Healthy General Tso Chicken

This healthy General Tso Chicken recipe pairs crispy baked chicken with a spicy, flavorful sauce to rival your favorite takeout with a fraction of the calories. Since the chicken is baked instead of fried, each serving of this version has 40 grams of protein with just 13 grams of fat, 365 calories, and 5 WW Smart Points.

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I wouldn’t call any recipe that requires breading chicken easy, but this General Tso chicken is well worth the effort. Trust me!

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How to Make Crispy Baked Chicken for Healthy General Tso Chicken

If you follow my Instagram stories, you may have seen my 3-day saga of testing different chicken recipes. I started out with the Corn Flakes method like in my spicy popcorn chicken recipe but found the crispy exterior came off when tossing in the sauce.

I tried a few blends of Corn Flakes, flour, and corn starch before settling on the tried and true breadcrumbs and grated parmesan. This method also produces the lowest calorie General Tso Chicken out of the bunch.

To make the crispy baked chicken, all you need to do is mix an egg with black pepper, soy sauce, red wine vinegar (or any vinegar) and throw cubed chicken breast in for a quick soak.

Mix the breadcrumbs and parmesan together before adding about a tablespoon of the egg mixture and crumbling. This creates some larger crispy bits that you get with fried chicken.

Then it’s as easy as coating the chicken pieces and throwing on a wire rack to bake. If you have extra breadcrumbs or marinade, feel free to go double batter on a few pieces.

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For a pre-breaded chicken option, check out the Just Bare lightly breaded chicken breast chunks I used for my healthy sweet and sour chicken or the Perdue Farms option I used for my Panda Express honey sesame chicken copycat.

How to Make the Healthy General Tso Sauce

The real star of the show in this recipe is the sauce. There are a couple carryover ingredients like vinegar and soy sauce so don’t sweat the long-ish ingredient list. At its core, you’ll need to prep a few veggies:

scallions
ginger
garlic
dried chiles

Other than those, all ya need to do is mix a few liquid ingredients in a bowl.

Cook the veggies in a tiny bit of oil to bring out their flavors before adding the liquid and cooking the sauce down to that thick, spicy General Tso sauce you know and love.

After the chicken is baked, toss in the sauce and you’re done. Easy peasy!

Modification Notes

I’ll run through a handful of ingredient questions I expect to pop up. If you have a question I don’t cover, drop a comment at the bottom of this post.

Breadcrumbs

If you need a lower carb option, crushed pork rinds are always a good alternative. You could also try gluten free breadcrumbs or the Corn Flakes method I mentioned above.

Red Wine Vinegar

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You could substitute another vinegar like cider or balsamic (something tart) or even citrus like lemon juice. Honestly, I think any any vinegar would do the trick.

Swerve Brown Sugar

Swerve makes a line of erythritol-based (sugar alcohol) zero-calorie, non-glycemic sugar substitutes that I love and have used in everything from Nashville Hot Chicken Burgers to Peanut Butter Protein Cookies.

If you have regular light brown sugar on hand, rock that. The recipe only calls for 1/4 cup so it’s not like you’ll ruin the healthy part of this healthy General Tso chicken recipe.

Update: My baked orange chicken recipe uses Walden Farms pancake syrup in place of brown sugar. That could be another great brown sugar substitute.

Can I omit the veggies?

Yeah but don’t. 😉

Final Healthy General Tso Chicken Recipe Notes

Nutrition Facts

I split the nutrition facts into 4 servings and didn’t get the weight of each serving. If you need 100% accurate servings, you can weigh the entire finished recipe and divide by 4 (or however many servings you’d like). You could also count the total chicken pieces and divide that way.

Spice Level

As far as General Tso chicken recipes go, I’d say this fairly standard if not on the milder side. If you are spice sensitive, you can omit the chiles or cut the sriracha in half. Those are pretty much the only heavy hitters in the bunch.

Also, serving with rice, cauliflower rice, or other veggies should help balance out the heat. Need a low carb option? Check out my guide on how to make fried cauliflower rice in an air fryer.

I think you’re ready to go. Be sure to let me know what you think about this healthy General Tso chicken. You can leave a recipe review tag me in a pic on Instagram @mason_woodruff to let me know it’s Tso tasty.