until I tried it for a couple things and now I love it. And it's going to be our tool of choice for making a quick and easy General So with no deep frying involved, not even a stove top for that matter. We're going to start off with a very similar marinade to our original General So using an egg white. To this egg white, we're adding a tablespoon and a half of soy sauce, a tablespoon and a half of Shiaoing
cooking wine. And that's it. That's all we're really going to start with here. Just whip that up until it's nice and foamy. Add our chicken thigh. Cut up into 1 in pieces. Then we're going to let this sit at room temperature for about 30 minutes. Our sauce likewise is getting a simplification. About 1/4 cup of soy sauce. Another 1/4 cup of shaing cooking wine. A tablespoon of rice wine vinegar. Now, in lie of chicken stock, I'm going to add like half a teaspoon of chicken bullion powder and 1/4 cup of water.
Namely, we're doing away with fresh aromatics. So, I'm going to do about half a teaspoon of onion powder, half a teaspoon of garlic powder, teaspoon and half, 2 tsps of red pepper flake, get some good spice going, maybe closer to one teaspoon of ground ginger, teaspoon of roasted sesame oil. And apparently this is a very common practice to use in general. So I'm gonna add like a tablespoon of ketchup just to give some color, some sugar. Oh, speaking of sugar, we also have to add 1/4 cup of granulated sugar. Grab your tiny whisk and tiny whisk until no lumps or chumps remain.
I'm also going to add 1 tbsp of cornstarch for the eventual thickening of it all. Make sure that's dissolved. And make sure to give this a mix before you pour it because all the cornstarch will settle on the bottom. All right, we can set this aside until we're ready. All right, chicken's done marinating. I have a big old bowl of flour here. You want a big, wide, tall bowl so you can really toss things around. Make sure you get all the nooks and crannies. Let's shake off. We want some excess in there, so it's okay if it drips a little bit, but let's leave the vast majority in the bottom of the bowl. Chicken thighs like to fold over and hide wet spots. So, make sure you're getting every little
hole full of your dust. What? Drop them down over here on a rack set in a rim baking sheet. And these guys I'm going to give a couple spirited taps to. Those are looking nice just like chicken that's about to be fried, which is exactly what we want. While it's on this rack, I'm going to take the opportunity to spray it down with oil. I want to leave no dry or powdery spots if possible. There's going to be some. Don't worry about it. We're going to hit them again while they're in the air fryer. This is just to give the flour some initial oil so it can start crisping and cooking. I'm going to bring the temp down to 375.
I'm going to set the time to It's like 14 minutes. probably be done after 12. I'm going to arrange these as close together as I can without them overlapping. We're probably going to have to fry in batches, which is totally fine cuz we're going to finish heating the chicken through in the sauce. One more little spray for good luck. Into the air fryer. We're give it about 4 minutes before taking it out, spraying it, and giving it a toss. Right now, it's too sticky and it'll just end up in a big clump. Toss them around. Send it back in. Another four or so minutes. Give it a little toss.
Make sure everybody's browning evenly. All right, it's about 12 minutes. We've been rewarded with crispy, crunchy, juicy fried chicken. Look at that. That's fresh out the air fryer. It has a slightly dusty texture to it, but especially because we're putting this in a sauce, it's not going to be a problem. You can hear it's super duper very. Now to make the sauce, I'm going to take the grate out of the air fryer. It's got some nice crispy bits in there. Some fond if you will. Some air fryer fond. I'm going to beat up our sauce. Get all that corn starch evenly distributed. Dump it right in here and heat it up until it's nice and thick.
Okay. sauce is getting thick and glossy right where we want it to live. So now all we got to do toss our chicken in there literally and figuratively. And just cuz it's been sitting out a little bit, I'm going to throw it back in there just to heat through for 2 minutes and dump it right onto our rice. And there you have it, folks. General So made entirely in the air fryer. Faster than it would take to order takeout. Well, kind of. Let's see if it's still crispy. It's deeply flavored from the marinade. The sauce is righteously spicy. I put a lot of red chilies in there. Highly recommend. And the chicken's super crispy. I've never had chicken so crispy
outside of an air fryer that wasn't just frozen fried chicken that I threw in the air fryer. It is comparatively a little fussy to most things you throw in the air fryer, but you got 45 minutes. All you need is the air fryer to make a complete general sew experience. But can it be made even easier by a shoeing animal flesh? So for the very easiest general s chicken, we're going to try to make a fried chicken in the air fryer using only four ingredients. That being some medium tofu that's been pressed and drained for 30 minutes, some salt, some potato starch, and some spray oil. That's it. Believe it or not, this is going to yield some pretty awesome results. For this, all we need is a brick of medium tofu that we're going to
press between two layers of paper towels, weighted down by something heavy like this. I got a cast iron pan here. That might even be too heavy. I'm worried about crushing it. No, I'm not. and we're going to press this for 30 minutes. So, we're going to start by breaking the tofu up into General So's chicken sized chunks. Now, in addition to salting our potato starch, I'm also going to salt the tofu because otherwise these are going to taste like well, nothing. Which once drowned in the sauce, not the end of the world, but you should always try to layer flavor when you can. Just mix that salt in with the starch and then few pieces at a time. Toss them in the starch mixture. Take them out. Shake off
the excess. And that's all there is to it. I'm going to set this to 375 for 20 minutes. I'm going to start by spraying oil into the cooking vessel itself. Drop in a bunch of our tofu. I'm going to spray these with oil while tossing them around. In it goes for 20 minutes. We're going to spray it with oil one more time halfway through. All right, 10 minutes have passed. Things are starting to get crispy already. You can hear it. Very thoroughly coat them with another big old spray of oil. Back in there for another 10 minutes. 20 minutes. Four ingredients. And look what comes out.
What already looks like perfect popcorn chicken is also incredibly crispy. Like this might be old hat to a lot of vegan air fryer owners, but this is magic to me. I cannot believe that something so good could be made so simply. Let me get a real closeup of this right here. The structure of it is perfect. It's covered in I never would have guessed that this was airfried. And if we want to be really fancy, just yank this little plate out of here. Pour in some bottled general so some scallions, some extra crushed red pepper flake just to amp up the heat. And throw this guy back in for a couple minutes just to warm them up.
Sauce is nice and bubbly. Add our tofu. Nice and well coated. Splash ourselves in the eye with hot sauce. And that, my friends, is all there is to it. Sure, it's tofu, but it's crispy. It's juicy. It's super flavorful. But this, including the breading, the tofu, the rice, and the scallions. What are we looking at here? That's seven ingredients. Seven ingredients. Looks the part, but does it taste the part? It's so crunchy. I'm blown away by that. It's obviously only going to be as tasty as the bottled General So sauce that you buy, but you can upgrade it. You can add
stuff to it. Unbelievable. 20 minutes, seven ingredients, you have a healthier General Sos that is like perfectly lovely. Amazing. It's one of the easiest meals imaginable. But as it turns out, there's an even easier way to get restaurant quality General Sos at home. specifically my general so and that's by ordering my general so chicken on Cook Unity. That's your face. Yeah, dude. They put it on there. Cook Unity has finally added my cooking to their chef to you platform, giving me the chance to share my recipes with you in a way I never could have imagined.
We're starting things off with four dishes made in their Brooklyn kitchen to be delivered throughout the Northeast. But we're rapidly expanding operations across the country as I develop new dishes and train new kitchen staff. I've workshopped these recipes meticulously both in Cook Unity's kitchens and my own to ensure that my meals aren't just delicious, there's something special. Cook brings quality cuisine, freshlymade, never frozen, and delivered in reusable and recyclable packaging from esteemed chefs, myself included, directly to your doorstep. Head to the link in the video description to try my
general so chicken, the great American pot roast experience, gooey mac and cheese with crispy fried chicken and calabrian chili honey and spicy chili garlic noodles. Check your zip code availability and see if they're available in your area and stay tuned as we add more meals in more cities in the coming year.
