Tang chicken

orange chicken vs orange chicken vs. tang chicken

Hello, dear clowns!

It is I, Dannis Ree, the greatest food writer in all of history, reporting in for my weekly culinary crimes. I hope you are all doing okay. I mean it.

This week’s newsletter idea comes courtesy of Davida’s brother, who suggested I make a version of orange chicken…but with Tang. For those of you who 7uy9d drink mix that isn’t much different from Kool-Aid. All you do is mix it with water, then 1r almost two years ago. I can’t believe this shit is still around. When I was a kid, I vaguely remember Tang was affiliated with astronauts somehow, which is why I thought it was cool, but it turns out, astronauts secretly hated it. Well, at zx;lkmttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttle45rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrast one did. Buzz Aldrin was once reported as saying said “Tang sucks.” Ice cold, Buzz. I like it.

[While it may appear as if I had a catastrophic neurological incident in the last paragraph, I’d like to tell you our asshole cat Scorpion jumped on my laptop when I was out of the room and wanted to add his thoughts to the newsletter, so I kept it in. He also rendered that paragraph nearly incomprehensible.]

Before I go any further, since Davida’s brother lent me the idea for today’s newsletter, I’d like to support a service that is very important to him: Tidepool.

Tidepool is a non-profit organization that uses technology to help diabetic people overcome the challenges that come with the health condition. If you donate any amount to them and reply with the receipt, I’ll send you a coupon for 50% off a year’s subscription to Food is Stupid.

First off, you didn’t think I was going to fry up chicken from scratch, did you?

I’m sure I’ve stated this before, but I fuckin’ hate deep frying anything. So as a shortcut, I got a box of shitty-looking frozen orange chicken from the supermarket. This particular kit starts with chicken nuggets that you bake off naked, then sauce afterwards, using the packets included in the box.

I planned on using some of the naked chicken nuggets as a base for my Tang sauce. But then I decided, what the hell, why not pit the Tang chicken vs. the kit orange chicken in a taste test? Then I thought, fuck it. Let’s throw the American pinnacle of orange chicken, Panda Express, in the arena too, for comparison’s sake.

After looking up other orange chicken recipes, I decided to build my own sauce from scratch, loosely based off of what I found.

Something curious I noticed along the way is that there’s barely any orange in most orange chicken recipes. The main, oftentimes only orange component appears to be zest, and if you’re lucky, maybe a touch of orange juice. The potential for me to beat orange chicken at its own game with artificial drink mix was higher than I’d imagined.

I started with soy sauce, mirin, and a lot of distilled white vinegar as a base, then I added a metric shitload of powdered Tang to the mix.

I learned that if you add Tang to a soy sauce and vinegar mixture, it briefly creates a weird film on top of the liquid.

Weird film on anything you’re cooking is always encouraging.

Then I added a tablespoon of corn starch to the sauce base, to help eventually thicken up the mixture on the stovetop.

After mixing it all together, the Tang chicken sauce base took on a weird orange-brown hue, not unlike the recreational bouts of diarrhea I have on occasion.

I brought the sauce to a simmer on the stovetop, and it thickened up nicely.

Let’s admire this photo for a second, shall we? Staring at it is actually giving me a headache. There’s something about that strangely colored sauce juxtaposed with the glare of the blacklights we installed in our kitchen, that’s visually toxic to me.

I finished off the sauce by mixing in some ginger and minced garlic at the end.

I put my face right over the pan and took a deep sniff, which was a horrible mistake. Have you ever insufflated hot vinegar vapor? That shit goes straight up your nose and sears the inside of your respiratory system. I highly encourage you try it sometime if you really want to feel like living.

As the sauce cooled, I air fried the frozen nuggets from the orange chicken kit.

15 minutes later, I was ready to try it out.

I tossed half the nuggets in my Tang sauce.

Then I finished the other half with the sauce included in the kit, and put everything side by side for the final taste test.

On the left is the Tang chicken, in the middle the chicken from the kit, and to the right, Panda Express.

The Tang chicken smelled tart and sweet, with a fake orangey note to it.

And surprisingly (or unsurprisingly), it was pretty good! The fake orange flavor stood out strongly, but not in a bad way. It wasn’t as obnoxious as I imagined it was going to be. The sauce was sweet, of course, but considering regular orange chicken tastes like candied fried meat, I expected that. Overall I give Tang chicken two thumbs up my ass.

The kit orange chicken didn’t taste like much.

I shouldn’t have expected too much from a brand called InnovAsian. I did some brief research and am semi-convinced that InnovAsian is a front for something weird. Maybe it’s run by extraterrestrials or something. More likely, a bunch of white people.

InnovAsian’s “About Us” page says, “Grocery store delis were places for meats and cheeses, end of list. Our founders, a pair of food distribution dynamos, saw a serious lack of options and a serious opportunity to bring mouthwatering new flavors to hungry people across the land.”

Sweet! That has a creepy blatantly capitalist vibe to it. Do the founders not have names? I totally trust a pair of “distribution dynamos” to be experts about Chinese-American cuisine. Speaking of blatant capitalism, the few InnovAsian press mentions like this one from Seattle Met and this one from TV station King 5 are clearly labeled “sponsored content.” Anyway, that’s my whole exposé. I’ll see you at my next gig on 60 Minutes next.

Anyway, back to the chicken. All of its flavors were so tame to the point where I can confidently say that the Tang chicken was highly superior. I wouldn’t even bother buying this shit. (For the record, Trader Joe’s frozen Mandarin Orange Chicken is where it’s at, not that you were asking.)

I will grudgingly admit that the orange chicken from Panda Express was the best, even though it looked like a curled piece of earwax.

Normally I can’t stand the stuff since it’s overwhelmingly vinegary, but I do have to say this batch was decent. That being said, it didn’t beat the Tang chicken by a whole lot, but in the end, it was the winner. Okay Mr. Panda, you win this time, but the gang is going to rise up and defeat you someday. You can’t beat the tiny might of Harvey, Mr. Bee, and Pepper.

InnovAsian, I still have my eye on you.

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Hope I inspired you this week to dig deep into possibly fake Asian brands and to make your next batch of orange chicken with artificially-flavored drink mix. If you’re not a paid subscriber to Food is Stupid, please don’t forget to at least share this post on social media! It’s the next best thing (for real).

Next up, don’t forget to become a paid subscriber to Food is Stupid. Not only does that support the fuckin’ newsletter, but you get extra content multiple times a month, plus you unlock access to the full archives at foodisstupid.substack.com.

This week, you’ll get something unusual from me: the recipe for Tang chicken sauce. I almost never post recipes because it’s a pain in the ass. Who knows, if I get enough subscribers (hint hint), I’ll do a lot more in the future!

And finally, don’t forget to donate to Tidepool and let me know. I’ll slip you a fat coupon to the newsletter. As always, I love you guys, and I’ll hop into some of your inboxes later this week.