Baked Sweet and Sour Chicken with Fried Rice
You can enjoy amazing Chinese food at home with this Baked Sweet and Sour Chicken with Fried rice recipe. This is one delicious dinner!
I have a DELICIOUS recipe for you all! I am so excited to share this one. My family and I LOVE this dish. It has such a great flavor. You could probably trick your family into thinking you picked up Chinese food at a gourmet restaurant. It is that good, I promise!
I found these recipe one million years ago on Mel’s Kitchen Cafes website. Her site is filled with incredible recipes. I made this last night for dinner and I think we all ate it up within 10 minutes! It’s so good. I hope you give it a try soon. 🙂
Baked Sweet and Sour Chicken
Delicious sweet and sour chicken baked in the oven. This recipe beats any take-out Chinese!
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Ingredients
Chicken
- 3 to 4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
- salt and pepper
- 1 cup cornstarch
- 2 large eggs beaten
- 1/4 cup vegetable oil
Sweet and Sour Sauce
- 3/4 cup granulated sugar
- 1/4 cup ketchup
- 1/2 cup distilled white vinegar
- 1 Tablespoon low sodium soy sauce
- 1 teaspoon garlic salt
Instructions
Chicken
- Preheat the oven to 325 ℉. Cut the chicken breasts into 1-inch pieces. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Place the cornstarch in a gallon-sized Ziplock bag. Place the chicken pieces into the bag with the cornstarch and seal, tossing to coat the chicken.
- Whisk the eggs together in a shallow pie plate.
- Meanwhile, heat the oil in a large skillet over medium heat until very hot. Dip the cornstarch-coated chicken pieces in the egg and place them carefully in a single layer in the hot skillet.
- Cook for 20 to 30 seconds on each side until the crust is golden. (The chicken will finish cooking in the oven.)
- Place the chicken pieces in a single layer in a 9×13-inch baking dish and repeat with the remaining chicken pieces.
Sweet and Sour Sauce
- Mix the sweet and sour sauce ingredients together in a medium bowl and pour evenly over the chicken.
- Bake the chicken, uncovered, for 40 minutes, tossing the chicken once at the halfway mark. Serve over warm rice and enjoy!
Notes
Serve this delicious chicken with the fried rice recipe below!
Tried this recipe?Mention @lifeinthelofthouse or tag #lifeinthelofthouse!
Recipe time updated to 40 minutes on 8/4/25
Ingredients
- 1 Tablespoon sesame oil
- 1 Tablespoon vegetable oil
- 1 cup frozen peas and carrots
- 1 small white onion chopped
- 2 teaspoons minced garlic
- 2 large eggs slightly beaten
- 3 cups cold cooked white rice (important it is pre-cooked cold rice)
- 1/4 cup low sodium soy sauce
Instructions
- Heat the sesame oil and vegetable oil, over medium-high heat, in a large skillet or wok. Add the peas/carrots mix, onion, and garlic. Stir fry until veggies are tender.
- Lower the heat to medium low and push the mixture off to one side, then pour eggs on the other side of skillet. Stir fry until scrambled.
- Add the cold, cooked rice and soy sauce. Stir and blend all together until thoroughly heated. Serve and enjoy!
Tried this recipe?Mention @lifeinthelofthouse or tag #lifeinthelofthouse!
This was a huge hit with my family!!! I haven’t made the Fried rice and just serve it over regular rice. I also steam up some broccoli to toss in with the mixture so that it is more of a complete meal. My 15 yo daughter even made this meal last night…it’s that easy! It was wonderful coming home to a cooked meal!!!
Loved this so much & it was easy to make! Much better than any Chinese takeout. I made some additions to the sweet & sour sauce by adding onions, green peppers & pineapple to make it more like the restaurant by us. Will definitely make this again…thanks for sharing!!!
A few notes:
1. If you pre-soak the chicken in baking soda for about 15 minutes, then rinse it well and pat it dry before starting, your chicken will have better flavor and texture, and be very tender. That’s a Chinese restaurant trick, and it works for pork, too.
2. Adding onions and peppers is necessary for me, it doesn’t seem like sweet & sour chicken without them. Pineapple chunks are okay, but I can live without them.
3. For the fried rice, if you replace the soy sauce with a 1:1:1 mixture of soy sauce, fish or oyster sauce, and Maggi seasoning sauce, you will get a much more authentic Chinese restaurant flavor.
Otherwise, this is great, I love the idea of doing it in the oven. Good job.
Another note re the rice – you must use older cooked rice, like make it the day before and refrigerate it or use leftover rice from a few days earlier. If you use fresh cooked rice, it will be too sticky and clump together. It needs time to dry out some in the fridge before you try to make fried rice with it. Also, if you store the rice in a zipper bag, it’s easier to break up for fried rice.
I made this for our Valentine’s dinner. I added some shrimp at it was really, really good. Thanks!
Made this last night with my boyfriend and it was amazing! We were hesitant about dipping the chicken in the cornstarch first and then the egg but we were pleasently surprised as to how the chicken got this nice crispy coating. By the end of the baking cycle, the sauce carmalized and thickened.
We seasoned the chicken a tad bit more and also added cayenne pepper for kick. We added more salt to the sauce and a little less vinegar. And finally we only needed half a cup of cornstarch and one egg for the chicken. Everything else was spot on and we have leftovers for today.
Thank you so much! We’ll definitely be making this again!!
I made this tonight for dinner, it turned out AMAZING! This will definitely be in our “this is a keeper” recipe book! Thanks for sharing!
Hey!! I bookmarked this so so long ago and finally made it in December, then I finally blogged about it lol.
https://www.soverydomestic.com/blog/index.php/2012/02/16/3999/
🙂
Excellent recipe!
Made this last night for dinner. Let me tell you…AHmazing!!! My boyfriend extremely picky and only likes chicken and rice so I have begun finding plain chicken recipes…this is NO plain chicken. The flavor is unbelievble and it’s really easy to make :o) Next time I will add some red pepper flakes for a little kick but that’s because we love spicy so much!!! MAKE THIS CHICKEN!
Tried to make both of these last night…The stir fry was pretty good, think I’ll do a few tweaks, (like have day old rice etc.), but the rice overall was good. The chicken however was an EPIC FAIL. I made some changes (doubled the recipe but had too much sauce so poured much out – most likely the sugar portion, cooked in a cookie sheet, not a 9×13,) it tasted really pungent and sour and even a little burnt…so I will try it again and perhaps even follow the directions this time:)
Do you think I can freeze the rice? It made a ton!
made this tonight. i only had a small amount of corn starch so i used what i had plus corn flour to make a full cup. turned the oven up to 375 the last 15 minutes to crisp the chicken up a bit and it was perfect. the family LOVED this chicken and the rice. i used short grain brown rice that i had cooked and froze earlier in the week and low sodium tamari instead of soy sauce.
so delicious! thanks for the recipe.
Made this for dinner tonight after craving chinese food for two weeks. I had all the ingredints for the sweet and sour chicken and decided to try it out (found recipe from pinterest!).
My husband and I are still drooling over the chicken – it was soo good! I’ll definitely be keeping this recipe and hope to double it next time. Thank you for such an awesome recipe!
I made this tonight, and it was the best thing I have ever cooked. My husband walked in from work and said it smelled like a chinese resturant. I was so proud that I made a dish that tasted so good, all from scratch. Thanks so much!
I have actually never left a comment on a blog before (haha), but I just HAD to post after I made this tonight. My 2 1/2 yr old daughter does not eat any type of meat… so frustrating. In yet another attempt to get her to try some chicken, I smeared this chicken on her lips & had her lick her lips. She liked it so much that she speared a piece of chicken herself & ate it!! And then kept eating ALL the chicken!! Yayy! Thank you so much for sharing!
I stumbed upon this today on Pinterest and HAD to try it. I had all the ingredients, so it worked out perfectly. I subbed in 4 frozen chicken breasts and it still turned out great. I found that it had an abundance of oil (both for the chicken and for the rice), so I might reduce it by half next time and see how it turns out. I did sub olive oil for canola in the chicken recipe to make it a bit healthier, and it still tasted great. Overall, it was delicious, and now I’m going to fall into a food coma from eating so much of it lol. My husband requested that I made this once a week. No need to order chinese takeout ever again!
i made this for my husband and me tonight. it was a HUGE success! thank you for sharing
I’m trying to calculate the nutritional info for this recipe and I was wondering how many servings this makes…thanks! Can’t wait to try it!
WOW!! I made this tonight and it was DELICIOUS! Better than our Chinese restaurant! I made some Yum Yum Sauce to go with the rice using the recipe here: https://www.japanese-steakhouse-white-sauce.com/white-sauce-recipe.htm
EXCELLENT!
Quess everyone knows this is a wonderful dish. I printed it sometime ago and have made a couple of times since. Posted it on my blog today so just wanted to let you know. Thank you for a wonderful fast delicious meal. Andi Thewedenesdaybaker.blogspot.com
Made this tonight and it was soooo yummy!
https://www.toddlindsey.com/2012/03/shrimp-fried-brown-rice.html
Thanks so much!
I made this tonight and it was delicious. I just served it with steamed rice and everyone ate it up. Next time I think I will add some chopped veg, like bell peppers and onion, as one of the other comments has suggested.
I wasn’t sure what vinegar to use, so I used pickling vinegar which was all I had. It was a bit too vinegary, but I tasted the sauce before I put it in the oven and added some honey and it was fine.
Wonderful recipe. I followed the recipe exactly, and it turned out fantastically! Everyone in my family loved it. I’ll definitely be making this again.
Made this for dinner. AWESOME!! Kids loved it, hubby loved it, I loved it. THANK YOU!!!
I just made this tonight and it was soooo good! It was like getting take out. The only change I made was to add deli ham to the rice for a pork fried rice flavor. The chicken was delish. My husband and I loved it. I wouldn’t call it healthy but way healthier than take out and tastes just as good and you know exactly what’s in it. THanks so much for posting!