Skip to content
whisksweetly
Home Recipes About Contact

By course

By method

Chinese Sweet and Sour Sauce

Clear, glossy and sharp enough to cut through fried food. No ketchup, no food coloring, ready in eight minutes.

Prep
5 min
Cook
8 min
Makes
Makes about 1½ cups (350 ml)
Jump to the recipe
Battered chicken and pineapple coated in glossy sweet and sour sauce
Photo: cegoh / Pixabay

Takeaway sweet and sour sauce is usually ketchup, sugar and red dye, which is why it tastes of tomato and sugar and nothing else. The version worth making is built on rice vinegar and pineapple juice, and it comes out amber rather than fluorescent.

The ratio to hold onto is roughly one part vinegar to one part sugar to two parts juice. Everything else can move. Below that much acid the sauce is just syrup, and the whole purpose of it — cutting through something fried — disappears.

Cornstarch, not flour, and it goes in as a cold slurry. Cornstarch thickens clear and glossy; all-purpose flour thickens cloudy and tastes raw unless cooked much longer. Whisk it with cold water first: dropped dry into hot liquid it seizes into lumps that never come out.

It is the dipping sauce for fresh spring rolls when the peanut version feels too heavy.

Take it off the heat the moment it thickens. Cornstarch reaches full thickness and then, if you keep boiling it, breaks down again and thins out. That is the one way to fail at this.

Sweet and sour chicken with pineapple in a bowl
Photo: Eaksit Sangdee / Pexels

Sweet and sour sauce, printed

Clear, glossy and sharp enough to cut through fried food. No ketchup, no food coloring, ready in eight minutes.

Eight ingredients

  • 1 cup (240 ml) pineapple juice
  • ½ cup (120 ml) rice vinegar
  • ½ cup (100 g) superfine sugar
  • 2 tbsp light soy sauce
  • 1 tbsp tomato paste, for color
  • 2 garlic cloves, minced
  • 1 tsp grated fresh ginger
  • 2 tbsp cornstarch mixed with 3 tbsp cold water

Simmer, thicken, stop

  1. 1 Put everything except the cornstarch slurry into a saucepan and whisk to dissolve the sugar.
  2. 2 Bring to a simmer over medium heat and cook 3 minutes, so the garlic and ginger lose their raw edge.
  3. 3 Whisk the cornstarch slurry again — it settles within a minute — and pour it in while stirring.
  4. 4 Cook 1–2 minutes more until the sauce turns glossy and coats the back of a spoon, then take it off the heat immediately.
  5. 5 Taste. More vinegar if it is cloying, more sugar if it is harsh. Both faults are fixable at this point and neither is once it cools.

Keeping it, and thinning it

  • Keeps two weeks refrigerated. It thickens cold and loosens again when warmed.
  • For a sauce to toss through a stir-fry rather than dip into, use half the cornstarch.

Cloudy and thin sweet and sour sauce

All-purpose flour instead of cornstarch, or a slurry that was not whisked smooth before it went in. Cornstarch is what makes it translucent.

It was boiled too long after thickening. Cornstarch breaks down under prolonged heat. Off the heat as soon as it coats a spoon.