Low Fat Vegan Cooking

General Tso’s Sauce

The other day i thought of another Chinese dish that i’d heard of that maybe my husband would like.  I’m trying to find tasty vegan food that he will gladly eat, and there isn’t much so far.  He likes Chinese, so i am trying a lot of Chinese dishes right now.   I’ve never had either a chicken or a vegan version of this recipe, so i have nothing to go on but what other people tell me.

I looked at recipes both with chicken and vegan, and  a vegan version sounded pretty good to me, but my husband said he’d pass.  But i already wanted to try it.  At first i thought i would try to do the batter on seitan or tofu, and bake it, but today it seemed too distressfully iffy to attempt, so i just made the sauce.

But it’s raining, and i’m not happy with indoors pictures, even though i have a special expensive light, so i put some in the refrigerator, hoping i can find a few minutes tomorrow with no rain to take a picture.  If not, i’ll eat it and make it again when there’s no rain predicted.  Or, who knows, maybe i’ll get around to reading about my light and use that.

I cut the soy sauce (i always use wheat free low sodium tamari) and sugar, but it is good with all that sugar, so you might want to make it a feast day and have the extra sugar for a more authentic dish.

Well, it depends on what you mean by authentic.  According to Wikipedia, the dish isn’t really associated with any General Tso, who did exist.  Most likely the dish was invented for American tastes in New York by a Taiwanese chef.  Hence, the sugar.

This is one Chinese dish that doesn’t have chilies in it!

General Tso’s Sauce

Makes 4 servings

Preparation about 10 minutes

Can be made ahead

Can be frozen but will keep in the refrigerator for several days

2 T. low sodium tamari or 1 T. tamari and bouillon for 1 c. liquid

6 T. rice vinegar

6 T. water

4 t. – 6 T. sugar

4 t. cornstarch

Mix the sauce in a medium pan, being sure the cornstarch is all dissolved.  Heat the sauce, stirring constantly, until the sauce thickens, about 7 minutes.

I served this over brown rice with Choy Sum.  It is in the bok choy family, but with a more delicate flavor.  Sum means heart, and this choy is considered one of the finest choys.  I washed it and took off a few of the outer leaves which had yellowed, and a couple of the stems, which were mushy.  I sliced the rest, much like you would celery.  I think a professional chef would discard the chewier but quite edible middle stem and just use the stem of each leaf, but i sliced it all up.

With this, i had lotus root.  It has a mild flavor that gets starchier if you cook it for long.  If you can find it fresh, it should be beige.  The darker brown lotus root is older.  Even though we shop at a large, very active Asian market, the lotus root we got this week was not very fresh, and three of the package of four were dark brown and had mushy, rotten spots on them.  I just used the light beige root.  It is very pretty sliced, with all the holes.  I peeled it and sliced it and covered it in a pan with water and cooked it about 5 minutes, until it was slightly easier to poke with a fork.  I’ve read that it comes canned, too.  However, no one seemed to be buying it.  It was the week after Chinese New Year, i wonder if that had anything to do with it.

I tried the sauce with some seitan.  It was delightful, but it’s not really necessary to enjoy it.

The recipe that was most helpful to me was by Eat Air.