Mandarin orange chicken stir-fry

Jump to recipe

It's not tangerine chicken, but it's pretty close. We'll save all of the remaining peels from that box to dry and use in future dishes.

You may notice that it's been quite a while since I've posted any new recipes here. Life has been pretty busy, and I've mostly used this recipe blog as a quick resource for myself instead of adding new dishes. If I have a ton of time one of these days, I'll get a few new winners up, though truth be told many of them are very minor tweaks to existing recipes, so they're just a standard repost like most of the internet has these days.

However, I just made a dish that was NOT a repost of any particular recipe, instead being a mix of a few different versions of a popular dish, and wanted to get it posted here, both for myself in the future and for others. Plus, it's a "Costco hack" that uses their frozen chicken bites, which is a great time-saver and somewhat of a compromise between a heavy, deep fried coating (fast-food style) and not being breaded at all (authentic Hunan-style preparation).

The reason I'm making this at all is that we went to Trader Joe's today to try to find a pack of their Mandarin Chicken, which is surprisingly good, but they were out. This ended up being an opportunity instead of a burden, because they had decent fresh mandarin oranges, so we gave ourselves a challenge and tried to make something better. I had recently been researching to try to figure out what this dish originally would have been inspired by, since most Chinese-American food is not authentic - orange chicken in particular, as it was invented by the founder of Panda Express some 30-ish years ago. I love the backstory on this, as I do for other fun facts on "Chinese food" after watching The Search for General Tso (which is really good and very short, highly recommend). With a bit of digging, I found that the actual dish that Mandarin chicken comes from is tangerine peel chicken (which I believe is chen pi ji if an internet search is accurate), and it isn't terribly hard to reproduce with the right ingredients. The dish doesn't use breaded chicken, and it includes prickly ash (sichuan peppercorn), which we like enough to grow in our yard and harvest for use in Sichuan dishes. So we made a kind of mash-up of different cultures and produced a dish that was somewhere in between the American and the Chinese dish from Hunan province. And, naturally, we used lightly breaded chicken, because we had it and it's delicious, and spared us the trouble of firing up the wok this time. I can't rightfully call this tangerine chicken because we couldn't find tangerines, but we did use real California mandarin oranges, both peel and juice, and those seem to be a close second on many websites. Also, mandarins are genetically one of the parent citrus fruits, so I'm going to just claim that this substitution isn't as blasphemous as, say, using pasteurized orange juice.

One point of note, as referenced above - we used Costco's Just Bare lightly breaded chicken, which is routinely cited as a knock-off of Chick-fil-A nuggets, but it also makes a fantastic base for coating in a glaze, be it teriyaki, pineapple, or this mandarin orange sauce. I highly recommend this substitution, which we cooked in our air fryer before tossing in the sauce.

I ended up using a whole bunch of kitchen electrics, as shown in this photo of my kitchen chaos, but you could probably get by with the basics if you have an oven and a clean coffee grinder.

Lots of gadgets involved that helped - air fryer (left), spice grinder (left of oranges), and rice cooker (right)

We'll probably adjust this dish quite a bit, since I plan to make it regularly in both breaded and unbreaded forms. I'll update to the best version we come up with, which may end up including black vinegar and Shaoxing wine in some form, which would be a bit more faithful to the real recipe. And we will try dehydrating mandarin peels instead of using them fresh, to see if this concentrates the flavor further (which I suspect it will).

Mandarin Orange Chicken (with Broccoli)

Created after modifying highly from Woks of Life version and reviewing historical recipes on chen pi ji

• 1 lb lightly breaded chicken bites (we used Just Bare brand, but you could do a cornstarch-battered and fried breast chunk, or just use unbreaded chicken thighs stir fried with a bit of ginger and garlic, which would also be excellent)
• 1 tsp sichuan peppercorns
• 6 dried red chili peppers, whole
• 4 mandarin oranges
• 1 tbsp canola or peanut oil
• 1/4 cup chicken broth
• 2 tbsp rice wine vinegar
• 2 tbsp sugar
• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tbsp cornstarch, dissolved in a small bowl with 1 tbsp water
• 1 scallion
• 1/2 lb broccoli florets

First, get all of the pieces ready. Steam the broccoli until par-cooked. Wash and peel the mandarins, reserving the peel of at least 2 (you only need 2 for the peels, possibly 4 to get enough juice). Try to get the peel off in large pieces. Scrape the white pith off of the inside of the peel with a serrated knife to reduce bitterness, and cut the two peels into long strips. Juice enough of the peeled mandarins to gather 1/4 cup of juice. In a large measuring cup, assemble the sauce liquids - the mandarin orange juice, chicken broth, vinegar, sugar, and soy sauce.

Cook the chicken using an appropriate method (for us, this was air-frying the breaded chunks) until done. Once the chicken has about 5 minutes remaining, heat a large frying pan (NOT nonstick, you need it ripping hot) and toast the sichuan peppercorns over high heat for 30 seconds or less, until it begins to release fragrance, and place in a spice grinder to cool for a minute before grinding to a powder. Slice the scallions on an angle, separating the pale white part from the green part.

Back in the empty and hot pan, add the chili peppers and mandarin peel strips for about 15 seconds. Then add the canola oil and the white part of the scallions, and toss all to coat for another 15 seconds. Now carefully add the juice mixture from the measuring cup - this will splatter, so be careful. Cook until this darkens and thickens, at least a minute, possibly more. You want to caramelize the flavor a bit, but not reduce this until it's a syrup.

Now, all within about 10 seconds of each other, add just enough of the cornstarch/water mix to thicken the sauce to a glaze (less is better here, and don't use all of this unless you really need to or else you'll make a paste), then add the cooked chicken and the par-cooked broccoli and toss all to coat. Throw in the green onion tops, toss again, and serve over rice.