Sweet and sour vegetables can be made with a variety of ingredients and a simple or complex sauce. Stronger vegetables like carrots and eggplants are recommended, and the dish is traditionally served with rice or noodles.
Meat isn’t necessary to prepare a meal, particularly if there are enough ingredients on hand and bathed in complex layers of flavor. Making sweet and sour vegetables can involve an easy or difficult blend of components, with a medley of chopped greens and rice covered in a distinctly Asian sauce that’s tart, sweet, and salty. This coating can be a simple blend of ketchup, vinegar, sugar and soy or a complex blend adding other ingredients such as ginger, fruit juice, Worcestershire sauce, garlic, nuts, mustard and wine.
Since sweet and sour vegetables are a vegetarian meal, they should consist of stronger styles of vegetables. These include carrots, potatoes, mushrooms, tomatoes and eggplants. Each component is then cut into bite-sized portions and often blanched in cold water for at least a few minutes before boiling or frying. Often, the final cooking of the vegetables takes place in a vegetable broth which will serve as the basis for the sweet and sour sauce.
A simple sauce for sweet and sour vegetables, available from the Help With Cooking website, involves cooking the vegetables while making a sauce that can be poured over the vegetables later. The sauce is a quick blend of pantry staples: 4 tbsp. (about 60 g) brown sugar, 1 tsp. (about 5 ml) of soy sauce, 1 tbsp. (about 15 mL) of ketchup and 0.33 cup (about 80 mL) of rice vinegar. These ingredients are brought to a boil, then a mixture of 2 tsp. (about 10 g) of cornstarch with 4 tsp. (about 60 ml) of water is added as a thickener.
Others prefer to infuse sweet and sour greens with complementary flavors throughout the cooking process. This more complex process is illustrated on the Cook UK recipe website, which involves simmering vegetables in vegetable stock, while simultaneously whipping up a sauce in a separate pan. The sauce starts with chopped onion, minced garlic and oil, then is further developed with soy sauce, vinegar, wine, chopped walnuts, tomato paste, brown sugar, salt, pepper, and finally, arrowroot as a thickener. Once the sauce is thick enough, it is added to the hot vegetables and allowed to melt for another 10 minutes or more before serving.
The traditional way to serve sweet and sour vegetables is with rice, either plain or fried. Another possibility is to serve the dish with noodles. Some may just use the veggies and sauce, though, as a heavy dipping sauce for flatbread.
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