BackA vexing request, a great flop
Samar Halarnkar tries replicating the Panda Express orange chicken
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This is a tale of culinary failure, my first ever with one of my main consumers.
It all began one bright summer’s day in Bengaluru.
“Appa, can you please make orange chicken?"
That was my five-year-old’s chief request after a month of separation from her father. Of course, she had missed her staples, especially my grilled chicken and 5-minute fish curry and her grandmother’s marrow bones.
“Yummmmy!" she said, as she fell upon the grilled chicken. “After so long, appa’s chicken!" She quickly looked across at me, eyeing the drumstick, and issued a warning: “And don’t touch the cartilage appa, I want it."
Yes, me and my daughter, we tussle for the soft, bony cartilage at both ends of a chicken drumstick. In magnanimous moments, she lets me have it, but she had been without cartilage for a month, so she wasn’t feeling magnanimous.
After she oohed and aahed over the cartilage, she told me about the one thing that she really liked during a month in California with her aunt, uncle and new cousin: orange chicken.
Orange chicken? It even sounds dubious.
“She really did like it," my wife told me. “She ate it in malls all the time."
I sighed. This is what the US does—wins over my home-cooked-food-loving daughter with what is doubtless an ajinomoto-laden culinary perversion.
My wife said this dubious entrée was the speciality of a fast-food chain that specializes in cheap, mall food. A little research later, it emerged that orange chicken was actually world-famous—in the US, as so many things tend to be.
On the Internet, I found this: “Orange chicken is a dish inspired by the Hunan Province in South Central China. It is prepared with crispy boneless chicken bites, tossed in the wok with our secret sweet and spicy orange sauce. Panda’s very own Executive Chef Andy brought this entrée to life and it quickly became Panda’s most beloved dish."
This was not a promising start. I was trawling through the website of a chain called Panda Express, whose logo was, unsurprisingly, a panda. Apparently, Panda Express is a 30-year-old chain of restaurants that began life in Pasadena, California. The chicken was the brainchild of Andrew Cherng, an immigrant from China. Cherng’s American dream took shape as a “fine-dining restaurant (that) introduced the robust flavors of Mandarin and Szechuan cuisine to Southern California and became the inspiration and standard for the Panda Express restaurants that are loved across the world today".
Are they?
There are more than 1,700 Panda Express restaurants across the US, although most appear to be in California. One outlet is in Mexico City, so I suppose the world-famous claim is accurate.
I stood corrected.
Panda Express is loved across the world—in California.
Much to my chagrin, I found that the mysterious orange chicken was their best-selling dish. It was mysterious only to me. The dish was actually orange, a vivid orange that spoke of additives of some kind.
And this is what I was supposed to make?
It got worse. I soon found the Internet was full of recipes and YouTube videos of various versions of orange chicken: How to make Panda Express orange chicken at home; The Pioneer Woman cooks orange chicken; Orange chicken (copycat Panda Express)—and so on.
The recipes, not very simple, involved a lot of deep-frying, sauce-making and refrying. This certainly did not follow my mantra of quick, no-fuss cooking. But what was I to do? My daughter, who is otherwise a willing subject for my culinary experiments, for once had a request.
The least I could do was to take a crack at orange chicken. Of course, it would have to be my version of it.
That gave me hope. I took a printout of The Pioneer Woman’s recipe and got to work. I had no place in my freezer for atrocities like boneless chicken—the basic requirement for orange chicken—so I had to thaw my usual legs and thighs and chop them up into bite-sized pieces.
Making orange chicken was not easy. As you can see from the recipe below, it really is quite a process. The most difficult part was the deep-frying. Don’t laugh. I know that as an Indian deep-frying should be as easy as, well, talking loudly or throwing trash on the road. But with my low- to no-oil approach to cooking, I bumbled my way through the deep- frying. I didn’t even have vegetable oil, so I had to use olive oil at medium heat, which is not a good idea because olive oil really should not be smoked.
In the event, I finished the vexed process and at the end I had a pile of chicken that was faintly coloured orange, so I suppose it was orange chicken. I couldn’t get myself to eat it, so I submitted it to the one-person, five-year-old target audience.
By the time I did, she was jet-lagged, tired and cranky. The first flush of reunion-fuelled affection had faded. Her face was already screwed up when she took a taste of the orange chicken. The verdict was clear and ringing: “I DON’T like it. This is not like the Panda chicken." I finally tasted the chicken. It wasn’t so bad, but it was markedly orange-y.
I stared at her. I am not used to kitchen experiments gone wrong, I am not used to failure, and I am not used to my daughter—jet-lagged or not—expressing her disapproval about my cooking. For everything, there comes a day. This was that day.
Orange chicken
Serves 1-2 children
Ingredients
200g boneless chicken, cut into bite-sized bits
2 tsp cornstarch
2 egg whites
Whisk the egg whites until frothy. Mix in the cornstarch and swirl well. Let the chicken soak in this mixture for 10-15 minutes.
For the sauce
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 tsp ginger, finely chopped
Zest of half orange
Juice of 1 orange
1 tsp plain vinegar (I did not have this, so I used red-wine vinegar)
1 tsp sesame oil
1 tsp red-chilli flakes (I did not have this, so I used 1 tsp cajun powder)
1 tsp cornstarch
2 tbsp water
Salt, to taste
Method
In a wok or saucepan, mix all the ingredients—except the cornstarch and water—and gently swirl on low-medium heat until the sauce starts to bubble. Premix the cornstarch and water into a paste—add to the sauce and cook until it thickens. Set aside.
In a wok, heat vegetable oil (half cup should be enough), until it smokes. Deep-fry the chicken, stirring so that pieces do not stick. Remove when golden-brown (it takes 2-3 minutes) and set aside on kitchen paper, so that the excess oil is absorbed. Return to oil so that the coating is sealed (none of this worked for me, the coating separated because the oil was not hot enough). Remove from oil, drain again, mix with sauce. Add salt if needed. Grind fresh pepper atop if needed.
Serve hot with rice or noodles.
This is a column on easy, inventive cooking from a male perspective. Samar Halarnkar also writes the fortnightly science column Frontier Mail for Mint and is the author of the book The Married Man’s Guide To Creative Cooking And Other Dubious Adventures.
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