Panda Express sells over 80 million pounds of orange chicken a year.
It's the platonic ideal of fast casual comfort food: reasonably priced, readily available,
sweet, spicy, crunchy, and addictive.
So what makes this dish so incredibly yummy?
Americans love white meat, particularly chicken breasts.
When prepared correctly, a boneless, skinless chicken breast can be a thing of beauty.
But dark meat has its benefits, too, and Panda Express has taken advantage.
When a chicken breast is overcooked by even a minute, it can become dry, flavorless, and
sometimes even rubbery.
Dark meat chicken is more forgiving and can stand up to heavy sauces while remaining tender,
even after deep frying.
Dark meat is inherently more flavorful than white meat, so the chicken in your orange
chicken is going to have a more intense chicken flavor than white meat nuggets.
It's hard to ignore the appeal of fried chicken, though consuming it on a daily basis could
end up being a deadly habit.
"Got any fried chicken?"
"Best damn chicken in the state."
"Bring me four fried chickens and a Coke."
Crunchy, juicy, and tender on the inside, it's no wonder Panda Express' top item is
a fried chicken dish.
When chef Andy Kao invented orange chicken in 1987, it originally contained pieces of
bone-in chicken.
It wasn't until customers requested a boneless version that the orange chicken we know and
love was invented.
The fried chicken pieces in Panda Express' orange chicken stays nicely crunchy with those
yummy craggy bits associated with fried chicken, despite being covered in the signature orange
sauce.
The dish has a subtly crunchy mouthfeel that's just one of the reasons this entree is so
craveable.
According to Jimmy Wang, director of product development for Panda Express, the orange
chicken sauce is made in each store daily.
It's fresh in a way you rarely find in fast casual restaurants.
A Panda Express chef on Reddit explains,
"We make almost everything on site.
Fresh veggies delivered 3 times a week are all sliced up and prepared each morning or
during the day.
We cook all of our non-breaded meats from raw in the woks and we use actual recipes
that are difficult to follow sometimes."
Umami is also known as the "fifth taste."
The Japanese term roughly translates to "yummy deliciousness."
As a flavor, it can be tough to describe, but if you've ever eaten some wonderfully
aged Parmesan cheese, it's the feeling that hits the back of your throat and makes you
crave more.
It's not entirely sweet, salty, bitter or sour, it's all of the above.
Just like orange chicken.
The key to umami flavor is glutamic acid, which breaks down to become L-glutamate.
Ginger, garlic, and chicken are all rich in umami, and are all ingredients in Panda's
beloved orange chicken.
Soy sauce, the third-best selling condiment in the United States as of 2016, after mayonnaise
and ketchup, also adds some umami to the mix.
The sweet flavor of the chicken comes from the additions of brown sugar and honey, which
give the sauce its sticky, caramelized glaze.
The sweetness helps balance out sour flavors and spices.
It also helps the sauce adhere to the chicken, so you get that addictive umami hit every
bite.
An entree serving of orange chicken from Panda Express contains 19 grams of sugar, roughly
the same amount as two and a half Oreo cookies or a standard strawberry yogurt.
There's just enough heat in orange chicken to give it a bit of a kick, but not so much
that the taste buds of your average 5-year-old couldn't handle eating it.
The spice comes not only from ginger, but also due to a pinch of red pepper flakes.
Chef Jimmy Wang told NPR,
"You want to draw out tingling sensation with heat, with garlic, with ginger.
We use a little bit of crushed chile to give it just a little kick, but not too much."
You can order the orange chicken with a side of the chain's new hot chicken strips and
add them to your entree for an additional kick.
The secret to Panda Express' orange chicken is the tang of the orange sauce, which comes
from using the oil from orange peels.
A precursor to orange chicken from the 1800s had a vaguely citrus component to it, from
boiling lemon and orange peels along with soy sauce and garlic.
But it was vastly different from the orange chicken we know today, because the chicken
wasn't breaded or fried, and orange citrus oil has a stronger taste than orange peel.
Most of the Panda Express orange chicken copycat recipes you find call for using orange juice,
orange juice concentrate, or a bit of orange zest.
Even though most of these recipes yield pretty delicious results, it's just not the same
as ordering it in-house.
You'd be hard pressed to find the equivalent to Panda Express' orange chicken in a traditional
Chinese restaurant.
It's inherently Panda Express, and it was developed specifically for a Western palate,
which explains why we find it so irresistible.
The CEO and founder of Panda Express, Andrew Cherng, says the reason this sweet and vaguely
spicy entree is so popular with Americans is because
"They like the dessert before dinner or during dinner."
Because of how sweet it is, Panda Express' orange chicken has a congregation of haters.
"No!
Don't eat it!
It's no good!
No good!
No good!"
But this orange chicken isn't here to educate people about authentic Chinese cuisine or
challenge taste preferences.
It's a cheap dinner everyone can agree on when you're sick of feeding your kids macaroni
and cheese, you're between flights at an airport, you're tired from shopping at the mall, heartbroken
or hungover.
More than 50 percent of all orders placed at Panda Express are orange chicken.
It's hard to beat the traditional best-seller, and chef Jimmy Wang explained the secret to
its success is the sauce:
"As a chef, we all strive to try and top what's the best.
But in the three years I've been with the company, everything I've worked on seems to
not be able to beat our orange chicken."
Wang says the sauce's combination of savory and sweet is what makes it so popular with
customers, and that beloved tang and fresh orange taste comes from orange peel oil.
The company has played with the recipe over the years, but it always reverts back to the
original formulation.
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