Cashew Chicken

Most recipes for cashew chicken dish out syrupy sauces and tough chicken—and sorely lack cashew flavor and crunch. Here’s what we discovered:

Test Kitchen Discoveries

• To remedy dry and flavorless chicken, we marinated the breasts in a little soy sauce. The salt in the soy penetrates the meat much like a brine, promoting juiciness and deep seasoning.
• We also turned to a technique called velveting, where raw chicken is tossed with cornstarch and oil. This forms a thin coating around the chicken and protects it from heat. To save time, we added those ingredients right to the soy sauce marinade, producing juicy chicken that was tender inside and out.
• Many cashew chicken recipes are packed with onion, carrot, and celery, which don’t add much flavor. We omitted them and increased the amount of chicken.
• Tasters liked the freshness of snow peas and the crunch of water chestnuts, which we added toward the end of cooking to preserve their texture.
• For the sauce, after testing various combinations, we went with soy sauce cut with chicken broth to mitigate its saltiness. We replaced the rice wine vinegar and sugar with mirin, a sweet rice wine, and instead of hard-to-find Chinese black vinegar, we used Worcestershire sauce to give the sauce complex richness.
• We doubled the amount of cashews that most recipes call for and toasted them to intensify their flavor and crunch. Chop half of the nuts to better incorporate them into the sauce. Add them at the last minute to ensure plenty of nutty crunch in every bite.