Pro Chef Tries to Make General Tso’s Chicken Faster Than Delivery

Time check.

Woo! Right on time, 11 minutes, baby.

The fryer is the only thing that's [beep] me.

I'ma move it to the middle

because the middle part got more flame.

That's [beep] up,

trying to set me up for failure here.

What's good, what's good?

It's your boy Chef Harold,

aka Unkle Harold, aka The Food Hustler.

My challenge today is to cook a great, classic,

takeout meal faster than it can get delivered to my door.

And if you can see in the background,

we're not in the Bronx anymore.

We've upgraded, now in Martha Stewart's house.

[upbeat music]

[phone ringing]

[Restaurant Employee1] 1] How may I help you?

Yeah, I'm calling for delivery.

[Restaurant Employee1] 1] Okay, your address?

It's [beep] 36th Street.

[Restaurant Employee 1] Oh, you called the wrong place.

36th, right?

Yes.

[Restaurant Employee1] 1] We are 68th, too far.

We don't deliver that far.

Come on, man.

You can make it happen, it's America.

[Restaurant Worker 1] No, it's America

so you gotta try somewhere over there that's close.

All right.

[Restaurant Worker 1] All right, sorry about that.

All right, sorry about that.

Okay, bye.

I called the wrong Chinese place.

It's too far from the radius.

[Restaurant Worker 2] Hello?

Yeah, I'm calling for delivery.

[Restaurant Worker2] 2] Hold on, one second.

Can I get General Tso's with shrimp fried rice, please?

[Restaurant Worker 2] Yeah.

How long is it gonna take?

[Restaurant Worker 2] 30 minutes.

Perfect, thank you.

We got [beep] 30 minutes.

[upbeat music]

Let's do it.

I'm just turning everything on just to get it going.

Having hot pans ready to go

when you're cooking something fast is a clear advantage.

You can control the time and temperature there

by pulling the pans off or putting the pans back on.

[upbeat music]

There's a few things that restaurants do

to make a great General Tso's chicken.

The crispiness of the chicken,

the glaze that goes on top of the chicken,

the balance between the sweetness and the spiciness,

last but not least, you gotta have a great side dish.

So that's all the things that I need to include

in my dish today.

The way the restaurants get a really crispy chicken

is really about the prep.

First, you need to marinate it in the egg white slurry.

It's made egg whites, a little bit of cornstarch,

and a little bit of soy sauce,

and some other good stuff in there, sesame oil.

And what it does is create this kind of binding agent

for anything that you're gonna add onto it,

flour, cornstarch, seasoning is just gonna stick to it.

And when you fry, it becomes this kind of nice coating.

This goes into the fridge to marinate for 20 minutes.

From there, we create the frying batter.

[upbeat music]

Cornstarch, AP flour,

baking soda, rice wine vinegar,

little bit of sesame oil, and a little bit of hoisin.

And what I'm doing here is I'm clumping this up

and you create these little nooks and crannies

so when you dip the chicken in there,

it'll create this crust.

And when you fry it, they'll have these these little,

crispy bits and pieces on the side of the chicken.

Next, I'm gonna start working on the fried rice.

Fried rice is such a moneymaker because, you know,

they use day-old white rice

and it can extend their food cost.

And so, I think using day-old white rice is key.

It creates nice, crispiness.

It also absorbs a lot a lot more flavor.

And if you want to be sustainable,

you know, use whatever you got in your fridge,

from corn, to peas, to carrots,

that carrot, corn mix that's in the back of your fridge.

Don't do blueberries.

I tried that once, that was, that didn't come out right.

[timer ticking]

Once you get this nice, toasty brown color

on the ginger, that's when we're gonna add the rice.

Wanna flatten it out a little bit

so we can start creating that crispiness on the bottom

like socarrat.

And you see what I'm doing is I'm making sure

that I'm moving this stuff around so it won't burn.

Season it real quick with a little salt

and black pepper.

And then, we're gonna add a little bit

of this fermented crab, right here.

I like it a lot because it's,

it has a lot of umami flavor profiles in it.

And it also gives such a unctuous flavor profile

to anything you add onto it.

As you can see,

the rice is already turning this bright orange hue.

And you're gonna let your rice talk to you, okay?

You see, you're listening to it right now.

You hear the crackle and pop.

She's gonna tell you when she's ready or not.

She's gonna say hey, don't forget about me, man.

I'm burning!

[upbeat music]

time check right now, we are at 17 minutes.

I feel really good, man, to tell you the truth.

I'm almost done.

[upbeat music]

The Chinese food culture in the Bronx when I grew up,

it really was a quintessential meal for everybody.

I think it has a little bit more seasoning.

And I think it has a little bit more love

because some of the Chinese restaurants,

they kind of incorporated the community aspect in it.

If they're in a neighborhood full of Dominicans

and Puerto Ricans, they're gonna,

they're gonna have a special combo with platano maduro,

with chicken for X amount of dollars.

So, boom.

Yeah.

The fusion of the Bronx with the Chinese food

was an easy translation for me because it kind of reflected

the history of Filipino food with Malay, Chinese,

and Spanish influences in the food.

So right now, next, we're about to go into making the sauce.

First thing's first, I'm gonna take a little bit of garlic,

just gonna microplane it right into this pot.

This is just gonna go ahead

and disappear into the sauce itself, you know?

Instead of you having these chunks of garlic

and stuff like that, you just taste only the flavor.

You don't want the garlic to burn, okay?

So you want to pull it off

and let it just kind of toast up a little bit, slowly.

Try not to get too much color.

Gonna add some of these chili flakes,

and your whole house is gonna smell like love right now.

You know what I'm saying?

You add a little bit of miso.

Miso is gonna give it that nice salinity that you need.

Low sodium soy sauce, little bit of hoisin,

just a little bit of chicken stock right here.

And then, you're gonna add a little brown sugar, okay?

[upbeat music]

Then, most important part of Chinese or, or Asian cooking,

a little bit of corn starch.

What's gonna happen here is it's gonna get thicker

and thicker once we add the cornstarch.

And you want to keep stirring,

wanna control your heat, wanna turn it down a little bit

so you don't burn it.

All right.

Oh, smells like General Tso's to me.

That looks good right there.

But now, we're going into frying the chicken, okay?

Time check.

Woo! Right on time, 11 minutes, baby.

What I'm gonna do is,

I think the fryer is the only thing that's [beep] me.

I'm gonna move it to the middle

because the middle part got more higher flame.

Martha Stewart's house, it's [beep] up,

trying to set me up for failure here.

Sauce is here, that's ready.

Rice is ready.

What's I'm gonna do now, too, is a little trick.

I'm gonna dump crab meat on top,

just to let it warm up to the temp,

then I'm gonna fold it later, okay?

I'm gonna go to the fridge and grab the chicken.

So, what we're looking for is a 350 fry oil.

It's worldly known that you gotta fry shit at 350,

cause if it's at 300, I've done it before,

all the breading goes everywhere.

I get yelled at by a [beep] French chef,

talking about I don't know how to fry fried chicken

and I'm [beep] American.

[timer ticking]

I think the one thing I made a mistake is putting

the fry oil to the top left.

I should have made my sauce in the top left

and kept the fry oil in this middle one

where there's a bigger burner.

That's the only mistake that I think I made

throughout my whole life.

Because I could have been frying right now,

could gave been ahead.

You know what I mean?

But it's okay, it's okay.

One thing about life,

you don't attach yourself to the outcomes, okay?

[upbeat music]

One of the best techniques for you

to get really crispy chicken is to double fry.

So, once you get the batter going, you fry it once

at 350, then you turn it up a notch to 375

and you fry it again to encapsulate the dish,

and cook it through, and get that extra crispiness

in that chicken.

Look like a [beep] chicken nugget.

That's what you want.

[upbeat music]

I'm gonna chop up some chives real quick.

And one little trick that I learned in fine dining,

especially if you're gonna chop up

like a million of these things,

cause French chefs love their chives, man.

So what you wanna do is, you wanna fold this up a little bit

and bring it all the way across.

What you get is this little spear.

And what it does is, it helps hold your chives in place

while you're angrily cutting it

cause mother [beep] wants 500 grams of this.

So once you get to this point here,

you pull it up, you do the same thing again.

And now, you can call yourself a fine-dining chef

cause you know how to chop chives

like the best of them.

[time beep] Nice.

We are in the game.

And we're still waiting for the [beep] Chinese food, so,

I think we're winning here, Morgan, all right?

I'm gonna go straight for it.

So, this what we're gonna do.

Gonna take the chicken,

then I'm gonna just double fry it for three minutes,

and then I'm gonna toss it in the sauce right after, okay?

Like KFC, baby.

Wanna keep moving this around,

then keep moving your sauce around.

You don't want it to get too sticky.

Oh!

Right into this, oh my goodness.

What you wanna do is,

make it fancy, and you wanna toss this thing.

Yeah, yeah, that's it, yeah.

Wow, look at that thing.

Oh man, my mouth is salivating.

Hit it real quick, boom,

little sesame, little chive action.

Oh, for all my French chefs, I love you.

That's for you.

Best part about it is, you get to be the first one

to taste, cause you made it!

I mean, bam!

Seriously, it's [beep] good as shit.

If that thing comes and doesn't taste like this,

they're [beep].

I'm gonna go and plate up.

[upbeat music]

Every time I'm cooking, I'm always thinking about my mom

or somebody I care about,

somebody that meant something to me.

The energy transfers to your food.

If you're ever cooking for somebody,

they're always gonna appreciate you putting

the most effort into it, especially putting love into it.

[upbeat music]

Oh shit, the Chinese restaurant.

[phone dinging]

Yeah, hello?

Yeah, who's this?

[Delivery Driver] Sixth floor.

Delivery?

[Delivery Driver] Yeah.

Yeah, where you at?

[Delivery Driver] Sixth floor, sixth floor.

All right, somebody's gonna come get you.

Thank you.

Chinese food just came.

Now, we're about to see the difference

between the, this dish and this dish.

I'm gonna add my secret ingredient, the palapa, on top,

and then we'll see what happens next.

So palapa, in Filipino food,

is used mainly by the Medina region.

This is the Muslim, kind of,

consortiums of people down there in Medina, now.

So, they don't eat a lot of pork and a lot of meat over all.

So, they created this spice called palapa.

It's made out of coconut, chilies,

mushroom powder, scallions,

and it's sauteed together.

And you just add it into your dishes.

So, we're gonna add that here,

a little bit more love.

You know what I mean?

Oh, look at that thing.

All right, and then a chive bomb on top

for my French chefs.

That's for you.

[upbeat music]

So, this is our plated dish here.

I almost beat the timer, but my [beep] fryer [beep] me.

I was only like 20 seconds late, okay?

Yeah, technically, we did beat the delivery guy.

So, so, yeah.

So, we did win!

So, this is the regular packaging

of New York takeout delivery.

They give you the smiley bag, plastic bag,

which they're not supposed to have any more

cause it's against the law.

And then, this is it right here.

From the top of my head,

I'm guessing the guy was busy,

whoever was making the Chinese food,

probably had a lot of orders, and he was rushing it.

The wok was too hot.

You can tell the kernels are a little burnt over here.

Also, the sauce itself is runny.

I can tell there's a lot of sugar on this, too.

So, this is gonna be a lot sweeter than what I have here.

I didn't do the [beep] broccoli.

I [beep] up.

I'm sorry.

All right so, I'm just gonna do a nice bite, okay?

A little bit of General Tso's.

And we ordered shrimp fried rice,

so I'ma put a little shrimp on there.

It's soggy.

The sauce itself is muddled.

It's really one tone, it's just sweet.

There's really no spice to it.

I've had Chinese food all over this city,

in every borough, except for Staten Island.

[beep] Staten Island.

This flavor profile right here is basically kind of

the same all across New York City.

And let's try my General Tso's version

with crab fried rice and some palapa.

You wanna add all that in there together, one bite.

I mean, that's the jump.

It's crispy.

There's layers of flavor there.

There's spice.

There's umami.

The palapa just putting it into another level.

I mean, seriously, I would charge people $25

for this dish.

The lump crab is expensive, so.

But, it's so good.

As we spoke about before,

the key components of having a great General Tso's chicken

is glaze of the sauce on the chicken, as we see here.

Also, the side dish itself, as you can tell the difference,

we have a shrimp fried rice here that's,

I only see two shrimps.

And then, a crab fried rice with huge lumps of crab on it,

and this beautiful, orange color of a hue.

And then also, kind of the texture of the dish,

where the chicken was crispy

and this one was a little bit soggy

from kind of over-saucing it.

So, if I'm rating from one to ten,

I think I'll give myself a hard, hard 15.

A, I really enjoyed it, and I'm super prideful about it.

I stand behind it.

And two, it's really comforting, the,

the flavor profiles here.

This really reminds me of some stuff that my mom would make

or my father would make,

and it really reminds me of my roots of coming back home

to the Philippines.

But, it's also a fusion of New York City Chinese food.

I can't knock this cause I've grown up on it.

And like we spoke about before,

this meal right here, for ten bucks,

you know, this can last you all day,

from lunch to dinner, yeah.

So, it's fed me and kind of nourished me.

I can't really knock it, so I'm not gonna give it a score

because this is just regular, New York, Chinese, hood food,

and I think you should just appreciate that

if you're from New York.

If you want to take the time to learn the techniques,

learn about time and temperature, and do it on your own,

you down have to order out that night.

You can create something delicious,

and you can create something that you're proud of,

and showcase some of your talents

to your friends and family.

So one more time, like we always say,

never forget where you come from,

otherwise you become a [beep] asshole.

Bon Appetit.

South Bronx all day, peace.

[upbeat music]

Anything that comes out of the fryer,

please season, okay?

Don't be an asshole and not season it, okay?

Learned that the hard way, too.

The mother [beep] makes you fry it again

and eat, will make you eat it.

The restaurant industry is so rough, dude.