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42 Chinese Chicken Recipes To Help You Replicate Your Favorite Takeout Orders - Yahoo

General Tso's chicken is only the beginning.

We all have those moments when you want a lazy night in, curled up on the couch, with a long night of Netflix binging and Chinese food. I have plenty of days like those; Chinese food has always been my go-to comfort cuisine, so I eat it a lot.

And while you might think it's easier to just order in, you'll be surprised at how much better (and cheaper) homemade takeout is with these best Chinese chicken recipes.

Related: Vegan Chinese Food Recipes

There are plenty of Chinese chicken recipes to choose from in our list, from chicken and broccoli, sticky sesame garlic chicken, easy kung pao chicken, and hoisin chicken stir-fry, to healthier fare like steamed chicken with shiitake mushrooms.

Related: Best Asian Chicken Recipes

There are also Chinese chicken salads, chicken and rice dishes, plenty of noodles with chicken and all the kebabs, potstickers and dumplings you're probably craving if you've made it this far reading.

So without further ado, here are 42 crazy good Chinese chicken recipes to make you exit the take-out apps once and for all!

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Next Up, 70 Downright Delicious Grilled Chicken Recipes for Summer

China Trade Deal Means More U.S. Beef, Chinese Chicken Exports : The Salt - NPR

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Chicken meat for sale at a market in Anhui province, China. VCG via Getty Images hide caption

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Chicken meat for sale at a market in Anhui province, China.

VCG via Getty Images

Cooked chicken from birds grown and raised in China soon will be headed to America — in a trade deal that's really about beef.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced Thursday night that the U.S. Was greenlighting Chinese chicken imports and getting U.S. Beef producers access to China's nearly 1.4 billion consumers. But the deal is raising concerns among critics who point to China's long history of food-safety scandals.

The Chinese appetite for beef is huge and growing, but American beef producers have been locked out of that market since a case of mad cow disease cropped up in the U.S. In 2003. In response, many countries, including South Korea, Japan, Mexico and China, banned imports of U.S. Beef.

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China was the only one of those nations to not eventually lift its ban — and that's a big deal.

"It's a very big market; it's at least a $2.5 billion market that's being opened up for U.S. Beef," Ross said in announcing the trade deal.

Many people long had seen China's refusal to lift its ban on U.S. Beef imports as a negotiating tactic, a tit for tat aimed at allowing Chinese chicken imports into the United States. The negotiations that led to the new trade deal have been going back and forth for more than a decade, stalled at one point by worries in Congress over China's food-safety practices.

American beef producers are rejoicing that the process has finally resulted in allowing them to send beef to China.

"After being locked out of the world's largest market for 13 years, we strongly welcome the announcement that an agreement has been made to restore U.S. Beef exports to China," Craig Uden, president of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, said in a statement. "It's impossible to overstate how beneficial this will be for America's cattle producers, and the Trump administration deserves a lot of credit for getting this achieved."

The U.S. Should be cleared to export beef to China by mid-July. That's also the deadline for the U.S. To finalize rules for the importation of cooked chicken products from China. Why cooked chicken instead of raw?

"For a country to be able to ship meat and poultry products into the U.S., they have to demonstrate that their food-safety inspection system is equivalent to the system here in the U.S.," explains Brian Ronholm, who served as deputy undersecretary for food safety at the U.S. Department of Agriculture under the Obama administration.

"The equivalency determination process for China as it relates to processed [cooked] chicken products had been underway, and this deal expedites this process," he says. "China also is seeking equivalency for their inspection system for slaughter facilities, but that will be a longer process."

Given the many outbreaks of avian flu China has experienced, there are also worries that if raw Chinese poultry were processed in the U.S., it could potentially contaminate American plants or somehow spread to birds here in the States.

Tony Corbo, a senior lobbyist for the food campaign at Food & Water Watch, an environmental advocacy group, has been raising concerns about efforts to open the U.S. Market to Chinese chicken imports for years. He questions the Chinese government's ability to enforce food-safety standards, given its poor track record.

That record includes rat meat being sold as lamb, oil recovered from drainage ditches in gutters being sold as cooking oil, and baby formula contaminated with melamine that sickened hundreds of thousands of babies and killed six. In 2014, a Shanghai food-processing factory that supplied international restaurant brands including McDonald's and KFC was caught selling stale meat, repackaged with new expiration dates.

Corbo points out that last December, China's own Food and Drug Administration reported it had uncovered as many as a half-million cases of food-safety violations just in the first three quarters of 2016.

That said, the USDA has gone to China to inspect plants that would process the chicken to be shipped to America. But Corbo finds little comfort in that. "You don't know from moment to moment how China is enforcing food-safety standards," Corbo says.

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In recent months, a team from the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service has traveled to China to train Chinese officials in meat safety.

One thing Thursday's trade deal did not address: U.S. Poultry exports to China. The U.S. Used to send a lot of chicken feet over to China, where they are a delicacy. But China banned U.S. Chicken imports in 2015, after an outbreak of avian flu in the Midwest.

China "was a $750 million market just a few years ago, and now it's essentially zero. It was one of our most important markets," says Jim Sumner, president of the USA Poultry and Egg Export Council.

But Sumner isn't worried about the new competition from Chinese chicken in the U.S. In fact, he welcomes it as an important step in reopening the Chinese market to U.S. Poultry producers.

"Trade is a two-way street," he says.

It's not clear how soon after mid-July we can expect to see cooked chicken products from China in U.S. Supermarkets. Sumner says he doesn't expect the product to overwhelm store shelves, because the economics of raising chickens in China and then shipping them to America still favors U.S. Producers.

Maria Godoy is a senior editor with NPR News and host of The Salt. She's on Twitter: @mgodoyh

The Curious Case Of The Chinese Chicken Import-Export Business

In 2006, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) submitted a list of regulations to the White House aimed at helping China get into the U.S. Chicken market by certifying Chinese facilities to process U.S.-raised poultry for sale back in the States.

Tony Corbo, a lobbyist at the nonprofit public interest organization Food and Water Watch, followed the decision closely, because food processing in China was notoriously poor. Chinese authorities had identified insecticide-soaked hams, soy sauce made from human hair and, in 2004, fake milk powder that gave babies the sometimes fatal "big head disease" (so named because it caused their heads to swell and bodies to wither). Normally, Corbo says, such a decision from the White House could take "months if not years" to come through. But just one day later, the White House gave its approval. Corbo was puzzled until, the following morning, China's president at the time, Hu Jintao, visited then U.S. President George W. Bush in Washington, D.C. "[The approval] was a gift," Corbo concluded. But for what, exactly, wasn't clear.

After the ruling, USDA inspectors went to China and determined that Chinese poultry plants were eligible to process U.S. Chickens. But food problems persisted in the country. Before the year was out, people in China were sickened by fish tainted with illegal antibiotics, vegetables covered in pesticides, snails infected with meningitis and poultry carrying the avian flu virus. Congress voted to completely defund the USDA's poultry inspections of Chinese imports.

Soon China's certification lapsed, but it appealed to the World Trade Organization, which ruled in 2009 that Congress's treatment of the country was unfair. Funding was restored and the process of approval began again. A series of USDA audits followed, all of which found China unfit to process U.S. Poultry. Then, in 2013, without further inspection, the agency granted four Chinese plants certification. "It seems China is continually getting to the head of the line," Corbo says.

Between 2006 and 2014, China's food industry continued to scare people. As Representative Christopher Smith, R-New Jersey, noted in a June 2014 hearing on Chinese food issues, the country produced "meat that glows in the dark, exploding watermelons, bean sprouts containing antibiotics, rice contaminated with heavy metals, mushrooms soaked with bleach, and pork so filled with stimulants that athletes were told not to eat it lest they test positive for banned substances." Since 2007, more than a 1,000 dogs in the U.S. Have died after eating Chinese-made pet food containing poultry. "[The FDA has] tested for all the pathogens they know of," says Barbara Kowalcyk, the Senior Food Safety Risk Analyst at RTI International, a nonprofit research organization. "There is something in there causing dogs to die. It's baffled officials here in the U.S. For years. Why on earth would we allow it to come into the U.S. For human consumption?"

Beyond the health concerns, there also doesn't seem to be any reason to ship chicken to and from China for processing. It "probably doesn't make any economic sense," says Jim Sumner, president of the USA Poultry and Egg Export Council, a nonprofit, industry-sponsored trade organization. According to Sumner—who has visited USDA-approved plants in China and would "put them up against any I've seen anywhere" in terms of cleanliness—"the biggest if not only advantage would be cost of labor." Compared with fish, which is sent from America's West Coast to China for deboning and processing, getting chicken from farm to table is far less labor-intensive, so the savings in labor costs don't seem to beat the expense of shipping chickens back and forth across the ocean. As Mike Martin, director of marketing for Cargill, a meat producer that produces poultry in Europe but does not sell it in the U.S., put it to Newsweek, economically speaking, "it's a head-scratcher."

China agrees. According to a report issued by the USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service in 2007, after the agency's ruling opened the door for China to process U.S. Poultry, China's equivalent of the USDA stated that "this trade is not economical.… Rising international broiler [the subspecies of chicken most commonly raised for meat production] prices and international transportation costs, combined with the unfavorable exchange rate, make re-exports uncompetitive."

Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty

In 2013, in the months before the USDA approved the four Chinese plants to process chickens for the U.S. Market, of the country's four major chicken companies—Tyson, Pilgrim's Pride, Sanderson Farms and Perdue Farms—only Tyson lobbied the USDA for "market access for chicken to China" (and other countries). Neither the National Chicken Council nor the U.S. Poultry and Egg Association put any money toward the cause. When asked about the USDA's decision to allow China to process chickens for the U.S. Market, a Tyson spokesperson told Newsweek, "All of the chicken we sell in the U.S. Is raised and processed here in the U.S. We have no plans to import chicken from China."

So why did Tyson lobby the USDA? Corporations are not required to disclose in detail their reasons for supporting specific issues, but in an email to Newsweek, Tyson says that the lobbying efforts reported in 2013 were around trade and tariff issues for the export of U.S.-produced products into China and not related to the import of poultry products produced in China. It also sought to have Chinese import bans lifted from two major poultry producing states. Tyson Foods and other major poultry producers like Pilgrim's owner JBS are also among the largest beef processors in the country. And in 2009, the companies, along with other large beef and chicken processors and the U.S. Cattlemen's Beef Association, were among more than 50 companies and organizations that signed a letter to U.S. President Barack Obama asking him for support of "regulation governing the importation of cooked poultry products from China," and advocating for open markets for international trade.

When asked about the USDA's ruling, people in the beef and chicken industries, as well as food activists and Representative Rosa DeLauro, D-Connecticut, who is fighting to keep Chinese-processed chickens out of school lunches, all told Newsweek that, in DeLauro's words, "it's all about the beef."

The beef industry's interest in Chinese chickens dates back to 2003, when a cow in Yakima, Washington, was determined to have mad cow disease. Around the world, countries were quick to respond. Japan, the top foreign consumer of U.S. Beef, banned its importation. So did Mexico, South Korea and a score of other countries—China among them. In time, all of these governments reversed their bans except for China.

It is now widely believed that the beef ban is now simply a tactic for China to gain access to the U.S. Chicken market. Indeed, a 2007 report issued by the FDA indicates that the country would much rather be able to sell its own chickens in America. "They're holding U.S. Beef hostage," says DeLauro, "a quid pro quo: U.S. Beef in exchange for Chinese chicken."

The problem is that because the USDA has the "dual mission to promote U.S. Products and safety," it is easily swayed by these types of tactics, says DeLauro. "When it comes to the USDA, it's all about trade trumping safety. It's all about profits. It's pretty outrageous."

The U.S. Beef industry, worth $44 billion, is far more profitable than the American chicken industry. Though pork has traditionally dominated the Chinese market—more than half of the world's pork is consumed by China—beef is on the rise there. While beef has historically been considered a luxury good in China, beef consumption has grown by more than 5 percent in the past year, and demand is expected to keep rising. In response, foreign companies are scrambling to get in on the boom. In the past year, Canada's beef exports to China have multiplied six times; Australia, the largest exporter to China, has multiplied its exports by four times; meanwhile, the U.S. Still can't send its beef to China.

For the U.S. Meat industry, the appeal of the chicken-for-beef trade is clear. Profits from the potential exportation of beef to China, Sumner says, "far exceed" the potential losses in giving up a share of the American chicken market. The motive for China selling its chickens in America is less clear. As Sumner explains, the U.S. Is the largest producer of both corn and sorghum, which are the major ingredients of chicken feed. "Feed is 60 percent of the cost of a chicken," he says. "Whoever produces the cheapest feed produces the cheapest chicken. That'd be us." That means that even if China is able to sell its chickens in the U.S., it's unlikely it would undercut its American competitors.

Still, activists worry that giving China access to the U.S. Chicken market—either to process American-raised poultry or, eventually, to sell its own—is a dangerous gambit, given the Chinese government's poor track record enforcing food safety regulations. For example, in the years leading up to 2008, Chinese customers had been complaining that milk purchased from one of China's largest dairy companies was making children sick. For some reason—either corruption or negligence—officials ignored these concerns. It was only after a foreign shareholder in the company complained to Chinese officials in Beijing that the milk was finally pulled from the market. Eventually, the government prosecuted those involved in the scandal. But for Kowalcyk the response was too late. "The Chinese government shot the people who did that," she says—but not before six infants were killed and more than 50,000 babies were hospitalized. "I can't even imagine who would put melamine in baby formula.

"There are huge problems with China's food safety," she adds. "They're just not there yet."

Correction, September 29, 2014: This text was corrected from an earlier draft version of the article accidentally published due to a production error.

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