Adam Liaw Instagram – Tonight’s dinner. Gong bao ji ding (宫保鸡丁). A classic dish of Sichuan cuisine, but one that’s also been largely “lost in translation” creating so many misconceptions about Chinese cuisine outside China. It’s chicken flash fried with dried chillies, Sichuan peppercorns, spring onion and peanuts and within China it’s distinctive for (a) its seasoning profile of ma-la (hot and numbing) combined with sweet and sour, (b) being made with chicken breast, (c) and the inclusion of peanuts. It’s adaptations of “kungpao chicken”, “General Tso’s chicken” and “chicken with cashew nuts” largely remove the spice, replacing the dried chillies with capsicum and omitting Sichuan peppercorns, leaning more into a thick sweet and sour sauce, and use various nuts from almonds to cashews. It’s popularity, particularly in the US, has meant that many people’s idea of a stir-fry is chicken breast, coated in a sweet and sour sauce with a lot of vegetables, and some nuts sprinkled in at the end “for crunch”, despite there being very few Chinese stir-fried dishes that do any of these things. So next time you see someone sprinkling sesame seeds over stir-fry, know that this dish is what started that kind of stuff.