How to Make Sweet & Sour Sauce

"My name's Brandon Sarkis on behalf of expertvillage. Today I'm going to show you how to make Sweet and Sour Chicken, as well as Sweet and Sour Pork. Okay, so now you'll see I'm back to make the sauce. I've got my brown sugar, rice wine vinegar, my ketchup and cornstarch. What you're going to do with the cornstarch, though, is you've got to wait until the last second to do this, right before you make the sauce, which is right now. Let me move this out of the way. We're going to take just a regular old fork because the tines work really well to mix this up. We're just going to add a little bit of water to this and stir it and what this does is the water helps get the lumps out and helps actually transfer it over to the work for cooking that much easier. You want to make sure to get all the way to the bottom, too, because it will clump up in the bottom and you should get a nice, almost like a milky looking substance here. And what will happen is when this hits heat; this'll thicken right up, therefore thickening up our sauce. So we're going to go ahead and do our sauce, and let's start. So, here we are, we've got our wok, and that wok handle is so hot, I can barely touch it. Got our wok nice and hot. What we're going to do now is add all of our dry ingredients from earlier. Add the sugar, and we're going to add my ketchup here. I've got a little rubber spatula to help me out in case the ketchup doesn't want to cooperate, although it appears to be cooperating very nicely. So, now what we're going to do is we're going to dump in that rice wine vinegar. Now, we're going to stir everything up. It turns a nice reddish color. You've got to watch out because your sugar will try to crystallize in the bottom, so you want to make sure to get all the way to the bottom. Scrape it out. Alright, so now that it's gotten pretty thick on it's own, we're going to hit it with just a little bit of cornstarch here; finish it off. See what happens, is the cornstarch gives it that nice gelatinous look we're all used to. Obviously this isn't that gelatinous because it's still very, very hot. And if you want, you can always just add more cornstarchs to achieve desired consistency. You want to make sure you don't cook it too much with the cornstarch in there because you can actually cook all the cornstarch right out of it."