Recipe: Better Than Takeaway Sweet & Sour Chicken

As some of you might have noticed from Instagram, in July we bought a house (I would not quite put the date we moved out of London as July too, because that unintentionally happened just before lockdown in March) in Kent where I grew up.

Moving from the city to the countryside, because of working from home and social distancing was not actually as big a change as you’d have thought. When eventually there are offices to return to, thanks to the train station in the village and the high speed train, commutes are pretty much the same. There is a drinking pub in the village and another with a reasonable public footpath to with excellent food, and I still have an off licence where I can pick up last minute ingredients (though, I grant you it’s not the East Dulwich M&S Simply Food) for recipes.

However, of course, moving to a rural village we can no longer get Deliveroo. Now, not being able to get practically any takeaway of excellent quality you can think of delivered right to our door from our phones anymore is not as big a wrench than you’d think, if anything it is going to make getting a takeaway as more of a treat, rather than a ‘I just can’t be bothered’ option. And besides, there is an Indian in the village that is pretty decent (and knocks money off your bill if you walk to collect it and pay in cash) and the fish and chip shop smells amazing. That excellent food pub I mentioned does call and collect stone baked pizza, burgers and hot dogs, and you’ll bet I’ll use trips to Canterbury as an excuse to pick up some of the delicious, make to order sushi from Happy Samurai to take home with me for dinner.

A couple of Saturday’s ago we fancied a Chinese. Googling we took ourselves off to a town about 10 minutes drive away to get some dinner. It started well – the Chinese seemed busy, we got a socially distanced pint in the pub garden next door while we waited for our food and it smelt amazing in the car on the way home – but that was pretty much it. Except for the sweet and sour chicken balls and the crispy (kale) seaweed it had to be the worst Chinese takeaway either of us had ever eaten. In the end we gave up and had Magnums for dinner. It had right out put us off eating anything savoury.

On reflection I don’t think the worst bit was the dry prawn toasts that tasted like cardboard, or my dry duck (which was supposed to come in orange sauce but it was instead pineapple, which is never good). It was the sweet and sour chicken, J’s usual go-to order. As well as the chicken being old and dry, and the sauce being just plain bad (and bizarrely different from the one which came with our chicken balls which was pretty good) it had chunks of raw cucumber mixed into it. I kid you not.

The next night we shelved our planned roast chicken to Monday night and I made a Chinese instead, to remind ourselves that Chinese food – done properly either at home or in the Great British Chinese Takeaway – is bloody delicious. I made an Orange Sesame Prawn Stir Fry I’ve been working on (coming soon!) but this reminded me that I’d not yet shared my own recipe for sweet and sour chicken I perfected back in our London flat, before lockdown.

Now, sweet and sour chicken is J’s thing, not mine. I find it always tastes a bit too artificial from the takeaway, but when I found this recipe for sweet and sour chicken that does not require any deep frying (I’m more of an air fryer type) I gave it a go. It turns out, when you make sweet and sour chicken yourself at home, what you’re left with is a wonderfully balanced and addictive sauce that even I love.

Now, I’ve had a play with the original recipe a fair bit to scale down the recipe to make it halve-able if you’re cooking for less people (trust me – this neither re-heats or tastes good cold), and to make it suit a British kitchen. Oh, and to add in some pineapple, because who doesn’t like (fresh!) pineapple in their sweet and sour chicken??

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