How to Make Orange Chicken with Jet Tila _ Ready Jet Cook With Jet Tila _ Food Network.mp4

Hey guys, I'm Jed Thiele and this is Ready Jed Cook, where I take the mystery out of Asian cuisine by showing you how to make some of my favorite dishes from shop to finish. But before I get into today's recipes, I need you to subscribe right now. Guys, today is super controversial. I'm making a dish that some say is for sure Chinese, but others argue it's totally American. I say it doesn't matter because it's freaking delicious. That's right, today is all about orange chicken, and I'm throwing in a side of fried rice. Chicken powder is really the secret of every single Chinese restaurant in America. It's actually this that gives you saltiness and savoriness, not really soy sauce. For ultimate crispy orange chicken, get tempura flour. It's a mix of all-purpose flour and cornstarch. It fries up super crispy, but a little light. I can get a little nerdy, but just know this is the stuff. First things first, let's make our fried rice. The secret to great fried rice is using day-old rice. This is just cooked rice hanging out in the fridge. It's dry. If you are using fresh rice, just make sure it's cool, dry, ready to go in the pan. I'm gonna start with some eggs. Another really great tip that grandma taught me, fresh eggs make fluffy fried rice, and I'll explain that to you here in a second. Two eggs, just give it a good whisk so it's nice and even. Starting the pan with some high-temperature oil. Now, you gotta coordinate really quickly here. It's gonna be eggs and then rice right into the eggs. Don't let your eggs set. While those eggs are still wet, pour your rice right into the eggs, and then literally, you're gonna be coating the rice with egg. What's happening is the eggs are coating the rice, and it creates this naturally nonstick surface, because egg has protein, but it also has a little bit of fat, and you're using that fat from the eggs versus putting a ton of oil into the pan. That is cooking. I can put a little onion. So really great fried rice should not be dark and full of soy sauce. Here's the tip. A touch of sugar, a little bit of chicken powder, and just enough soy sauce to kind of give that soy aroma, but not make it dark and heavy and salty. A lot of the salt from this dish is actually coming from the chicken powder. This is really great Hong Kong-style fried rice, meaning eggy, light, fluffy. This is the fried rice that my grandma taught me how to make a bazillion times growing up. And you don't see this style often, but I think it's one of the best ways to cook and eat fried rice. And then I'm gonna add some scallions, and this is the perfect side of fried rice for the orange chicken. Visually, what you're looking for is the egg to be cooked through and the rice to be nice and fluffy. And I'm gonna hold this in the oven, but you can put this in a casserole dish or a bowl and just have it hanging out till you're ready to eat orange chicken. So to get some vegetation into this dish, I wanna cook off some broccoli, and I'm gonna use my buddy Chef Mike, meaning Chef Microwave. Yeah, I know, it's cheesy, but effective. I've got broccoli florets in the bowl, a little bit of water in here. I'm just gonna season this and then cover it with plastic. And I'm gonna ask Chef Mike to cook this on high for three minutes, and I'm good to go. All right, so let's get to the orange chicken part, and I'm gonna start with the sauce. I mean, everyone's got love for this dish. You go to the mall, you've eaten this about a bazillion times, but I wanted to make my elevated version that actually has orange in it. Now, most people don't actually put any orange juice in their orange chicken, but I do, so let's start with that. So to that, we're gonna add sugar, soy sauce, little paprika, oyster sauce, poison sauce, and I'm gonna make a little slurry with my vinegar, a little rice vinegar. So I've added the cornstarch to the vinegar. I need to get it stirred around to activate it. So visually, what I'm looking for is the bubbles to start getting smaller and smaller. That means the cornstarch is activating and the sauce is thickening into a nice glaze. So I'm just gonna reserve the sauce and move on to the chicken. So to prep the chicken, I've got chicken thighs and tempura flour. I'm using chicken thighs because it's more moist and I get way more flavor out of it. The nugget won't dry when you fry it. I'm really just going for about one to one and a half inch cubes. So tempura flour is doing double duty. The first thing it's gonna do is dredge the chicken, and all that means is I wanna get enough flour on the chicken so it'll hold on to the batter. Next, I'm gonna add some water to the rest of the tempura flour to make a nice thin batter, like a pancake batter. Perfect, so this is looking to me like beautiful pancake batter. You wanna make sure your oil is at 375 degrees before you start frying. Because the magic number's 350, when you put food in frying oil, it brings down the temperature. And what I'm doing is I'm dropping the nuggets into the batter, letting them really pick up a good amount of batter and get it right in. You wanna fry these just a few pieces at a time. You wanna come in with the spider to kinda separate any nuggets that are sticking together. I'm gonna cook these until they're GBD, golden brown delicious, and let them drain on a wire rack. So the chicken is super crispy. It's golden brown delicious. I'm gonna let the chicken rest on the wire rack, drain off a little bit, and set up the final phase, which is the stir fry. I'm starting with a hot pan and put a little oil in it. So like most stir fries, you're gonna go aromatics. Garlic, ginger, and I'm gonna add the chicken to the pan. Little bit of onion, scallions. Because the glaze is sugar-based, it's not gonna penetrate and sog out the chicken. It's just gonna sit on top. It's gonna marry onto all that crispiness. I'm not really worried about the chicken being cooked through because I've already fried it. So I'm really just trying to get a nice, even coating here. Once everything's coated, I'm ready to marry the rice and the orange chicken. I can't make this dish because I always get hungry and I wanna eat it immediately. So now it's time to plate up. I'm gonna start with the fried rice that we made. Bring in the orange chicken to the game. Oh yeah, that glaze is incredible. And then dot it with our broccoli. Dude, I am gonna monster this whole plate. I'll see you later. Yo, get out of here. So I hope instead of takeout tonight, you try these recipes instead. Please let me know how it goes and if you like it, hit subscribe. I'll see you next time on Ready Jet Cook.