slippery shrimp

This was seen on the Netflix show Eat Your Words, the episode with the judge from Yang Chow's in China Town, Los Angeles. The recipe is famous and the favorite thing on their menu for the last forty years.

It's butterflied shrimp coated in cornstarch then deep fried and coated with thickened sweet/sour sauce of garlic/ginger, and capsaicin heat.

My batch is much smaller than recipes online.

This is Chinese/American and mine uses Japanese ingredients because I like them. Recipes call for green of sliced scallion at the end so that is purely decorative.

* garlic

* ginger, these first two things cooked in ...

* oil

* tablespoon of catsup, itself a sweet/sour sauce, tomato-based, this accounts for its color. An American ingredient.

* soy sauce for salt, or else regular table salt

* sugar, I used mirin that is sweeter, so less is used, and has much greater depth

* vinegar, these two ingredients expand the sweet/sour I used rice vinegar that is comparatively sweet

* red chile flake, or something else hot. I used Chipotle that has smoked flavor

* teaspoon of corn starch to thicken the sauce. 

* I added scant sake, a teaspoon, because I like it in things like this.

The shrimp is butterflied to spread them out. This is a bit tricky when the shrimp come deveined because you slice from the bottom to butterfly and they're already sliced on the top.

Incidentally, cutting through the bottom is how Japanese sushi chefs splay shrimp for ebi sushi. Slicing through the membrane that behaves as a tendon that allows live shrimp to flap its tail and swim is how sushi chefs prevent the cooked shrimp from curling. That, and cooking the shrimp in water that is not boiling.

Enough corn starch to coat the shrimp. Straight cornstarch makes an incredibly crunchy coating that stands up to being covered in sauce.

Once the coated shrimp are in the oil, the surplus cornstarch is dumped out and the same bowl is rinsed and now contains the sauce previously prepared.

The crispy fried shrimp are flipped around and coated with sauce.

Well, what do you say? It really is tasty as the Los Angelenos rave about. Well done, Mr. Chow who obviously invented this for Americans. You understand us so well.

A video online repeats, "The best thing I ever ate with sticks."