Unless you go to basically a non franchise, non chain, actual asian/chinese restaurant/take out place… yeah basically if you dont do that, you are getting pretty much reconstituted chicken puree doused in… not really even real orange chicken sauce.
As with much modern food in America… its got waaaay more sugar and is missing other vital parts of the original way of making it.
Real orange chicken from a real chinese place tastes significantly different, and varies from place to place if they actually make the sauce on site. Usually a different medley of spices and oils… way more flavorful than extremely sweet orangeness.
No, it isn’t a traditional Chinese recipe, but many American Chinese restaurants have figured out a way to do an analog of it as I described, due to many Americans now expecting it as a basic staple of ‘Chinese food’.
I thought this too, especially after I lived in China for years, but I just went to Southern China and tangerine chicken is a traditional food used for celebrations.
Even if you don’t eat it, since it’s sweet, it’s like a traditional celebratory good luck food to always have with your feasts at weddings or promotion dinners or family get-togethers.
First time I ever saw orange chicken in China, but apparently it is a traditional food down south, as far back as anyone I talked to remembers, and it’s important to note that in the south, every spring festival every family and business buys a tangerine or clementine tree like a Christmas tree, so likely not an original Hawaiian creation in 1987 or whatever that cook says it was.
Maybe he independently created it, but it doesn’t look like he originally created it.
When I was riding through the city I was in, there were multiple commercial rows like 100 deep and a thousand wide of clementine and tangerine trees, it was pretty cool.
Maybe the Chinese orange chicken is actually made from clementines and not tangerines, because I remember there being a lot more clementine trees
It’s pretty easy to make at home too. I make vegan orange chicken often.
Edit: the downvotes you get the minute you mention the “v-word” are hilarious. Some of you people are so touchy about a stranger on the internet just having a nice time and eating whatever food he wants to, god damn.
I usually buy the gardein nuggets as they have a really good texture for it. You can use the big TVP chunks. If you do, you should hydrate it in stock with a splash of vinegar, press the moisture out, sautee in lots of fat until a good sear develops, and then coat in breadcrumbs or corn-starch and fry.
I’ll do tofu as well. You have to buy good tofu though, not that mealy garbage in the plastic container full of water.
Fried cauliflower is delicious, but devoid of protein, so I never use it here as I don’t want to be hungry in an hour.
If you really want to blow your mind, look up the ad campaign when they introduced Chicken Nuggets in the 1980s. It was very much inspired by tempura fried chicken, so nuggets are literally the fast food version of the kind of chicken underneath the orange chicken sauce.
Sorry, what? Err, yes, of course it is… i mean, its not quite chicken nuggets in the fast food sense, its cut pieces of chicken breast fried in batter and tossed in sauce as opposed to mashed up and reformed chicken anythings battered and tossed in sauce so its a little higer quality.
Forgive me, but it’s like saying a snickers is just a mars bar but with nuts in.
100%, but the context was around overly processed chicken made of “beaks and arseholes” as my mum used to say.
Also, generally speaking, chicken nuggets are low quality reformed chicken. I appreciate that anecdotally your experience is different. I wish i had grown up eating those nuggets as they sound excellent. However, for the majority, I’m certain that it’s the shit nuggets most people were brought up on.
If you work in a decent restaurant, the sweet and sour chicken is the light meat. We used dark meat for General Tso’s, Orange Chicken, and Sesame Chicken. It tastes better.
I think light chicken meat tastes better than dark, hands down, always. I always thought dark meat was used because it’s cheaper, or because they have to use it in something to get rid of it. I never knew it was because it was a traditional recipe thing - TIL, thanks!
Edit pound for pound, dark meat is less expensive than light, so cost may still be a factor, but it means I can still hope to find a place that makes a more luxurious General Tso’s, etc, with white. Still, lucky for you that you prefer the cheaper stuff! It’s like, I still prefer Taco Bell to fancy restaurants that make tacos with surloin slices or some crap - just give me ground beef, for christsakes.
We’ve had a ton of debates in my object oriented programming classes about the cube rule of food. Representing it using classes and inheritance with varying food types can be fun:
I think to be organized you’d pick one cuisine as a base object. So if a hotdog is a taco, then beef wellington is a burrito (bread on all sides) as is a calzone.
My idea is you pick one ethnic style as the base and use the cube bread rule to classify every food under that one ethnic base class. So if you start with the idea that a hotdog is a taco, you’d make Mexican your base ethnic cuisine and classify all other foods into a type of Mexican food.
The point about the chicken mash is not the main point. Merely an observation about the caveat in my main point that the statement about orange chicken being orange and chicken is essentially just listing ingreadients.
Like saying cake is just flour eggs butter and sugar.
Yeah. Orange chicken is just orange sauce and chicken nuggets. Of course it is.
Wendy’s tested this concept I guess about a decade ago. The commercial ran check out Wendy’s new Asian creations. I looked at the wife we both said f*** yeah and headed right over.
In the promo material in store it looked like hand breaded pieces of chicken lightly covered in a thick sauce. It was like general tso’s and orange chicken had a baby. And then we ordered and it was six of their tiny little crappy frozen chicken nuggets barely tossed in a little bit of a nugget sauce. I never went back to Wendy’s.
I mean, gong-bao chicken is also just diced chicken tossed in sauce, and san-bei chicken is, too. Beef Wellington is just half-ass cooked beef in pie crust.
Eh, if you get really good chicken nuggets, yeah. You can find non-fastfood nuggets that are cut up thigh or breast.
But yeah, most of the Chinese-American restaurant chicken whatever is a fried piece of chicken in a sauce. Orange, sesame, tsos, they’re all essentially the same thing in different sauce. Obviously, there’s some variation in that, but it holds true in general
Chicken nuggets are usually made by making ground chicken but orange chicken is a solid chicken breast cut into chunks. The texture is totally different and texture plays a huge part in taste. Not that it would be bad if it was chicken nuggets. I’m actually surprised that you can’t just get orange or lemon sauce at McDonald’s because those would be bomb as fuck.
But the baby chick macerator drops the fluffy goo into a different bucket. It’s not even necessarily the same processing plant as where the adult chickens are slaughtered for meat. Freshly hatched chicks are sexed so the boys can be immediately culled. Other meat doesn’t go into that macerator, so you’d have to go out of your way to add it to the nugget mix, and the benfit of a few extra lbs of mostly feathers and bone are not going to be worth the effort.
It’s not even necessarily the same processing plant as where the adult chickens are slaughtered for meat.
While this may be true: I have worked at 4 different chicken processing places (though 3 of them were owned by Foster Farms) and they all handled every part of production from farm to package. Both chicks and adults.
And it sucks being on any part of the line that is dealing with the live animals. It’s one of the reasons I don’t eat a lot of chicken any more. One of my first jobs ever as a teen was cutting the toes off the birds so they wouldn’t be able to scratch each other up if they started fighting.
That has to do with the fact that the entire American chicken industry is exploitative to the people raising the chickens as well as the chickens. Since the factory is both the hatchery and the processing plant, the farmers never even own the chickens. They're more like babysitting them by taking out a loan from the bank. They get squeezed, default, and somebody else comes along to keep it up. Reasonably this sort of business practice should be outlawed as anti-competitive.
And you think there’s no acceptable amounts of rat poop in any other food you eat? Funny.
Chickens aren’t grown in sterile level 4 labs. There’s all kinds of contaminants in every food you eat. Many many more so if you buy “organic” because those fertilisers and weed killers are far less pure.
There are exceptions, of course. But you’ll still find miniscule trace amounts of quicksilver in baby food every once in a while, sure. So little that the check machines won’t even register there’s any at all but a lab could still find some. But by and large, there are acceptable levels for everything and we check for all of that, too. There’s a reason it’s an industry, not grabbing a random chicken from the street and biting it’s head off.
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