I hadn’t made anything Asian in a while, so I got the stuff together to make Kung Pao Chicken. This recipe was pretty easy to make. I used white wine instead of sherry, but otherwise followed the directions and used the ingredients it called for. It cooked up very well.
This recipe was just okay. I wasn’t overly impressed with it. I thought it tasted more vinegary than it should be. Perhaps the sauce should be cooked longer, in case that would mellow out the flavor of it. This wasn’t very spicy at all; they called it a “moderate level of heat,” but honestly there might as well have been no red pepper flakes in it. Alex agrees, and he likes his food milder than I like mine. I’d say you’d need at least a ½ tsp, twice as much as the recipe calls for, to give it any kind of spiciness. The last problem with this recipe was that there simply wasn’t a lot of sauce with it. If I had paid attention to the amount of liquid I was putting in the recipe, I wouldn’t have been surprised, but I expected to have sauce to flavor the rice or vegetables I ate it with.
I’m done being nitpicky. This would probably be good with improvements. If I made this again, I’d double the amount of sauce, halve the amount of vinegar, and double the amount of red pepper flakes. But I’ll probably look around for a different recipe instead.
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