Orange Chicken Day Date in the current year: July 15, 2024

Orange chicken (chen pi ji) is a dish of American Chinese cuisine, which means that the dish in its current form was developed by Chinese immigrants to the United States, who tried to recreate the dishes they knew and loved in their new country and ended up adapting them to American tastes.

Orange chicken is believed to have derived from tangerine chicken, a dish that originated in the Chinese province of Hunan. The Chinese name of the dish can be roughly translated as “dried citrus peel chicken”. It consists of pieces of chicken that are stir-friend in a light, slightly sweet soy sauce that is flavored with dried tangerine or orange peels.

Tangerine chicken was one of the dishes that Chinese immigrants brought to the United States, but its recipe and flavor has changed significantly since then due to a number of geographical and cultural factors, resulting in the creation of orange chicken.

The original tangerine chicken is cooked with dried tangerine or orange peel, which gives it a fresh and spicy taste. However, American restaurant-goers weren’t particularly fond of this flavor profile, so chefs at American Chinese restaurants started using fresh orange peel instead of dried orange peel and changed the flavor of the dish to sweet and sour to cater to American tastes.

As a result, tangerine chicken has become the orange chicken we all know and love. It consists of chicken pieces that are battered, fried, and coated in a sweet and a little spicy chili sauce flavored with orange, which is caramelized or thickened to a glaze. The dish is sometimes considered a variation of General Tso’s chicken, another popular sweet and sour chicken dish of American Chinese cuisine.

According to the most popular account, the original orange chicken recipe was developed in 1987 by Chef Andy Kao who worked at a Panda Express location in Hawaii. Since then, orange chicken has become a signature dish of this fast food restaurant chain (can you imagine that Panda Express sells more than 100 million pounds of orange chicken every year?), but it is also served at many other American Chinese restaurants across the country.

The creation of Orange Chicken Day was announced in September 2016 by the Twitter account @OrangeChixDay that claimed the holiday was inaugurated by the Orange Chicken Board, although it unclear who runs the account and what the Orange Chicken Board is. Nevertheless, the holiday has been observed annually since 2017.

The best way to celebrate Orange Chicken Day is to go out to your favorite Chinese restaurant or try your hand at cooking orange chicken yourself. Make a party out of it: invite your family and friends over, cook orange chicken together or order heaps of Chinese takeout and enjoy yourselves! And don’t forget to promote the holiday on social media using the hashtags #OrangeChickenDay and #OrangeChixDay.