15 Best Better-Than Takeout Recipes - Damn Delicious (2024)

FAQs

Is Orange Chicken authentic? ›

Distinguished with its orange-flavored chili sauce, it has spawned several 'copycat' recipes. While the orange chicken is one of the most famous Chinese dishes in America, it is a purely American invention, with no authentic Chinese resturants or restaurants in China serving this dish.

The ingredients used by Chinese chefs to cook dishes are fantastic. Herbs and spices included in Chinese cuisine make each dish taste like heaven. We also can't forget about all the delicious types of sauces that make the dishes mouth-watering.

Popular Chinese Dishes. General Tso Chicken – According to Grubhub, this sweet fried chicken dish is the most popular Chinese food in America. It's also unhealthy, considering that it is deep-fried and the recipe demands tons of sugar.

Fried Rice, the staple food of the Chinese, is ordered by 90% of American customers in a Chinese restaurant. Fortune cookies, famously associated with Chinese cuisine in the U.S, are not popular in China, with less than 1% Chinese restaurants serving them.

Worst: General Tso's Chicken

Named after a Chinese war hero, this fat-laden dish won't help you win any weight loss battles. The breaded, fried chicken is smothered in a sugary sauce. One order clocks in at around 1,500 calories and 88 grams of fat, and it delivers more sodium than you should get in a day.

Thicker, stickier sauces like sweet and sour and sesame are going to be very calorie-dense, so limit those as much as possible. Stir fry sauce, however, is largely made up of soy sauce, making it a much lower-calorie option. Speaking of soy sauce, if you are adding some to a dish, choose the lower-sodium option.

Beef is a type of meat that is difficult to find in China, but the main reason you won't find this stir-fry dish in China is because there's no broccoli in China or at least the type of broccoli that is sold in America, instead, they use a leafy vegetable called gai ian.

Orange chicken is called Chinese food in North America, but orange chicken is rarely found in Chinese restaurants in China. Andrew Cherng, owner and founder of Panda Express, said that orange chicken is just a variation of General Tso's chicken, another dish that is almost unknown in China.

Do Chinese restaurants put sugar in rice? ›

Many Chinese restaurants, like other types of restaurants, use sugar in their cooking. Sugar can be added to dishes to balance out salty or spicy flavors and to enhance the sweetness of the dish. However, the amount of sugar used in Chinese cooking can vary depending on the recipe and the individual cook.

Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) is a flavor enhancer that has been widely used for roughly 100 years ( 1 ). In addition to being naturally present in certain foods, it's a common food additive in Chinese recipes, canned vegetables and soups, and other processed goods.

Chinese cooks normally use soybean oil, vegetable oil, or peanut oil, all of which have a high smoke point. Peanut oil usually has a pleasant nutty flavor and is suitable not only for stir-frying but also for deep-frying. Canola oil, which has a high smoke point but a neutral flavor, is also a good choice.

These eight culinary cuisines are Anhui, Cantonese, Fujian, Hunan, Jiangsu, Shandong, Szechuan and Zhejiang.

While there is an incredible culinary variety across the country, there are five major cuisines that dominate the Chinese landscape: Sichuan, Shandong, Cantonese, Huaiyang, and Northeastern. Each one has its unique flavors, preparation methods, and ingredients. Each is also connected to particular regions of China.

General Tso's Chicken

This dish, made with crispy fried chicken pieces coated in a sweet and spicy sauce, is a favorite at Chinese-American restaurants across the country. Its popularity even inspired a documentary film.