Just One Thing: Basic Chinese Sauce Recipes

I eat a fair bit of Chinese food at restaurants. Asian foods are one of the places you can generally count on being able to get enough vegetables in your meal, so Chinese is my go-to cuisine when I really want veggies. In recent years, though, I’ve been noticing just how salty is always is, and it seems there’s more and more meat in dishes and fewer veggies. Sometimes I’ll just get a pile of vegetables and steal a few chunks of meat from my husband’s plate, but that meat is certainly factory-farmed and the veggies shipped in from who knows where and I always leave with lots of containers of leftovers…so it’s not an ethicurean dream food.

But what’s a girl to do? There’s just nothing like that delicately-scented white sauce, or the rich brown garlic sauce, or the spicy orange glaze. How the heck does one replicate that at home? Might as well just go out.

Actually, it turns out it’s pretty easy to make all of these sauces at home. You can adjust the salt to your taste, use meat and veggies that suit you, and keep the leftovers in a reusable container! The only tricky bit (until you’ve done it a few times) is working with cornstarch.

See below the cut for recipes and techniques for Basic Chinese White Sauce, Basic Chinese Brown Sauce, and Spicy Orange Glaze.

These are not haute recipes. They are almost certainly not authentically Chinese. But they do replicate fairly well those sauces we’ve come to like at American Chinese restaurants.

Basic Directions:

The technique is the same for all three sauces:
1) Cook any meat first. Remove it from the pan.
2) Stir-fry your veggies.
3) Mix up all the sauce ingredients in a measuring cup.
4) Add a few pieces of hot veggies to the measuring cup to pre-heat the cornstarch.
5) Dump all the sauce into the pan with the veggies (and add the meat back, if using) and bring to a boil.
6) Simmer for a minute or two until the sauce is clear and thickened.

Basic Chinese White Sauce

In a measuring cup, combine:

• 2 Tbl. soy sauce, shoyu, or Bragg’s
• 3/4 c. water
• 1 Tbl. grated ginger
• 1/2 tsp. chopped garlic (1 small clove)
• 1 Tbl. cornstarch

Follow the basic directions above.
Basic Chinese Brown Sauce

In a measuring cup, combine:

• 2 Tbl.  soy sauce, shoyu, or Bragg’s
• 3/4 c. water
• 0.5 – 1 Tbl. grated ginger
• 1 tsp. chopped garlic (1 clove)
• 1 Tbl. cornstarch
• 1 Tbl. molasses

Follow the basic directions above.

Spicy Orange Glaze

In a measuring cup, combine:

• 2 Tbl. soy sauce, shoyu, or Bragg’s
• 1/3 c. water
• 1 tsp grated ginger
• 1-2 tsp. chopped garlic (1-2 cloves)
• 1 Tbl. cornstarch
• 1 Tbl. orange juice concentrate
• 1/4 tsp. cayenne pepper (more to taste)

Follow the basic directions above. This sauce should be much thicker than the others; it’s great on chicken and tofu.

See also my Sweet and Sour Sauce recipe.