Go to the Recipe: Orange Chicken
Can you use benefiber for the wheat dextrin?
If I wanted to make this (or the other recipes) gluten free, should I just sub for a GF flour blend and reduce is by 10% to account for GF flours absorbing more moisture, or is there any other recs by the kitchen? The wheat dextrin should be fine so I don’t need to sub that out (less than 20ppm of gluten which is ok for celiac)
On cook sauce and coat chicken, wondering why the reserved mandarin peel isn’t listed with the ingredients, it is in the directions.
Hey Evan,
You can definitely substitute Evercrisp in this recipe for Benefiber as a 1-for-1 swap by weight. Anecdotally, Benefiber gives you a very similar result (though not exactly the same as Evercrisp; Modernist Pantry likely has a proprietary process which makes it ideal for fried batters/coatings). If you observe both products side by side, you may notice some differences in granule size and texture. But at the end of the day, wheat dextrin has the same properties in either case, and helps to keep things crisper for longer.Just make sure to use unflavored Benefiber (unless you're feeling adventurous.)
Hope this helps!
Hey Dan,
I've had success in the past with GF flour blends (King Arthur, for example) and this style of fried chicken. In this case, you shouldn't need to reduce the amount of dredge, since this isn't quite a batter (i.e. the liquid marinade is separate from the dredge). For the small amount of marinade that gets mixed into the dredge, you should get a similar pebbly texture. If it remains dry, feel free to add a few drops of water to get it to this point.
Good luck!
Hi John,
This is a just a convention of our recipe writing style. We typically call for an ingredient in the main ingredient list, and then subsequently only in the first step where it is prepped. In this case, the dried mandarin peels are hydrated and scraped in Step 4, then reserved for Step 11. From Step 4 onward, we only refer to those reserved hydrated/scraped peels in the recipe steps, not the step ingredient list.
Sorry if that sounds confusing! Writing clean, coherent recipes is hard (even for us).
Hi Tim,
On the first fry, the printed and verbal instructions say, "oil temperature between 280 °F / 138 °C and 300 °F / 149 °C, until chicken is golden and crust is set, about 3 minutes," but on the burner it was 368°.
Was this upped on your end intentionally to absorb the mass cooling of adding everything at once, in order to keep it consistently with the above quote?
