Daily Favorites: Easy General Tso's Chicken

 

Sometimes things just work out. 

My first attempt with a low-cal orange chicken sauce didn't go very well. The sauce just smelled and tasted bad, some strange off flavors that were in the realm of beefy dog food. So I figured I'd have to do some experimentation and figure out my own low-cal sauce. I figured I was in for a lot of trial and error.

But then yesterday I went to the store and when browsing for a soy sauce, I found these two bottles:

The teriyaki is mostly soy sauce so I wasn't that surprised by the calorie count. The general tso's sauce on the other hand seemed too good to be true, as most other sauces were triple that. If you need 4 tbsp, there's a big difference between 80 and 240 cals in sauce. 

So I figured, let's try it. I happened to have one chicken breast left over from the previous dishes. I marinated it with the teriyaki sauce for a few hours, then cut it up into teriyaki chicken parallelograms, browned it in a pan with cooking spray, salt and pepper. With pieces this small, by the time you get decent browning, they're cooked through. When they're about 95% cooked through, I added the general tso's sauce. I kept it stirring constantly so it wouldn't scorch. Once they were fully coated, I added a little extra sauce because I like to have enough to coat the rice too. 

This sauce is awesome. It's spicy enough but not too spicy. It's sweet enough but somehow low in calories. And it's thick enough to really coat the pieces and the rice. 

This was a small chicken breast, so I'm estimating 300 for the chicken, 200 for the rice, and 100 for the amount of sauce I used. 

I know traditional general tso's chicken has a breading and is deep fried. Obviously I wasn't going to go that route for making a 600 cal dish. (For comparison, the orange chicken plate w/steamed rice at Panda Express is 1360 cals.) And while that is extremely delicious, so was this. I honestly like the fresh feel of this not being fried.

I don't know how much the teriyaki marinade matters. I'm sure one day I won't have fresh chicken on hand and will try it with frozen chicken and just the general tso sauce. I bet it still gets me 90% of the way there.

This is obviously a super simple dish to make at home. But it also felt indulgent in a way that something like the lemon pepper chicken doesn't. That dish is bold and bright and you feel healthy eating it. This feels more like comfort food, like I'm going over my calorie limit without actually doing so.

If I ever wanted to, I could try to add some fresh grated ginger and orange zest/juice to give it a boost.