(upbeat music) - We sell over 110 million pounds of orange chicken every year. We have Panda Express
in all 50 states now. We also have stores
internationally in 12 countries. Per store on average, we may make over a hundred
pounds of chow mein every day, and over 80 pounds of rice. You know, a lot of times
we're the first taste of Chinese food for a
lot of people in the US. Hi, my name's Adrian Lok. I'm the Culinary Lead at Panda Express. We're here today at the
Newport Mall in Jersey City, the location of the first Panda
Express on the East Coast. This is our wok station
in the back of house. It's an open kitchen, so everybody that comes
can see what's happening. We're using jet tip burners
that go 100,000 or 150,000 BTU. This is our water blancher where we can par-cook and boil vegetables. Lastly, this is our sauce cart. This is all the sauces
that we make in house and our condiments that
we're going to be toasting, our aromatics. It's easy, accessible for our
cooks as we're making dishes. Our most popular dish by
far is our orange chicken. It's what we're known for. The first thing that we do
is we'll make the sauce. First ingredient, we'll
have our starch in there and this will help
thicken the sauce later. This is kind of like our mother sauce. It's got soy sauce, a little bit of sugar, some ginger, garlic. We're going to add one and
a half quarts of water. I know it looks like a lot of sugar, but it's for a lot of
batches of orange chicken. The next ingredient
we'll add is our vinegar. This sauce and this flavor profile, the inspiration is from Yangzhou, China. That's where our founders are from. In that region, there are a lot of sweet
and sour flavors, actually, and sometimes it's misconstrued
that sweet and sour is just unique to American-Chinese food, but in China there is a lot of sweet and sour flavor profiles as well. The last ingredient is our
natural orange extract. Orange chicken was created by our Executive Chef Andy Kao in 1987. The story goes, he was on a
restaurant visit in Hawai'i and he noticed a lot of citrus in dishes. So he got the idea of taking a Hunan-inspired
dish flavor profile and he merged that with citrus flavors, and that's how orange chicken was born. First thing we want to do is fry it up. It's already been fried once, so this will be the second fry. And you see it's like the little ridges. It's not smooth, and
that holds all the sauce and it adds a texture. We're going to fry our
chicken for seven minutes. Finished frying, it's GBD, golden brown and delicious. Next thing we're going to do
is toss it with the sauce. So you want to heat up your
wok till it gets nice and hot. Next thing we'll do is we'll start with our aromatics in the wok. Toast the chiles, ginger, garlic to bring out the flavors
of those aromatics. Next thing I'm going to do is
I'm going to add cooking wine. This is for flavor and aroma. You'll flash off the cooking wine, so the alcohol gets cooked off. And then now we're going
to add our orange sauce. It looks thin right now, but
once you bring that to a boil, the starch is going to activate
and it'll thicken the sauce. The sugars are starting to
caramelize a little bit, so go ahead and toss
our orange chicken in, and I'll turn the heat back
on and toss it with the sauce. Last step is to add
sesame oil for finishing. Sesame oil, it's commonly
used in Asian cooking. It's really good for that aroma of sesame, but it also adds a nice
shine to the dish as well. This store, on average, does about 120 pounds
of orange chicken a day. We serve American-Chinese food. When American-Chinese food started, Chinese cooks were using ingredients that they could find on
hand and trying to adapt. And ultimately, we wanted to make flavors that were inspired by Chinese origin, but accessible to our guests as well. Over time, it's really now
its own regional cuisine, American-Chinese food. Kung Pao chicken, it's a quintessential
American-Chinese dish Kung Pao chicken, our veggies, we have zucchini and bell peppers. This is our dark meat chicken. It's using boneless leg
meat that's been diced up. Our chicken's cooked now, we'll
go ahead and drain that oil. We're going to get our aromatics ready. Traditionally, in Sichuan a Kung Pao dish will have both whole dried
chiles and Sichuan peppercorn. You know, we just didn't
have access to that. Sichuan peppercorns were
banned until recently. So we'll add our onion whites first. We have our ginger, garlic,
and our crushed chile, and we're going to get
saute these aromatics to release the flavor. Next, we'll add back in the chicken. After that, we'll add
our cooking wine again. We'll blanch our vegetables. The last ingredient unique to
Kung Pao is roasted peanuts. Peanuts add a little bit
of texture and flavor. Finish off with sesame oil. (pan sizzling) Wok hei means "the breath of
wok," literal translation. As I'm tilting the food, you'll see the flames
are lightly searing it. It's caramelizing the sugars
and creating this unique flavor that you can only get out of a wok. This is our Kung Pao chicken. We get fresh vegetables
delivered twice a week. So usually on delivery days,
we have a team just come in and take a few hours to
cut all of our veggies. First thing I'm going to
prep is our baby broccoli that's used in our black
pepper Angus steak. We're probably one of the biggest buyers of baby broccoli and broccoli in the US just because we have so many restaurants. One of the biggest things
that we think about when we're developing a
recipe is consistency. We have over 2,000 restaurants, so we need to be able
to replicate a recipe. So standardizing cuts is really important. We prepped our vegetables earlier, so now I'm going to show you how to make black pepper Angus steak. Black pepper Angus steak is a dish that took over five years to develop. It's a Taiwanese dish, and
how it's typically served is, you get a whole steak that's
served on a sizzling plate with rice or noodles and
a black pepper sauce. So obviously we can't be
serving rib-eye steaks and New York steaks in our restaurants, but we could do the next best thing. It's got our baby broccoli that we did, a couple ounces of bell peppers. This is our raw marinated
Angus sirloin steak. This is a classic Chinese
technique, it's called velveting. The key ingredient in it is starch. What the starch does is that
it protects the protein, so when we do go and cook it later you'll see it makes it
really tender and moist. First step of cooking our meat
is, we call it oil-blanching. It's essentially a low-temperature frying. Now I'm going to add in
about five cups of oil. It seems like a lot but the
starch acts as a barrier, so you're not really
absorbing all that oil. I'm not deep-frying it. The other thing about velveting is, it also holds in the marinade. It makes the meat tender and
juicier at the same time. So we'll go ahead and strain
all that excess oil out from our Angus steak and it's ready to go. We're pre-cooking the baby
broccoli in boiling water. We wanna stir, sear these vegetables for about 15 to 20 seconds, and then next we're going
to add our Angus steak. This is our black pepper sauce. It's got soy sauce, sugar, ginger, garlic, and a little bit of tomato paste and soybean paste for umami. We want to toss and coat the meat and then next we're going to
add our baby broccoli back in that we blanched earlier,
and mix it together. So the first Panda
Express we opened in 1983 in the Glendale Galleria. Our founders, Andrew and Peggy, they had a full-service restaurant called Panda Inn Restaurant, which is still open today in Pasadena. So they had a opportunity to open a quick-serve concept of that, so it was named Panda Express. At the time, a lot of the mall options were burgers, pizzas,
getting a hot dog on a stick. There wasn't really a restaurant that was doing anything like Panda. We brought in these woks
into a mall location, a small footprint. This is something that I think
people weren't used to seeing in a mall at the time. This is where we serve all of our food. We call it our serving table and everything is out on display. Over time, in the past, it
used to be a steam table, and actually one of the
things that has changed is it's now all induction. Fried rice, chow mein,
some of our classics here, Kung Pao chicken, black
pepper chicken as well. Orange chicken, as you see,
because we sell the most of it, it's in the biggest wok pan out here. Majority of our restaurants
were in malls when we started, but now it's the complete opposite. Now we have over 2,400
restaurants at Panda Express. Out of those 2,400 though,
only 200 are malls. You could see kind of
the change over time. From when we opened 40 years ago, dining habits have changed. People are looking for new flavors, and ingredients, and experiences. We've been playing around with format. We're now testing an
orange chicken sandwich. So to us, innovation doesn't always have to be something brand, brand new, but it could be a
re-imagining of something that we already have or
something from the past. All right, perfect timing. As you can see, we have a line now. It is lunch rush, so we'll be
cooking in larger batches even to serve all these people.
