Ingredients in Orange Chicken
Here’s what you need to make this.
1. For the crispy chicken
Oops, I forgot to include oil. 🙂 I’ll include chatter about it though!
- Chicken – You can use either thighs or breast. I personally prefer thigh because it’s juicier.
- Soy sauce – This is the salt for the chicken. Use either light soy or an all-purpose soy. Do not use dark soy or sweet soy, these are too intense!
- Ginger – A hint of ginger flavour on the chicken is so good! But it’s optional.
- Cornflour / cornstarch – This is what makes the chicken crispy. It fries up crispier than flour, and stays crispier for longer.
- White pepper – For seasoning. You can substitute with black pepper.
- Oil – Vegetable, canola, peanut or any other neutral flavoured oil. You need enough for 0.5cm / 0.2″ depth in the pan. Using a 30cm/12″ pan which is what I am using, it’s about 1 cup.
2. for the orange sauce
The key to a good orange sauce is making sure it actually tastes of orange! Using zest is essential because that’s where most of the orange flavour comes from. A short simmer time matters too – the longer you cook it, the more that fresh citrus flavour fades. To help the sauce thicken quickly without prolonged simmering, I use a little more cornflour than you typically see in orange sauce recipes.
- Orange – We need both zest and orange juice, so you need at least one orange. For the juice, yes of course it is best if you juice fresh oranges but you can also use fresh bottled orange juice.
- Ginger and garlic – I love to flavour the sauce with these. The garlic is sautéed to make it toasty while the ginger is grated and simmered in the sauce which makes the ginger flavour a little fresher which I like.
- Soy sauce – This is what adds most of the salt in the sauce. Use either light soy or an all-purpose soy. Do not use dark soy or sweet soy, these are too intense and will ruin your sauce!
- Chinese cooking wine (Shaoxing wine) – This adds salt into the sauce as well as depth of flavour. Without, I personally find the sauce tastes a little flat. If you can’t consume alcohol, you can use chicken stock/broth instead.
- Rice vinegar – I think vinegar is essential here to balance the flavours, else it just tastes sweet. If you don’t have rice vinegar, regular white vinegar will be fine.
- Cornflour / cornstarch – This is what thickens the sauce, and makes it shiny and glossy.
- White sugar – Orange sauce is a sweet sauce, but I think you will be surprised how it doesn’t taste sickly sweet, like candy. If you reduce the sugar in the recipe, the sauce tastes more savoury than what Orange Chicken should be, but if you are ok with that, feel free to go ahead!
How to make crispy Chinese Orange Chicken – without deep frying
There’s only one little extra step here that needs to be done to achieve deep-fry level crispiness without deep frying: grabbing fistfuls of the cornflour dusted chicken and clenching them in your fist to press the cornflour on firmly.
If you are happy to deep fry, you can skip this step – but that’s the only step you can skip!
1. ORANGE SAUCE
Mix up the sauce first, ready to pour into the pan at the end.
- Cornflour first – Whisk the sauce ingredients in a bowl or large jug. Start with cornflour and soy sauce first, whisk until lump free. We do this before adding the other liquids because it’s easier to mix in cornflour using just a bit of liquid.
- Finish sauce – Then whisk the remaining liquids – orange juice, soy sauce, vinegar, sugar and Chinese cooking wine. This will only take a couple of minutes on the stove to thicken into a shiny, glossy sauce which we will do right at the end, then toss the chicken in just before serving.
2. COATING THE CHICKEN
- Sticky coating for chicken – Put the chicken pieces in a large bowl and mix it with the soy sauce, 2 tablespoons of cornflour, ginger and pepper. The coating will look kind of milky and it will be sticky, acting like a glue for the cornflour coating.There is no need to use egg. Fun fact – when you dredge in egg, it makes things less crispy, which is why I generally only use it for breadcrumb coated things.
- Cornflour coating – Then add the cornflour into the bowl and toss to coat each piece. You’ll need to get in there and separate pieces that stick together. I did warn you that the cornflour coating is like a glue!!
- Press – Grab a few pieces of chicken in your hand and enclose your fist – this will press the cornflour onto the surface of the chicken. Then drop it in a colander set over the sink. Use both hands, and do a few pieces in each, and you’ll fly through this step in no time!
- Shake the colander to let the excess cornflour fall through the holes. This step is important for a couple of reasons. Firstly, too much cornflour = powdery coating. It’s not nice! Secondly, the excess cornflour will fall off when cooking and burn, and because we are shallow-frying rather than deep frying, these burnt bits will get stuck on our chicken pieces. Again, not nice!
3. cooking
Key here is using high heat and cooking the chicken until deep golden and crispy. Not just light golden, not just golden. We want DEEP golden!
