Crispy Honey Chicken

Hello! Hi everyone, welcome back to Woo Can Cook, Wesley here. Today we're diving back into our series dedicated to reproducing classic Americanized Chinese cuisine with yet another addition to our ever growing collection of PF Chang's recipes, with a shot at what I actually think is a pretty interesting dish despite its very generic name, which is the PF Chang's "Crispy Honey Chicken". Now, to be absolutely honest, this dish has long been a dish that I've regularly skipped over for this series, frankly, because on its surface, it sounds...pretty uninspiring. Pretty much any fried chicken stir fry that comes to mind when we talk about this particular genre already includes honey, since it's a pretty critical ingredient to creating a cohesive glaze (this includes sesame chicken, orange chicken, sweet and sour chicken, the list goes on). This of course then begs the question...what even is this dish? 

The menu describes it as "lightly battered, with a tangy honey sauce", which again, means absolutely nothing to me. You've just described...every dish in this genre. But! Hear me out though, here's what's interesting, its that the glaze itself has a very, very light coloring to it, meaning no color bias ingredients whatsoever in this dish (like...soy sauce, for example). So! In our journey to creating a quote unquote "good" version of this dish, I thought I'd venture two separate versions here. The first being my very best attempt at deriving sweet and savory umami from this dish using a Chinese style white sauce approach to the glaze to yield a nice light coloring, and a second attempt that...just completely disregards the color bias. And, we'll compare! Hope you try it.