Sweet and sour stir-fry

I'd hurriedly got a chicken breast out of the freezer before I left for work this morning, but when it came to making tea tonight, I couldn't think what to do with it. Any of the as-yet-uncompleted recipes which use chicken breast also require ingredients I didn't have on hand.


Having eliminated all the possibilities offered by the chicken chapter, I turned to the sauces. There I decided a sweet and sour sauce (p187) would work ok with a simple chicken and vege stir-fry.

I was interested to see that this particular sweet and sour sauce didn't have any pineapple in it. I've always thought of pineapple as a vital ingredient in anything sweet and sour. Not so, apparently.


The first thing to do was chop onion and garlic and get them into a saucepan. While the onion was cooking, I combined tomato sauce with cornflour, then added it to the onions with some sugar. Then it was just a matter of gradually adding chicken stock, and allowing the sauce to thicken. When the sauce had reached a reasonable consistency, I removed it from the heat and added vinegar and seasoning.

When tasting the sauce to adjust the seasoning, I found that it was not really balanced between sweet and sour: sweetness predominated. I added more vinegar, and more again. By the time I had the sauce tasting the way I felt it should, I'd more than doubled the amount of vinegar given in the recipe.


While cooking the sauce, I'd also had some rice on and was stir-frying the chicken and vege. I served myself up a plateful and added a few spoonfuls of sweet and sour sauce.

I quite enjoyed my sweet and sour stir-fry. Not, perhaps, so much that I'd be jumping to make it again, but it tasted nice enough. As for the sauce itself, once I'd adjusted the flavour to my liking, it was a fairly familiar-tasting sweet and sour. Still, if I particularly wanted to make a sweet and sour sauce, I'd choose the one from the sweet and sour fish recipe over this one.