But for simplicity’s sake, for frying, you generally want to use neutral, refined oils like vegetable oil, refined olive oil, or corn oil. It’s not totally true that you should avoid olive oil since you can buy either refined or unrefined varieties. The sweet and sour flavor profile became so popular that, in 1983, McDonald’s introduced the McNugget along with four sauces, including the sweet and sour sauce that we all know and love. As ketchup adapted to Western tastes, it gradually morphed into a mushroom-based sauce, and then a sweeter tomato-based sauce popularized by companies like Heinz.Īs China began importing tomato ketchup in the 1900s, many Chinese chefs started experimenting and incorporating ketchup into traditional sweet and sour dishes as an easier alternative to making the sauce base from scratch.Īnd coming full-circle, as Chinese immigrants made their way to America and other countries, they brought dishes like sweet and sour pork with them. Soon after, Westerners started developing their own homegrown recipes for ketchup in order to avoid paying for imported sauce. Initially, British traders made a ton of profit selling imported fish ketchup back at home. In Hokkien, it was called kê-chiap, a name that stuck throughout Southeast Asia.Īround the same era, British traders in Southeast Asia became obsessed with their newly discovered “catchup”, and it quickly took storm as they brought it back to Britain. Somewhere along the way, fish sauce fell out of favor in China, but it remained a staple of Southeast Asian cuisine.Ībout 2000 years later, in the 1600-1700s, fish sauce was revived in China by traders traveling along the coast between Guangdong and Fujian and Vietnam + Cambodia. So, I went down a rabbit hole and emerged with an appreciation for ketchup and sweet and sour pork as symbols of the many ways in which Eastern and Western cultures have influenced one another.Įven though ketchup is known as a tomato sauce that we throw onto burgers or French fries, we can trace ketchup back to 300BC as a Chinese fermented fish sauce.
(It's actually used in quite a lot of traditional recipes, dating back to the 1900s.) If you’re like me, you might be thinking, “why is ketchup being used in a traditional Chinese recipe?”
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