We challenged resident Bon Appétit supertaster Chris Morocco to recreate a General Tso’s chicken recipe in the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen. The catch? He’s doing it blindfolded with only his other senses to guide him.Read more: 29 Stir-Fry Recipes to Toss Into Your RotationDirector: Dan SiegelDirector of Photography: Kevin DyniaEditor: Rob MaloneTalent: Chris MorroccoGuest: Hana AsbrinkDirector of Culinary Production: Kelly JankeProducer: Tyre NoblesLine Producer: Jen McGinityAssociate Producer: Sahara PaganProduction Manager: Janine DispensaProduction Coordinator: Elizabeth HynesCamera Operator: Jeremy HarrisSound Mixer: Brett van DeusenCulinary Assistant: Christopher LiuResearcher: Vivian JaoPost Production Supervisor: Andrea FarrPost Production Coordinator: Scout AlterSupervising Editor: Eduardo AraujoAssistant Editor: Billy Ward
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00 - Hi, it's Hannah, and I'm here in the BA Test Kitchen
00:02 to have a secret conversation about Chris Morocco.
00:06 Once again, we are going to put Chris's
00:08 super taster abilities to the test.
00:10 This is General Tso's chicken from the walks of life.
00:13 We are challenging Chris to replicate this exact dish
00:16 with every ingredient.
00:17 He'll be able to taste it, touch it, and smell it,
00:20 but at no point will he be able to see this dish.
00:24 At the end of the day, we'll come back
00:25 and taste his final creation, and I'll be the judge.
00:29 (dramatic music)
00:31 Oh, interesting.
00:43 Blast of soy sauce, or oyster sauce.
00:46 Real talk, it's hard to describe soy
00:48 without using the word soy.
00:50 There's something very savory, a tiny bit funky.
00:54 The flavor is like salty, but with a sense of umami.
00:59 Let's see what we got here.
01:01 Oh God, that's good.
01:04 Friggin' love that.
01:05 - What's so good?
01:07 - I'm glad you asked, Kev.
01:08 What we have here is a piece of chicken
01:10 marinated in some way, coated in a starchy shell,
01:14 fried, and then tossed in a sort of sweet, spicy soy glaze.
01:19 Can imagine there's like a little bit of like,
01:20 maybe like a shao xing wine.
01:22 There could be some ginger.
01:24 It's not wildly hot, it's not crazy sweet.
01:27 Everything's in a nice kind of tension and balance.
01:30 I am curious if there's anything else here.
01:33 Like what's that, you know?
01:34 Probably some broccoli.
01:35 So very often in this type of stir fry preparation,
01:41 the broccoli is gonna be very briefly blanched
01:44 for getting stir fried, to temper the toughness,
01:48 and also makes it very like vibrant and bright green.
01:51 Huh, oh.
01:53 So I've got some kind of dried red spicy chili.
01:57 The long red spicy dried chilies
01:59 that you get from Asian markets.
02:01 I'm not getting discernible pieces of ginger or garlic.
02:05 I feel like those flavors are there.
02:07 Or is it like a softer brightness
02:09 coming from a cooking wine?
02:10 To me, I feel like this has gotta be
02:12 some kind of version of like a General Tso's chicken.
02:15 This is one of those recipes where I think
02:18 my ingredient list is gonna be frighteningly short.
02:22 Oh, itchy.
02:23 No, that's not the new thing.
02:29 No, no, no, it doesn't.
02:32 Don't even have the glasses on, man.
02:34 Okay, whew.
02:35 So I'm making a list of groceries to be shopped.
02:38 Boneless, skinless chicken breast.
02:43 Quite a bit of cornstarch, veg oil.
02:46 Now I have to spell Shao Sing on camera.
02:49 Shao, is there an X in there?
02:53 Shao Sing.
02:54 I had one letter wrong.
02:56 I had S-H-A-O-X-I-A-N-G
03:00 when in fact it is S-H-A-O-X-I-N-G.
03:05 Come on.
03:07 Let's get some garlic, ginger, broccoli.
03:10 If there are other soys out there wherever you're going,
03:16 get 'em all and let's taste 'em all.
03:18 Let's get rice vinegar just in case.
03:20 Maybe toasted sesame oil.
03:22 If it's there, it's very soft.
03:24 I feel pretty good about this as a starting point.
03:26 Somebody's gonna run out and grab these ingredients
03:28 and then I will have my first attempt at making the dish.
03:32 Why did I think that Shao Sing cooking wine
03:41 was white or clear?
03:43 So I'm starting with soy because I'm just fascinated
03:45 by the number of things that came up here.
03:48 All labeled soy, standard Kikkoman which does have wheat,
03:52 this one which has all kinds of added ingredients
03:54 including caramel, then the seasoning sauce.
03:57 I've never even heard of this.
03:59 Fascinating.
04:00 And then we have a double black soy sauce.
04:02 Oh, has like this kind of molasses-y quality to it.
04:07 Fascinating.
04:09 Anywho, I wanna start out just by using
04:11 the most kind of standard soy sauce possible.
04:14 I'm gonna make final kind of like sauce element
04:17 that's gonna go on the chicken
04:18 when it comes out of the fryer.
04:20 So I'm doing standard Kikkoman soy sauce.
04:22 So I'm doing Shao Sing wine,
04:24 an ingredient that I'm not crazy familiar with.
04:27 I'm wondering to what degree it might go
04:30 in the finishing sauce element
04:32 but also in the chicken pretreatment or both or none.
04:37 Then we need some sugar here.
04:39 I just see where that nets me
04:40 in terms of a sweet salt balance.
04:43 That's not bad in terms of flavor balance.
04:46 I do wonder if there's a little bit of toasted sesame oil
04:50 operating in the background there.
04:51 Toasted sesame, especially used
04:53 towards the end of the cooking process
04:55 as a finishing element,
04:56 is an incredibly powerful aromatic ingredient.
04:59 Adding it at the beginning of a recipe
05:01 tends to really temper its aroma.
05:03 Starch is going to be what binds the sauce
05:07 as it reduces down and creates that kind of silkiness.
05:10 Now, I wanna keep some of these ingredients out
05:13 because I do wonder if they're maybe doing
05:16 double duty as part of our pretreatment of the chicken.
05:20 I don't need a ton of soy sauce in here.
05:23 Let's just start with, again, equal parts
05:25 just to establish a baseline here.
05:27 I'm banking on the notion
05:28 that there is garlic and ginger in the dish,
05:31 but perhaps it's simply been grated or treated in such a way
05:34 that you're not getting discernible pieces of it.
05:36 Let's put a baseline amount of starch in.
05:39 The starch in this part of the dish
05:40 is gonna be what effectively forms the crust on the chicken
05:45 when it goes into the oil.
05:47 So I want it to be a little bit thicker than that.
05:49 I want something that's really gonna cling to that chicken.
05:51 I feel like we could probably even go a bit tighter still.
05:55 Like it can be quite a tight mixture.
05:56 So that's quite a bit thicker
05:57 that should adhere pretty nicely to the chicken,
06:00 almost like a batter.
06:01 Going with boneless, skinless chicken,
06:02 it'll yield the biggest pieces without skin
06:05 that will allow me to cut it
06:07 into the most regular sized pieces possible.
06:10 All right, so seasoning chicken with salt
06:12 and then getting it into, let's just call it the marinade.
06:15 You see how this mixture is very tight?
06:17 Tight just means it's really clingy.
06:19 Is that like quite enough coating?
06:21 Like not really, right?
06:22 I definitely need more starch.
06:25 I need more liquid to bind it.
06:27 So we're going double.
06:29 Okay, great.
06:30 I don't know, maybe this is like too wet now,
06:32 but I mean, at least like we're coated
06:34 and we've got something.
06:35 We're gonna get oil going, vegetable oil.
06:38 We need to do a quick steam or blanch on this broccoli.
06:42 I'm thinking we do steam.
06:44 [steamer clicking]
06:46 All right, we're gonna get this hot.
06:48 We just wanna do like a very fast steam.
06:51 I could blanch it as well,
06:52 but I thought it'd be more fun
06:53 to just root around in the kitchen for a steamer basket.
06:56 And we wanna really think really hard
06:58 about any wet element that's going
07:00 into that stir fry environment.
07:02 - Uh-oh.
07:06 - Literally like the steamer basket disintegrated
07:08 in my hands.
07:09 Didn't want wet broccoli.
07:11 What'd we get?
07:12 Wet broccoli.
07:13 What else is there?
07:14 The thing that's going through my mind is just like,
07:15 there aren't enough things here.
07:17 Confidence is low.
07:18 This can't be enough.
07:19 I feel like I'm missing ingredients.
07:21 All right, so I'm gonna start dropping
07:22 these pieces of chicken in.
07:23 I'm gonna be looking for more of a color change
07:26 and texture change to know that this is done,
07:29 as opposed to temping it or anything else.
07:32 It can almost effectively be overcooked,
07:35 but that starchy shell is gonna protect the chicken
07:38 from losing too much moisture.
07:40 This is like, that's pretty good,
07:41 but what if we could make it great?
07:44 Flavors are getting a little bit of soy,
07:48 a little like retro nasal soy.
07:49 Seasoning's nice, pleasantly shreddy, but it's still moist.
07:52 We could dial that up a little bit.
07:53 So we are now stir frying.
07:55 A little bit of neutral oil in our wok.
07:58 I just wanna toast the chilies,
07:59 and they are toasting real fast.
08:02 Oh, they're probably gonna get too dark.
08:06 Not much of a stir fryer.
08:08 Sorry you had to see this.
08:09 A wok is so nice for this kind of application
08:12 'cause it disperses the heat.
08:14 A liquid is gonna evaporate really quickly.
08:17 It's not gonna sog out.
08:18 So chicken's gonna go in, and then this is the glaze.
08:22 Oh wow, look at how fast the cornstarch activated.
08:25 I'm gonna add a touch of water.
08:27 I don't want it to be over reduced, but we got something.
08:30 Sauce a little over reduced, a little salty.
08:35 Little bit of a poor effort there,
08:38 but I haven't cooked in a wok in so long.
08:40 Ended up creating a slightly kind of gummy texture.
08:43 We're missing some crunch here.
08:45 It's kind of a bummer.
08:46 For ingredients, I'm gonna give myself a 65.
08:50 Something's not right here.
08:51 Technique, I would go with more of a 75.
08:54 Appearance, maybe I would go with an 85 there.
08:57 Then taste, I think I'm at maybe a 70.
09:00 Okay, actual scores are on this sheet.
09:03 Wait, what is this?
09:04 Effort, attitude, kindness, confidence.
09:07 [laughing]
09:09 These are Dan's scores so far.
09:12 We've got effort is a 68.
09:14 Attitude is a very obvious 63.
09:17 Kindness, no surprise here, a 41.
09:20 Confidence, strangely high, 73.
09:24 Very much in character.
09:25 That brings Dan to a total of 61 for a D minus average.
09:30 - Those are your scores from me.
09:31 - No, that was your scores from me.
09:34 No, no, no, that's how you've been graded.
09:36 Actual score, total is 74.
09:39 Technique is a bit of a bummer to me, like a 68.
09:43 I don't know that I'm gonna teach myself
09:45 how to make General Tso's chicken in one more pass.
09:48 One more chance to taste the original dish,
09:51 and as ever, there is a lot riding on that.
09:54 Stakes are high.
09:55 Yeah, not getting oyster sauce.
10:02 Soy and chicken, so strong.
10:05 Anything on the outside of the chicken.
10:07 Ooh, I got a piece of garlic.
10:09 I could definitely add some more brightness.
10:11 I don't know that the Shaoxing wine is giving us
10:13 enough acidity.
10:14 Rice vinegar could just punch it up a little bit.
10:17 Frankly, it could be sweeter.
10:18 Brown sugar, still not getting pieces of ginger.
10:20 These pieces of chicken, it's almost like it's a strip
10:23 that's kind of curled in on itself.
10:25 I would love to change to boneless, skinless chicken thigh.
10:29 All right, cool, let's move on.
10:31 I'm gonna get my final attempt at the dish
10:33 and hopefully get a little closer.
10:35 So we're making the marinade, and I'm going all in
10:39 on Shaoxing wine and cornstarch with a little bit of salt.
10:42 It's just a matter of needing to make a slurry
10:45 that's a little bit more neutral,
10:47 and then bring all of the soy flavor in
10:49 with the glaze at the end.
10:51 I want it to be pretty thick.
10:53 Wow, that is so thick.
10:54 I really don't like that consistency.
10:56 It's sort of absorbing the starch,
10:58 but it's kind of separating out.
10:59 Now we've restored it to the kind of fluidity,
11:02 heavy cream texture.
11:04 We're gonna need that additional starch
11:05 in order to really build up that outer coating.
11:07 Okay, that's where the chicken's going.
11:09 So I'm not doing ginger or garlic in the marinade this time.
11:12 Moving on to the sauce element.
11:14 Still Kikkoman standard soy, sugar,
11:18 less cornstarch this time.
11:20 I'm including a little bit of rice vinegar and some water.
11:23 Rice vinegar is just, you know,
11:25 it's essentially a vinegar created
11:26 from something akin to sake.
11:29 Still going with just a touch of toasted sesame.
11:32 Flavor's good.
11:32 I do wonder if we're like missing some kind of complexity.
11:36 This one is our double black soy sauce.
11:39 Maybe I'm just gonna use a skosh of this.
11:41 I mean, screw it, right?
11:42 Let's see what that did flavor-wise.
11:45 A little bit more depth to it.
11:46 Next, chicken.
11:47 Got some boneless, skinless chicken thighs.
11:49 And the second tasting, it became apparent
11:51 that there was kind of multiple muscle groups.
11:54 So we did a little pivot and I'm feeling great about it.
11:57 I mean, it looks like holy hell, but.
12:01 Woo, that's some like fun house [beep] right in there.
12:04 If anything, it's clinging worse.
12:06 I don't know, I either don't know the right technique
12:08 or my understanding of the technique is just wrong.
12:11 So I'm adding a little bit more starch to this.
12:13 See if I can get it incrementally tighter.
12:16 It's doing that thing where it's like it's tightened up
12:18 to the point where it's kind of weird.
12:20 Do I get a lifeline?
12:21 - You can show Hannah what you have here.
12:23 - Do you have a minute to come talk about chicken?
12:25 - Yeah, what do you want?
12:26 - Okay, Hannah, if it's too fluid,
12:29 I don't have a thick enough coating.
12:30 Did you ever make oobleck?
12:32 - No. - Boo-yuck.
12:34 [laughing]
12:35 That's like what this really comes down to.
12:36 You know Bartholomew and the oobleck?
12:38 It's like that stuff you can make out of like glue
12:40 and borax and like corn starch.
12:43 Like a kid's like project. - Like '80s slime?
12:45 - Like '80s slime, thank you.
12:46 At least like, okay, well.
12:48 Does this just seem like it's like headed for disaster?
12:51 - I've said this before to you many times.
12:54 You know, I am of a two fry school,
12:56 double fry method camp.
12:59 I would just put that out there.
13:01 - Cool.
13:02 Thanks.
13:04 [laughing]
13:04 You know what?
13:05 Sometimes it's not like what your friend says,
13:07 it's just the comforting sound of their laughter.
13:09 Let's do it.
13:10 Let's stop talking about it and let's start cooking.
13:12 Just gonna cook off broccoli super fast.
13:15 All right, broccoli is blanched.
13:19 The oil is at temp, we're doing a test piece.
13:22 Was the batter thick enough to have enough clinging
13:26 to the chicken to create a real sensation
13:30 of there being a crust on it?
13:31 So in Korean fried chicken,
13:33 something that you see is a low temperature fry
13:36 followed by a high temperature fry
13:37 and that creates the crispiest, crunchiest
13:41 possible outer shell.
13:42 - I've said this before to you.
13:44 I am of a two fry school.
13:46 I would just put that out there.
13:48 - I don't think that's what we wanna do.
13:49 Oh heavens, the oil is a little bit hot.
13:52 Don't worry about it.
13:53 This place has a fire extinguisher, right?
13:55 Certainly thicker than round one.
13:58 I think we have achieved quite a bit more crispiness
14:02 on this outer coating.
14:03 I think this is gonna stir fry up really nicely.
14:05 I wanna be careful of not making it too, too hot here.
14:08 Oh, the sliced garlic.
14:11 Thanks for nothing, Dan.
14:14 - I'm gonna add a little garlic in the last second.
14:16 - Oh snap.
14:17 This is fine.
14:18 This is right when I wanted to add it.
14:20 I just really wanna make sure broccoli
14:22 gets a little bit of color,
14:24 garlic gets a little toasty.
14:26 We have our finishing sauce.
14:28 It's not a little tight, but it's better.
14:30 Crunch is better.
14:33 I don't know, there's still like a little something
14:35 lacking in the flavor,
14:36 but this is our second and final attempt.
14:39 Nice glaziness, nice sauciness, nicely coated.
14:42 I think this is an incremental improvement
14:44 over my first attempt.
14:46 Ingredients, we were at 72.
14:48 Maybe we pulled it up to a 78.
14:50 Technique, we're probably maybe still down around like a 70.
14:53 Appearance, maybe now we're an 80.
14:56 I don't know what changed so dramatically.
14:59 And taste, I'd love to think that we're at an 85 now.
15:02 Hannah's gonna come and try this,
15:04 and she's gonna be able to stack this up
15:06 against the original.
15:08 - Oh, hello there. - Hi.
15:10 - How's it going?
15:11 - It's okay.
15:12 Yeah, I mean, it's like fine.
15:14 - When your voice goes up like that,
15:16 it makes me nervous. - When I go falsetto,
15:17 it's like, yeah, I can't be, damn it.
15:20 - Okay, may I present to you General Tso's Chicken.
15:23 - Yay! - Yay.
15:24 - By the walks of life.
15:26 - The walks of life.
15:28 - What do you think?
15:29 - I mean, I am struck.
15:30 There's certainly like, there's something in that texture,
15:33 ever so slightly more kind of like puffy.
15:35 I don't know how to describe it.
15:37 - I think first of all, Chris, you did a great job.
15:39 I mean, they look very similar.
15:41 Obviously, some differences in appearance.
15:43 Your sauce is a bit darker.
15:46 This one is a bit looser,
15:47 and it is actually looser
15:49 than what we might be familiar with.
15:51 - We're gonna take a bite of the original,
15:52 and then we'll take a bite of mine.
15:53 - Do you see anything in there, batter,
15:56 that is not on your chicken?
15:58 - Sesame seed? - Yeah.
15:59 I think here you might have consolidated some steps.
16:03 They take a two-pronged marinating approach,
16:06 and they leave it on the chicken pieces to absorb.
16:10 And then the second part of that process
16:12 is dusting with a few sesame seeds,
16:15 cornstarch, and AP flour.
16:17 And so it's almost like a light dredge.
16:20 Yeah, I basically combined both things.
16:22 - Talk to me about how you went
16:25 about frying your chicken pieces.
16:26 - I was definitely listening to you when you said,
16:28 oh, you know, like a two-part fry, low temp, high temp.
16:33 I was, but again, like--
16:35 - When you say listening,
16:36 does that mean that you double fried these?
16:39 - Well--
16:39 - I don't think that's what we wanna do.
16:41 - What I was thinking you might have meant
16:43 was that the time that the chicken then goes into the wok
16:47 can almost function as the second fry.
16:50 - Yeah, no.
16:51 It needs two fries in the oil,
16:53 and then it can meet its sauce.
16:55 - That feels so fussy to me.
16:58 - I mean, imagine if you're at like a takeout restaurant,
17:01 you probably have a lot of this prepped ahead,
17:03 at least for the first fry. - Sure, blanched.
17:05 - And then to order, you're doing the second fry.
17:08 But I think more than that,
17:09 in terms of an ability to hold the flavor,
17:12 that second fry is critical.
17:13 - Interesting.
17:14 - So let's talk about the sauce components.
17:16 You actually got a lot of them correct.
17:19 Regular soy sauce, dark soy sauce.
17:22 They actually use brown sugar.
17:24 - Really, they do?
17:24 - Yeah, and I heard you might have been reaching for--
17:27 - Yeah, I was, I don't know.
17:28 The dark soy already had almost molasses-y quality to me.
17:33 - Here, they happen to use chicken stock.
17:35 I would say your sauce just tastes very concentrated
17:39 in a way that could probably have benefited from water,
17:41 regardless of what the textural output would have given you.
17:44 Great effort taking it from the top.
17:46 Ingredients.
17:47 You gave yourself a 78, and I actually gave you an 85.
17:51 Technique, however, I gave you 69.
17:53 The velveting technique they used
17:56 is just so different from what you did.
17:58 - Totally.
17:59 - Plus the lack of the double fry.
18:02 - Oh, you weren't gonna let me walk away from that one.
18:03 - And I literally gave that to you.
18:05 I gave that to you, okay?
18:06 That was a bonus.
18:08 Appearance, however, I gave you an 83.
18:11 It looks a little different,
18:11 but overall, looks so appetizing.
18:14 And taste, I gave you an 80, because--
18:17 - I think that's fair.
18:18 - Yeah, again, it had all the elements,
18:20 the salty, the sweet, the spice,
18:23 but it just was not in the correct balance.
18:25 And then my score for you is a 79.25.
18:28 So actually, I ended up giving you the better score.
18:31 - Yeah, that's fair, yeah.
18:32 - Chinese cuisine is especially an area
18:35 where I feel like I learned 10 new things
18:38 each time I learn about a dish.
18:39 - Totally.
18:40 - Good job. - Thanks, Savannah.
18:41 - Yeah. - All right.
18:42 - Thank you.
18:42 - Oh my God, next time, I don't care what it is,
18:46 we're double frying it.
18:47 It could be a bowl of cornflakes, you know what?
18:49 Put it in a [beep] bag, put it right in the oil, twice.
18:53 This is a very different presentation of this dish
18:55 than what I thought it to be.
18:58 I think that's great, you know what I mean?
18:59 It's just one dish,
19:01 but what that dish means to one chef versus another,
19:05 you know, the devil's always in the details.
19:07 Mushroom dark soy sauce.
19:11 Is there like caramel in this?
19:17 Holy Hannah, water, corn syrup,
19:20 hydrolyzed soy protein, caramel color.
19:23 - Hold on, hold on, hold on.
19:23 - Why can't we talk about soy now?
19:25 - We can, but then we gotta set up
19:28 why you gotta start with the soy sauce.
19:29 - Golden Mountain seasoning sauce.
19:31 - It's a not usable content.
19:32 - Why is it not usable?
19:33 I wanna start with the soy.
19:34 - Then say, "I wanna start with soy."
19:37 - I feel like you could've cut that in.
19:38 You could've just let me going and then cut that in.