Last week I made J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s California-Style Orange Chicken from The Wok cookbook.

This is Kenji’s version of Panda Express’s dish and is basically General Tso’s with a different sauce. The marinade, dry coating, and frying method are all the same.

For General Tso’s, I thought the dry-coating clumps were a little large, so this time I drizzled in the reserved portion of the marinade while whisking. I think this got a little finer. I also added additional flour and corn starch, but this time I kept it to the recipe. Since the chicken pieces were a little sticky, I went ahead and separated them to a plate so I didn’t have to deal with that while frying.

For the sauce, garlic and ginger are cooked in oil until soft. Soy sauce, cornstarch, distilled vinegar, orange juice and zest strips, sugar, and sesame oil, pepper flakes are added and simmered until thickened.

After the chicken fries, it gets tossed in the sauce and served. The same as General Tso’s.

The end result was good. How it could not be? The chicken was not as crispy as General Tso’s, and I think that’s entirely due to less flour and cornstarch (or, rather, the recipe-called for amount). The clumps were the crunchiest part. But also it tasted a lot closer to the restaurant version, which is a soggy-fried texture. I’m tempted to 1.5x the amount of sauce and dry coating for Sesame Chicken, which is next.

I am cooking my way through J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. Read more about it.