Last week I made J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s Springfield-Style Cashew Chicken from his The Wok cookbook. This fried chicken dish is a little different from the General Tso’s-based previous ones. Kenji notes in the introduction to it that the original dish was loosely based on a Chinese-American interpretation of southern fried chicken and gravy. The steps are similar to the previous dishes, but the ingredients are different.
Kenji calls for the chunked chicken thighs to be marinated in egg white, soy sauce, vodka, buttermilk, baking soda, flour, black pepper, garlic powder, and cayenne. The ingredients for this list chicken bouillon powder and roasted sesame oil, too, but they aren’t anywhere in the directions. I went ahead and added them to the marinade.
The dry coating is flour, cornstarch, baking powder, black pepper, garlic powder, cayenne, and salt. Instead of whisking in a half of the marinade, for this one Kenji directs to work a couple tablespoons of the marinade in with your fingers. I thought this helped get a more crumbly texture on the dry coating and might try finishing the marinade/coating mix with a bit of hand-work on the other fried chicken dishes.
Like the previous dishes, the marinated chicken pieces are individually added and tossed in the dry coating until they are all coated. And, like the previous dishes, they are deep fried. Kenji calls for slightly cooler oil temperature for this dish: 300–225°F versus 325—350°F. I did this in two batches, as I have learned, and I, again, did the “optional” second fry for “extra-crispy results.”
The sauce is a mixture of chicken stock, oyster sauce, soy sauce, sugar, black pepper, sesame oil, and ginger, thickened with a cornstarch slurry. It all gets heated and reduced until thickened.
After the chicken is done frying, cashews are briefly fried as well.
Unlike the previous chicken dishes where the chicken is tossed in the sauce until coated, this one has the chicken and cashews placed on a serving platter and then the sauce poured on top. It’s then garnished with scallions.
We all thought that the yet-to-be-sauced fried chicken was the best tasting from this section of the cookbook. The extra seasoning in the marinade and dry coating helped it a lot. We also all agreed that the sauce made the chicken worse, and this sauced chicken was the worst of the section. The flavor was strong on the black pepper, and there wasn‘t any noticeable sweetness to it. It really was closer to a chicken gravy than the sweet sauces we’ve been having. Also, this fried chicken got significantly soggier with the sauce versus the previous recipes.
Maybe I would make this again just as fried chicken? Probably not, though, as I have other fried chicken recipes that are also good. No need to adapt this one. We have a Thai(-ish? not sure how authentic) cashew chicken recipe that we really like.
I am cooking my way through J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. Read more about it.