Facebook Recipes: Orange Chicken

Sometimes, you want to do nothing more than order Chinese takeout. It’s easy, simple, and packed full of flavors! In my small town, we have two Chinese restaurants that are sometimes overly priced and not worth the hassle of going into town. That’s why I decided to try one of the Facebook recipes I found for orange chicken. This dish was pretty simple, but I had to make a few alterations to the recipe. Ultimately, it turned out pretty good, and the family loved it. It was packed full of orange flavor! (Maybe a bit too much orange, to be honest… but delicious all the same!)

Check out the recipe at the end of the article!

Pros:

• Great Flavor!
• Easy to cook up and didn’t take me too long.
• Most of the ingredients were easy to come by and were things I already had in my house.
• Pairs nicely with a bowl of rice.

Cons:

• The orange flavor can be overpowering.
• The sauce didn’t thicken as much as I wanted it to.

Overall, the recipe was straight forward and turned out great. I did make a few alterations and here are some of the things that I took away from the dish.

Alterations and Takeaways:

Unfortunately, I didn’t have any fresh ginger on hand, so I had to make do with ginger powder. I looked online for how much powder to add to fresh ginger, but that didn’t help. It was such a small amount that I ended up just doing my own thing and adding a little more than a dash of ginger powder.

My second substitute for the dish was apple cider vinegar for the regular vinegar that it called for. This didn’t change a whole lot for the dish.

Another substitute that I made was the chili flakes. I didn’t have any, so I decided to use crushed red pepper flakes. This was an easy substitute and didn’t change the flavor too much (or at least I didn’t think so).

For the overpowering orange flavor, I think what I’ll do next time is to use less orange zest. The oranges we had in our house were ginormous and probably not the normal size they’d expect for a recipe! That being said, I would probably do half the amount of orange zest and fresh orange juice instead of pre-made orange juice.

Instead of using the 1lb of chicken that it called for, I used about 1.5lbs. This meant that I had to use a couple more eggs when I was dipping the chicken in before putting it all in the pan.

The Sauce…

I have a few notes on the sauce. This one was a bit tricky, but I knew it could be so great with all of those ingredients. When cooking the sauce, I noticed that it wasn’t getting thicker. It was a bit too liquid for my liking, so I added some cornstarch to thicken it up a bit. When I had it just the way I wanted it, I did the flavor testing. This is where I added in a bit more soy sauce, vinegar, and ginger. Once I got it to the flavoring of my liking, I added the chicken and cooked it for a few more minutes. The sauce had just the right consistency (maybe a touch thick), and it stuck to the chicken very well.

Overall, this was a great dish!

My family decided to jump in on the Chinese cuisine by making eggrolls to go with it. In the end, we had some left-over eggroll wraps, so we fried those up and sprinkled a little bit of cinnamon and sugar on top for our dessert!

Facebook Recipe: Orange Chicken