Panda Express Spicy Orange Chicken | Copycat Recipe

Okay, folks, listen. We done all been to what? I'll just say everybody done been to Panda or had some type of a orange chicken or something like that. But today I'm getting ready to do a copycat recipe, right? Today, we finna put a twist on it. We finna do the copycat spicy orange chicken. So let's get it. Okay, so look, you guys can see it's a few ingredients, right? Don't trip. The full ingredient list is on my website, smokingandgrillingwithab.com. And that's W-I-T-A-B.com. Okay, so if you've been following me for a minute, you guys know that I like to, even though I get all my ingredients and I pull them all, it depends on what I'm making. I like to group everything together, right? So we finna start with our orange, you know, I guess we call it our orange sauce, right? So listen, you wanna get yourself one of these, you know, like a medium bowl. Now, I'm gonna start with a tablespoon of cornstarch. All right, we'll get that. And everything that you see right here is what I'm gonna be using, right? So we put a couple of tablespoons of, let's go with this first. I don't want it to like clump up, right? Get yourself a whisk. You know what I mean? We'll just add our orange juice, right? Now, I'm gonna do something a little different right here because I had that dry. And we know that when you put cornstarch or flour, sometimes it has a tendency to go ahead and, you know, lump up. So I'm just gonna work that in here just like you see, right? Now, we'll come with the rest of our ingredients. And again, you guys know that, oh, this goes a long ways, folks. This right here, this sesame seed oil goes a long way. But you wanna put a couple of tablespoons in there. You know what I mean? A couple of tablespoons or teaspoons. Again, everything is on the, I could just look at it and tell you this is right. Everything is on my website, smokingandgrillingwithab.com. And that's W-I-T-A-B.com. Now, if you guys notice, I'm taking my hand and I'm dumping things up. Over here is good practices that you guys always have hot, soapy water when you cooking. This way you can wash dishes as you go. And you know, whoever is behind you, you know they don't have the chore of cleaning it all up. You know what I mean? So you can do it and everything will be okay. Now, when it comes to your brown sugar, because my half cup is being used, that's what you wanna get, right? So I'm gonna go in here, get myself a half. You know what I mean? But this is a quarter cup. So we're dropping, we do it twice. Move this out the way, right? Come back to my whisk. Just work this in here. Now, this is gonna be our sauce, right? But we just getting that out the way right now. We got the cornstarch, don't trip. We're gonna get it to be a little bit on the thick side, but we do it like that. And then we wanna get the zest of an orange. All right, so now we'll just take it. Look at it, folks. Now, I wanna show you. You see how it is? It's still a little orange there. We just wanna take it like that. You don't wanna get it down where it start turning white. Reason being, when it start turning white, that's when you get to that bitter part. We all learned that from the lemon, right? You guys can see it right here. Now, I'm gonna give you guys a little tip. Say you ain't got an orange, you can use... I've done it before in the past because I didn't have one. You know what I mean? So we just work with it like that. But obviously, orange chicken, spicy. We wanna go ahead and use an orange. All right, so look, if you guys look, everything cut, everything ready to go. I got all of the... They all kind of like different pieces. Well, more so like the different shapes, right? You'll see how they come into play. Now, I'm gonna go ahead and set this over here. And then I can put this back in the water. And now I can go ahead and grab my station here. I love these pans. I know sometimes I use paper plates. It's up to you how you wanna do it, right? So right here, I got a cup of... That's a cup of cornstarch. And here I got a half a cup. Uh-oh, it does say half. Yeah, half a cup of flour, right? So we'll just get that mixed in there. Let me grab myself a whisk and let me whisk that. You know, flour and cornstarch is gonna be a little bit of a different color, even though they're whites. You know what I mean? So you'll see it. So the objective here is to go ahead and get this completely mixed so you don't have no... You know, so you can just have it... It's supposed to be blended the right way. You'll be able to see it. You don't wanna see no pockets that's just all white or nothing like that, right? And I ain't gonna lie to y'all. You know, we can always go ahead and do it old school. Remember how grandma used to do it? It was with a fork. Hey, my great-grandma would put that in a bag, shake it all up, and that's how you eat it down. You can do it any kind of way you want to, right? Now, you guys see that I got my meat thermometer right here. You know what I mean? But this serves because I wanna bring my oil up. But we gonna talk about all that. You wanna pick yourself up one of these. These are on my website also. Okay, so this is what we gonna do. You see me make the orange sauce. So what I'm gonna do is set that off to the side, right? What we gotta do is work with the chicken. I done already cleaned, washed, and did everything to my chicken and got it ready to go, right? Now, a little bit of a pro tip here is if you look down this way, is when you put one of these boards down or whatever, you know, it kinda like mood if it does. Let me see. Get yourself a wet, you know, a damp towel, right? Put this underneath the bottom, right? Because we dealing with the chicken. You know, we just put this on top. Right, and look. Now nothing move. Now, I'm gonna bring my chicken into play. Let's bring this over here like that. And then what we gonna do is we just wanna cut this down into bite-sized pieces, right? Maybe one inch or something like that. Right, so let's go. We'll just do it like this. And then we see where we at, right? So that's a good size. Any of this stuff like on the side, you don't wanna get too critical. That's me cutting that off. I normally wouldn't do it. So we just cut it like this. You know, get us some pieces. Main thing is you want them to all be about the same size. That's gonna be key. So when we put them in here, we start mixing them around in the oil, doing their thing. You wanna make sure that they all ready at the same time. So you see this right here? This right here good. Now I'm gonna grab one more so you guys can see it. And then, you know, look, that piece was already ready to go, right? Now this piece down here, once we open it up, this might be a little excessive. You know, just cut that off. And again, we just bite-sized pieces. You know what I mean? Make sure they all uniform, about the same. Okay, so this is done. Now we're gonna go ahead and move over here to our wet station, right? So we'll just go ahead, break this open and get both of these eggs in here. Then we'll add a little bit of cooking oil to it. All right, so add a couple of tablespoons, you know. And now we just get these yolks broke. Okay, so look at the consistency here. You see that right there? That's what you wanna have. Make sure you go ahead and scramble it, you know, and mix it, and you don't mix it well, but that's what you want. You wanna make sure that yolk is completely, you know, dissolved, it's not stringy, right? And it incorporated the oil. Now we're gonna go ahead and start bringing our pan up to our temp. Okay, so what you wanna do is, you wanna pour your cooking oil inside of, as you can see, I'm using a wok. We wanna look for 375 degrees. Now you guys know where the meat thermometer came into play. All right, so what I'm doing now is, I'm just checking this to see where we at. Right now, it dropped to 365, oh, 380, 381, that's fine. What's gonna happen is, once I stick this in the inside, it's gonna bring it down, and that's gonna keep us around 375, right? Chicken, we got our pieces together, right? So what I'm gonna do is, I'm just gonna bring them over here and start staging some inside, just like you see, right? And the reason I'm doing that, you'll see, because I like to get them all, you guys could use some tongs for this right here, because what we're doing is, we're just building them. What we're doing is, we're getting some way for it to coat, right? So this is gonna be the binder that hold our flour and cornstarch. And by the way, I added salt and a little pepper to it. It's really not about the seasoning of your chicken. You know why? Because if we gonna hit it with that orange sauce, that's gonna be nice, hot, spicy. Now, what you wanna do is, shake this off like this. Just add it in here, right? The reason we shaking it, we got a lot of chicken, and you know, go ahead and dump, right? So after you have a couple of pounds, you wanna make sure you have enough. But I can say two eggs with the oil does it. All right, so once we have them here, you remember earlier, I talked about how my mama did it and all of that, this, that old bag, that would really work out really good right here, wouldn't it? You know, so I'm just go ahead and flip this around like this. Just make sure they're coated. Remember, that cornstarch was gonna make it nice and crispy. That's what we wanna have. Then when we hit it with that sauce, you guys get the point. All right, so you see me go ahead and drop them in here. So this is what I do with my tongs. I just shake them, we pick them up, and then we just put them in just like this, right? You want them to kind of like be ready at the same time. So, you know what I mean? So you expeditiously get them in there together. Right? Don't forget, the oil is gonna drop to temperature. So when you start, you wanna be probably around 390, you know? And then your fire should go ahead and keep it around 375. This is where it really gets simple, right? As those are frying in the oil right now, now you wanna go ahead and get yourself some more. You wanna drop these in just like this, right? You wanna get those nice and coated. And then once we got these coated, then we stage them over here and we'll finish with the rest of them. Now I'm gonna go ahead and just stage these on, you know, my pan, let them drip dry. And then we move on to the next batch. Now I'm gonna show you guys something that'll help you with your fried chicken and everything else that you fry. We wanna check and make sure our oil is at temp, right? So we took the time to get to 375. Now we wanna test it and see where we at right now. So let me get a reading for you, 356. Okay, so this is hot enough, right? So I'm just gonna bring this down. And when you run your second batch, this is why you have success. And if you don't have success, it's because you guys didn't check your oil, you know? So we'll just start adding the rest. And I'm not gonna bore you guys. You guys get to see it right here. You know what we're doing. We're just putting it in here. You know what I mean? If it's a little bit dirty, that's okay. You might not be able to save your oil, but you do wanna make sure you get as much of the flour and cornstarch mix as possible. Keeps your oil as clean as it'll be, as you can keep it. Okay, so look, now we're gonna go ahead and prep these peppers, right? So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna cut this off right here. Now, they got seeds in them, it's up to you. It depends on how you wanna do them. You know what I mean? I'm gonna leave them like this. Let's see, cut this one down, this one down. I'm gonna get this one in half. But I think I'm gonna go ahead and just cut this down, just like this, easy. Oh, I didn't wanna even get it. You see it got some seeds in here. I'm gonna go ahead and clean this out. You know what I mean? And then I'm gonna do something like this. Now, it depends on how spicy you guys want this to be. But this is what I'm gonna do. A couple of these, I'm gonna leave whole. We'll just go ahead and let them get, you know, heated and acclimated to that heat. Drop some seeds in there. But when I say spicy, we're gonna make them spicy, folks. Okay, so listen, when you get to this point right here, you done prepped your peppers and all of that. So what we're gonna do is just add a couple of tablespoons of cooking oil right here. You know what I'm using. This is extra virgin olive oil, which is infused. Actually, this is garlic infused. You know what I mean? So I'll set that there. Now, I got red chili flakes and I got my peppers, right? So this is how we're gonna do this. We're gonna let this come up. We want this to be a little bit on the hot side. So once it starts to shimmer, right before we hit that smoke point, you know what I mean? We're gonna go ahead and just start adding red chili flakes and then the peppers. Okay, so now that I got it hot enough, I'm gonna come with my chili flakes, right? So remember, keep everything going. Now I'm getting ready to add, you know, my peppers. All right, so you just wanna keep everything moving just like you see. Now I'm getting ready to go ahead and add my garlic cloves, right? Now here's where it get a little tricky. I try to find somewhere, because this is nice and hot, folks. You know, garlic will burn quick. So what we're gonna do is just build up a little place right here. Now we just squeeze it, right? And then we just put it right here on top, right? That's what you wanna do. Now, that becomes fragrant right off the bat. Then you wanna bring your ginger. Then we grate over the top. If you don't see nothing falling, that's because it's all back here. Look at this. Yes, sir. Little sesame oil. And now we just move this around like that. Let it get nice and hot. Let it infuse. Now tell me when you guys make this, the aromatic, the kickback right there, don't tell you off the bat that it's gonna be fire. Once you got it, you can see your pepper's getting soft. I left some holes so it can drop some seeds in here, because I know you guys out there love your stuff spicy. You know what I mean? You can adjust your red pepper flakes for your spiciness. You know, whatever you like on your end, right? So now that we have that nice and hot, I'm looking at this. Let me center everything up. Now, you remember this from earlier? Remember this was our sauce. We already got a little cornstarch in there. We got that nice and hot. Now, we just finna go ahead and cook this. I'm finna raise my fire up. And what we gonna do is we gonna, you know, let it boil and cook till we get our desired thickness. Okay, you guys, so look at this right here. You see how thick that is? You get your desired thickness. I'm gonna turn this off. You know what I mean? Let's see if we can see it coating. All right, it coats that and how it just comes off. Right? That's what you gonna wanna have. Now, you know what to do. Now, these are nice and crispy. We just go ahead and put these in here just like this. We finna coat these, folks. Okay, folks, listen, I'm done. I'm finished taking pictures of it. That's why you guys are here, you know, checking it out. So listen, I'm not finna over-talk it or nothing like that. I haven't even tasted it, but I can tell you, if I'm just making this from time to time, this is gonna be fire, right? So I got a little, you know, fried rice here on the side, but you guys wanna know about this here. This right here, if you guys come on in here, take a look at that right there. You see that right there? That's it. So I'm gonna go ahead and, you know what? Let me just hit you with the cheers. Hey, when I tell you it's fire, I mean fire, literally fire. And don't forget, we put six tablespoons of red chili flakes, right? So listen, for those of you guys that wanted to make it a little bit less, I would say cut that in half. Other than that, this is nice. It's smooth. I think with the half on the red chili flakes will make it a little bit more kid-friendly. But you got some of these kids out here that love stuff spicy. So I would just say, make it the way I tell you guys to make it, and then go from there. But if you feel like you can't handle the heat, it's time to get out to the kitchen. You know, just cut it in half. Super easy. Look, the flavor there, it'll remind you, you'll probably say, I'm not going back, but I ain't gonna lie. I go to Panda all the time. You know what I mean? And I get it. They not quite as hot as this, but this right here is gonna be the closest to the, you know, copycat recipe as I can get you. Now, with that being said, let me take this time to say, thank you for watching this video. Don't forget to like, smash that subscribe button, and just tell everybody out there, listen, there's a channel out here that's simplifying these recipes and taking the mystery out of cooking. And when you want to learn how to do some level up cooking like this, holler at your boy. I'm out. Peace.