Your list of ingredients there quite carefully left out the entire ladle full of cane sugar. By volume it’s about one third of the sauce by way of how every takeaway place I’ve ever seen prepares it.

0_0 Yowza… even if it’s “just” a #1 ladle, that’s a shit-ton of the white stuff. The place where I worked used ~1.5tbsp of white sugar per pound of chicken thigh. I… almost want to try one of these recipes you mentioned just so that I can get dessert and dinner in one container. :D

This might be true for the shittiest of Chinese-American recipes. Just like OP, I don’t know where you’re getting your sesame chicken, but I suggest you stop going there.

Now, regarding the bases being mostly sugar, if you’re talking chemically, your statement is true: starches are just chains of sugar. But if your GTC and SC only differ by crushed red, you’re getting robbed.

Source: worked pantry/prep in the most popular Chinese take-out-only joint in Albany NY while in college. GTC was by far the most popular dish, averaging ~700 orders per night, pre Internet.

Granted, Chinese-American recipes are chaos. In my experience though, the best GTC recipes use whole japones chiles which are toasted in oil to make them more fragrant and a much more attractive presentation. Rice wine vinegar, garlic, ginger, and oyster sauce are the other primary notes. The balance of these notes IMO are what define the signature of the best GTC for any given restaurant, and everyone is just bringing their own spin to that mix.

Some of the comments here and some of the “Best GTC/SC Recipe EVAARRR!” that I see on the interwebz… Holy hell, y’all. I want to come cook for you, because… DAMN. There’s some genuinely so-shitty-it’s-hilarious-yet-tragic C-A recipes out there.

I don’t know where you’re getting General Tso’s chicken, but may I suggest not going there anymore? :D

Casual AF. I’m here to get shit done, not take any shit from my OS, not pay permanent rents to run my computers*, and do things my way. Protecting my privacy, fulfilling the promise of general purpose computing, and lack of DRM are just icing on the cake.

*Totally happy to donate on the regular to the open source apps I use!

Abstract rational logic seems to be very poor in this place. I often forget how the elementary must be tediously explained.

Or… you’re not nearly as smart as you think you are. You might be extremely intelligent and well-read, but you are plenty fucking stupid. There’s no point in having ideas, regardless of quality or merit, if you can’t convey them such that people can understand them.