Dial Up The Flavor Of Chicken Tenders With This Spicy, Funky Chinese Sauce

The juicy interior and shatteringly crisp exterior of the best chicken tenders make them the perfect vehicle for enjoying with an array of condiments. While you have more than likely done your share of dunking in sauces like barbecue or even your own take on Chick-fil-A's famous Polynesian sauce, perhaps you are ready for something more grown-up. Enter a complex sauce that has been elevating Chinese dishes for decades: XO sauce.

XO sauce is often attributed to a cook who worked at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong in the '80s. Its signature funky and spicy notes largely come from dried shrimp, dried scallops, preserved Jinhua ham, and dried red chilis or chili flakes. It also contains a litany of flavorful ingredients such as fish sauce, garlic, shallots, and a Chinese cooking wine called Shaoxing. This sauce starts with rare and expensive ingredients and involves a time- and labor-intensive cooking process that includes rehydrating, heating, frying, and blending. Its name means extra old, borrowing the XO as an ode to extra old cognac, which has come to evoke a similar luxury and prestige as the expensive ingredients in XO sauce, though the sauce contains no cognac and isn't aged. XO sauce has also often been used to flavor Chinese dishes from noodles to meat and vegetable stir-fries – and it's great with fried chicken.

Much like drinking Champagne with fried chicken, enjoying XO sauce on chicken tenders is a quiet signal of plenty. This is not a sauce that you use lightly. This is a sauce to covet. Perhaps it is best to start with slightly more pedestrian but still unexpected chicken tender dips, like a duck sauce or a cooling dip like bang bang. Then you can break out this rarefied and special-feeling sauce as a complement — or, dare we say, a peak move. Just a little XO sauce is plenty and will almost read like gilding your tenders with a high roller add-on like caviar or truffles.

Let's be clear though, XO is not a sauce for the meek. One taste and you will join the IFYYK camp. Think chili sauce, but more flavor in all the ways. The rehydrated fish and ham anchor the overall taste profile, but your mouth will keep on dancing with the heat of chilis that comes in afterwards. If you are craving chicken tenders in a way you may have never experienced, give XO sauce a try. Scatter on some finely sliced scallions to finish and it will be the chicken tender equivalent of making it rain. You may want to keep your findings to yourself though, as store-bought versions of this luxury condiment can easily go for more than $20 a bottle.