Cantonese Orange Ribs (香橙排骨)
Plus, where the hell did "Orange Chicken" come from?
So today I wanted to introduce you to a rarer, and what seems to be newer, Cantonese dish… Orange Ribs. If that immediately makes you wonder, “wait… orange ribs… is that anything like the takeout dish, ‘orange chicken’?” The answer is… yes, there’s a bunch of similarities.
There’s differences too, but they’re comparable enough that the question of “who invented Orange chicken” has nagged me for a while. See… while the takeout menu is famously not representative of what Chinese food is as a whole, much of that menu does have its roots in actual Chinese dishes – it’s just an odd selection adapted to the Western palette. Like, Lemon chicken was a Hong Kong Chachaanteng (i.e. Canto-Western fusion) invention, Hot and Sour Soup is a dish from Wuxi that travelled to Taiwan (and then the USA), Egg Rolls are derived from a Hokkein snack from Fujian, etc etc. Of course, there’s certainly some exceptions here or there: fortune cookies were invented in SF (or LA) and were derived from an old Japanese snack, General Tso’s was famously an invention of Chef Peng Chang-kuei who came to NYC in the 70s via Taiwan, Crab Rangoon dates back to the Tiki craze in the 1950s (specifically to Trader Vics in Oakland).
The story of orange chicken, meanwhile, goes like this: at Panda Express’s Hawaii location in 1987, Chef Andy Kao whipped up a sweet and sour sauce using orange juice – the sauce ‘taking inspiration from Hunanese food’ in the form of adding a touch of chili flakes. He served it with the same chicken they used with their General Tso’s, and… Orange chicken was born.
Ok, but here’s the thing. If you meander around restaurants in Guangdong, you can find fried dishes smothered with orange sauce – most notably, orange ribs. So just like how I’m incredibly skeptical of the claim that Egg Rolls were invented in NYC in the 1920s, I was also pretty skeptical of the Panda Express claim. Although perhaps in their defense, maybe they were simply referring to using the orange sauce on boneless chicken? And further, their orange sauce adds soy sauce and that touch of chili flake, so maybe all they’re talking about is the takeout version of orange sauce?
Made sense to me. So in a fit of obsessiveness, I wanted to see just how far orange sauce goes here in Guangdong. But the more we researched, the more confused we became. There’s very little information on the history of orange sauce in Chinese language sources, and the earliest mention we could find was something from the mid 90s. So as we often do when we’re stuck, we went to Steph’s Cantonese Dad (a living encyclopedia of Cantonese food), and asked him when he first saw orange ribs.
He paused, thought about it, and replied that he heard of restaurants serving them at “the turn of the century”. Steph’s eyes lit up, and asked if Grandpa talked about it at all, and if they were any different back then. In Steph’s Dad’s ever-so-Cantonese way, he brushed aside the question, “no, no… I first heard about them at the turn of the 21st century”.
So if you’re keeping score, it seems that Panda Express’s 1987 claim predates anything solid we could find on the subject of orange sauce. Which means it’s possible that orange sauce was invented in the USA and over a decade or two made its way back to Guangdong… the only Chinese dish that we could think of that made that USA -- > China journey.
Of course, there were also some whispers – nothing solid, unfortunately – that orange sauce was an earlier Hong Kong Chachaanteng invention, which would make sense as well (hey, lemon goes well with chicken… orange goes well with pork). It’s also possible that Orange sauce is an old Cantonese thing (Guangdong was the first place to grow juice-yielding oranges in China) and we just couldn’t find it.
Ingredients
St. Louis Style Spareribs (腩骨), ~500g. Cleaved across the bone into ~three inch pieces. This cut that we’re using is from the very bottom of the ribs – it’s basically the same as ‘St. Louis-style Spareribs’. You can also obviously just get a rack of spareribs and trim em yourself too.
Marinade for the ribs: ½ tsp salt, 1 tsp sugar, 1 tsp liaojiu a.k.a. Shaoxing wine (料酒/绍酒), optional sprinkle of white pepper powder (白胡椒粉), slurry of ~2 tbsp cornstarch (生粉) mixed with 1 tbsp water. Ok, so the type of coating we’ll be doing here is the really light sort – we just want enough to give the ribs a bit of texture. In light of that, we’ll be marinating the ribs together with a thick slurry in place of an actual batter.
Extra cornstarch for dusting. Really not so much here – I just massaged some extra starch on with my hand… I’m guessing I used no more than two tablespoons total. I’ll give you a visual later on in the recipe.
Ginger (姜), ~1 inch. Smashed. To stir-fry with.
Liaojiu, a.k.a. Shaoxing wine (料酒/绍酒), ~1 tbsp. For use while stir-frying.
For the orange sauce: 30g orange juice concentrate (浓缩橙汁), 75g water, 15g white rice vinegar (白醋), 30g granulated sugar, ½ tsp salt, ½ tbsp instant custard (吉士粉). So instant custard’s a common ingredient in modern fruity Cantonese sweet and sour sauces for balance – e.g. it’s also used in the sauce for Cantonese lemon chicken. If you can’t find some, swap it out for milk powder – it’ll largely serve the same function.
Slurry of ½ tsp cornstarch (生粉) mixed with ~1/2 tbsp water. To thicken the sauce. Instant custard has some thickeners in it I believe, so if going the milk powder route, double the slurry quantity and eyeball it at the end – we’ll be looking for something with a syrup-y consistency.
Process
Ok, so high level overview here: marinate your ribs, give em a light dusting with cornstarch, do a double deep fry (once at ~150C until done, then quickly at ~200C for fifteen seconds or so), stir-fry fry the ginger, add the sauce, thicken, toss in the ribs and give them a good coating.
Marinate the ribs. Add all the marinade ingredients (1/2 tsp salt, 1 tsp sugar, 1 tsp liaojiu wine, sprinkle white pepper, slurry of 2 tbsp cornstarch with 1 tbsp water) in with your ribs and give a thorough mix. Marinate for ~30 minutes.
Smash the ginger, mix together all the ingredients for the sauce. Again, that was 30g orange juice concentrate, 75g water, 15g white rice vinegar, 30g granulated sugar, ½ tsp salt, ½ tbsp instant custard. If you don’t have a scale… I dunno, buy one ;)
Give the ribs a light coating with dry cornstarch. Again, nothing too crazy here. This is the consistency I was working with. I like moving them over to an over rack as I work with them.
Deep fry at 150C for ~4-5 minutes until the internal temperature ~76C. So get a wok of oil up to ~160C and drop in the ribs – we’re aiming to fry this at ~150C. Jiggle them around a couple times during the fry to make sure they’re not stuck to together, and cook until done.
Deep fry at ~200C for ~15 seconds. Second fry, higher temp. Transfer over to a paper towel lined plate.
In a separate pot, make the sauce. Ideally use not-a-carbon-steel-wok so that this doesn’t muff up your seasoning (though it’s fine to do so sometimes, just best not to make a habit of it). Then:
Ginger, in. Stir fry for ~30 seconds until fragrant.
Pour that extra tbsp of liaojiu wine over the spatula and around the side of the wok.
Sauce, in. Let it come up to a light boil.
Remove the ginger (or not, whatever).
Slowly pour in the slurry to thicken the sauce while stirring constantly. You should be looking at something that’s roughly this consistency.
Add in the ribs. Shut off the heat. Quick mix to coat.
Optionally garnish with a slice or twist of orange.
Note on how to use fresh orange juice:
Could you use fresh orange juice here? Sure. It’s just that while testing, I found it didn’t really have the correct kick of orange. But feel free to go that route instead if you feel strongly on the subject.
What I’d do is swap the water and concentrate completely with freshly squeezed orange juice, ~105g, or roughly the juice of one orange. Swap the granulated sugar for Chinese slab sugar or dark brown sugar (mostly for color, but also… those two things taste good). And because it doesn’t quite have the same orange kick, I’d also personally zest an orange and toss that in there too.
Note on Orange Chicken:
Ok, so in the accompanying video… I had a little bit of fun. I decided to whip up “orange chicken” using this same sauce, together with the deep frying method employed by sweet and sour pork. It was tasty (because… of course it wouldn’t be bad), but it was kind of a Frankenstein that admittedly wasn’t authentic to… anything.
The modern Cantonese orange sauce has a bit more obvious of an “orange” flavor compared to its takeout brethren, and it’s also a bit thinner/more syrupy. If you want to recreate that Panda Express orange sauce, obviously feel free to use the Panda Express recipe – they say they use fresh juice (which I’m not convinced of), and also add in a bit of soy sauce and a touch of chili flake.
Then with the benefit of hindsight, I’m pretty sure that takeout joints abroad don’t use the Cantonese sweet and sour pork deep frying method – the cut’s a bit heftier, and more reminiscent of something like Tangcu Liji here – i.e. sweet and sour tenderloin. We don’t have a recipe for that yet (an oversight for sure!), so in the meantime definitely check out the always excellent ChinaSichuanFood’s recipe here.
So in light of all that, I don’t think it’s overly important to share a recipe there. Was basically just for fun anyhow.