(upbeat music)
- We sell over 110 million pounds
of orange chicken every year.
We have Panda Express in all 50 states now.
We also have stores internationally in 12 countries.
Per store on average,
we may make over a hundred pounds of chow mein every day,
and over 80 pounds of rice.
You know, a lot of times we're the first taste
of Chinese food for a lot of people in the US.
Hi, my name's Adrian Lok.
I'm the Culinary Lead at Panda Express.
We're here today at the Newport Mall in Jersey City,
the location of the first Panda Express on the East Coast.
This is our wok station in the back of house.
It's an open kitchen,
so everybody that comes can see what's happening.
We're using jet tip burners that go 100,000 or 150,000 BTU.
This is our water blancher
where we can par-cook and boil vegetables.
Lastly, this is our sauce cart.
This is all the sauces that we make in house
and our condiments that we're going to be toasting,
our aromatics.
It's easy, accessible for our cooks as we're making dishes.
Our most popular dish by far is our orange chicken.
It's what we're known for.
The first thing that we do is we'll make the sauce.
First ingredient, we'll have our starch in there
and this will help thicken the sauce later.
This is kind of like our mother sauce.
It's got soy sauce, a little bit of sugar,
some ginger, garlic.
We're going to add one and a half quarts of water.
I know it looks like a lot of sugar,
but it's for a lot of batches of orange chicken.
The next ingredient we'll add is our vinegar.
This sauce and this flavor profile,
the inspiration is from Yangzhou, China.
That's where our founders are from.
In that region,
there are a lot of sweet and sour flavors, actually,
and sometimes it's misconstrued that sweet and sour
is just unique to American-Chinese food,
but in China there is a lot
of sweet and sour flavor profiles as well.
The last ingredient is our natural orange extract.
Orange chicken was created
by our Executive Chef Andy Kao in 1987.
The story goes, he was on a restaurant visit in Hawai'i
and he noticed a lot of citrus in dishes.
So he got the idea
of taking a Hunan-inspired dish flavor profile
and he merged that with citrus flavors,
and that's how orange chicken was born.
First thing we want to do is fry it up.
It's already been fried once,
so this will be the second fry.
And you see it's like the little ridges.
It's not smooth, and that holds all the sauce
and it adds a texture.
We're going to fry our chicken for seven minutes.
Finished frying, it's GBD,
golden brown and delicious.
Next thing we're going to do is toss it with the sauce.
So you want to heat up your wok till it gets nice and hot.
Next thing we'll do is we'll start
with our aromatics in the wok.
Toast the chiles, ginger, garlic
to bring out the flavors of those aromatics.
Next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to add cooking wine.
This is for flavor and aroma.
You'll flash off the cooking wine,
so the alcohol gets cooked off.
And then now we're going to add our orange sauce.
It looks thin right now, but once you bring that to a boil,
the starch is going to activate and it'll thicken the sauce.
The sugars are starting to caramelize a little bit,
so go ahead and toss our orange chicken in,
and I'll turn the heat back on and toss it with the sauce.
Last step is to add sesame oil for finishing.
Sesame oil, it's commonly used in Asian cooking.
It's really good for that aroma of sesame,
but it also adds a nice shine to the dish as well.
This store, on average,
does about 120 pounds of orange chicken a day.
We serve American-Chinese food.
When American-Chinese food started,
Chinese cooks were using ingredients
that they could find on hand and trying to adapt.
And ultimately, we wanted to make flavors
that were inspired by Chinese origin,
but accessible to our guests as well.
Over time, it's really now its own regional cuisine,
American-Chinese food.
Kung Pao chicken,
it's a quintessential American-Chinese dish
Kung Pao chicken, our veggies,
we have zucchini and bell peppers.
This is our dark meat chicken.
It's using boneless leg meat that's been diced up.
Our chicken's cooked now, we'll go ahead and drain that oil.
We're going to get our aromatics ready.
Traditionally, in Sichuan a Kung Pao dish
will have both whole dried chiles and Sichuan peppercorn.
You know, we just didn't have access to that.
Sichuan peppercorns were banned until recently.
So we'll add our onion whites first.
We have our ginger, garlic, and our crushed chile,
and we're going to get saute these aromatics
to release the flavor.
Next, we'll add back in the chicken.
After that, we'll add our cooking wine again.
We'll blanch our vegetables.
The last ingredient unique to Kung Pao is roasted peanuts.
Peanuts add a little bit of texture and flavor.
Finish off with sesame oil.
(pan sizzling)
Wok hei means "the breath of wok," literal translation.
As I'm tilting the food,
you'll see the flames are lightly searing it.
It's caramelizing the sugars and creating this unique flavor
that you can only get out of a wok.
This is our Kung Pao chicken.
We get fresh vegetables delivered twice a week.
So usually on delivery days, we have a team just come in
and take a few hours to cut all of our veggies.
First thing I'm going to prep is our baby broccoli
that's used in our black pepper Angus steak.
We're probably one of the biggest buyers
of baby broccoli and broccoli in the US
just because we have so many restaurants.
One of the biggest things that we think about
when we're developing a recipe is consistency.
We have over 2,000 restaurants,
so we need to be able to replicate a recipe.
So standardizing cuts is really important.
We prepped our vegetables earlier,
so now I'm going to show you
how to make black pepper Angus steak.
Black pepper Angus steak is a dish
that took over five years to develop.
It's a Taiwanese dish, and how it's typically served
is, you get a whole steak that's served on a sizzling plate
with rice or noodles and a black pepper sauce.
So obviously we can't be serving rib-eye steaks
and New York steaks in our restaurants,
but we could do the next best thing.
It's got our baby broccoli that we did,
a couple ounces of bell peppers.
This is our raw marinated Angus sirloin steak.
This is a classic Chinese technique, it's called velveting.
The key ingredient in it is starch.
What the starch does is that it protects the protein,
so when we do go and cook it later
you'll see it makes it really tender and moist.
First step of cooking our meat is, we call it oil-blanching.
It's essentially a low-temperature frying.
Now I'm going to add in about five cups of oil.
It seems like a lot but the starch acts as a barrier,
so you're not really absorbing all that oil.
I'm not deep-frying it.
The other thing about velveting
is, it also holds in the marinade.
It makes the meat tender and juicier at the same time.
So we'll go ahead and strain all that excess oil out
from our Angus steak and it's ready to go.
We're pre-cooking the baby broccoli in boiling water.
We wanna stir, sear these vegetables
for about 15 to 20 seconds,
and then next we're going to add our Angus steak.
This is our black pepper sauce.
It's got soy sauce, sugar, ginger, garlic,
and a little bit of tomato paste
and soybean paste for umami.
We want to toss and coat the meat
and then next we're going to add our baby broccoli back in
that we blanched earlier, and mix it together.
So the first Panda Express we opened in 1983
in the Glendale Galleria.
Our founders, Andrew and Peggy,
they had a full-service restaurant
called Panda Inn Restaurant,
which is still open today in Pasadena.
So they had a opportunity to open
a quick-serve concept of that,
so it was named Panda Express.
At the time, a lot of the mall options
were burgers, pizzas, getting a hot dog on a stick.
There wasn't really a restaurant
that was doing anything like Panda.
We brought in these woks into a mall location,
a small footprint.
This is something that I think people weren't used to seeing
in a mall at the time.
This is where we serve all of our food.
We call it our serving table
and everything is out on display.
Over time, in the past, it used to be a steam table,
and actually one of the things that has changed
is it's now all induction.
Fried rice, chow mein, some of our classics here,
Kung Pao chicken, black pepper chicken as well.
Orange chicken, as you see, because we sell the most of it,
it's in the biggest wok pan out here.
Majority of our restaurants were in malls when we started,
but now it's the complete opposite.
Now we have over 2,400 restaurants at Panda Express.
Out of those 2,400 though, only 200 are malls.
You could see kind of the change over time.
From when we opened 40 years ago,
dining habits have changed.
People are looking for new flavors,
and ingredients, and experiences.
We've been playing around with format.
We're now testing an orange chicken sandwich.
So to us, innovation doesn't always have
to be something brand, brand new,
but it could be a re-imagining of something
that we already have or something from the past.
All right, perfect timing.
As you can see, we have a line now.
It is lunch rush, so we'll be cooking in larger batches even
to serve all these people.