Beef and Bok Choy Over Crispy Air-Fried Noodles

Jump to recipe

When I was growing up, there was a Chinese restaurant near me that served a few different stir-fries served in a "bird's nest". Although actual birds' nests are a thing, this is not what they served - it was shredded potatoes shaped into a bowl and then deep fried, usually served with a mix of seafood and vegetables in a rich, light colored but very garlic-heavy sauce. The dish has a lot in common with some versions of chow mein, which in some preparations is a bed of really crispy noodles with a very heavily sauced stir-fry plated over the top. Both are great, and the consistency is what really wins me over - crispy on the edges, but chewy and loaded with flavor as you work your way in, and as the noodles start soaking up the sauce from the outside in.

To try to replicate this, I bought a nest-frying tool, which is a strange contraption of two concentric hemispherical baskets that clamp together, and you load up the volume in between with potato and then deep fry the whole thing. Naturally, I've never used it. Instead, I've tried to make the noodle version of this dish a few times with minimal success, mostly because the crispy noodle cakes that serve as the foundation usually come out both squishy and burnt when trying to get heat into the center of a cake of pre-boiled noodles. On a recent attempt, after having a fit about ruining too many noodles, I gave up in a fit of rage and threw a small quantity of the noodles into my air fryer, which turned out to be the magic step - this turned a disaster of a process into a really easy one. And then today, based on a recent attempt at making a few Thai noodle soups from Serious Eats, I borrowed a technique where you make a garlic-infused oil and then use that as the oil to coat the noodles in, prior to air-frying. The result was better than any version I've had in a restaurant.

The toppings for this crispy noodle cake almost don't matter as long as there's enough of a decent, garlicky sauce to work its way into them at serving time. I tend to lean towards a beef with oyster sauce, so I liked the version that combines beef and bok choy from Omnivore's Cookbook, adapted to what was in the garden, and using some leftover rare rib roast and only lightly stir-fried. It's infinitely adaptable, so long as there's at least a cup of a thickened sauce to go over the noodles. If you get the timing just right, serving over the hot, freshly fried noodles will get them to sizzle audibly, and start soaking up that goodness right before you start eating.

A word on ingredients - use decent stuff. There's a good amount of oyster sauce in this, and Shaoxing wine is used in a couple of steps. Try to get a good quality version of these two things, which both make a difference. Try to find an oyster sauce that's actually got "oyster" as the first ingredient, and look for a wine that's got less salt and might be labeled "hua diao" or has aged a bit. This is going to change the flavor immensely, and took me a long time and many mediocre stir-fries to realize.

These are the versions of the key ingredients that I keep on hand. And yes, that's Japanese soy sauce, not Chinese.

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.