I Reverse Engineered Panda Express Beijing Beef

Over the past few months, I've made every Beijing beef recipe I could find online, and not a single one tasted like Panda Express. They all get the sauce wrong, and the breading is soggy before you can even plate it. But Panda stays crunchy for hours, even sitting under a heat lamp. So I did what I always do. I cross-referenced their official ingredient lists, I read everything former employees have said about this dish, and I tested it dozens of times until I figured out what Panda Express is actually doing. So let's start with the sauce, because this is the first thing everyone gets wrong. I pulled up 5 of the most popular Beijing beef recipes on YouTube, and their sauce recipes are all over the place. Hoisin, sambal, orange chicken sauce, Shaoxing wine, rice vinegar, none of that is on the official ingredient list. So I went through what is on the list and translated every industrial ingredient into something you can actually find at a grocery store. The first thing I found surprised me. The base of the glaze is a pre-made sweet and sour sauce. Every former employee who's talked about this publicly backs me up. But it's not the 1980's Miami Vice neon red sweet and sour sauce you're probably thinking of. Panda's version has a few ingredients you've probably never cooked with. For starters, they're using 3 different sweetening agents in this sauce. Invert syrup, corn syrup solids, and dextrose. One prevents the sauce from crystallizing, one adds body, and one browns faster than regular sugar. At a grocery store, dark corn syrup handles all three by itself. The second ingredient is phosphoric acid. It's the same thing Coca-Cola uses to give it that crisp, tangy flavor. The sauce already has a lot of sugar in it, so they needed a way to balance it without adding more vinegar. The grocery store equivalent is citric acid. You can find it on Amazon for a few dollars. I'll include a link in the video description. The last one is xanthan gum. This sauce is almost half vinegar, and that much acid breaks down cornstarch, which is why a lot of homemade stir-fry sauces turn watery after a few minutes. A tiny pinch of xanthan gum will keep the sauce thick and clinging to the beef instead of pooling at the bottom of your plate. This one is optional, but it's insurance against the sauce thinning out on you. To make the sweet and sour base, in a small saucepan, add two and a half tablespoons of water, two and a half tablespoons of granulated sugar, two teaspoons of dark corn syrup, one and a half tablespoons of tomato paste, two and a half tablespoons of distilled white vinegar, one and a half tablespoons of soy sauce, a quarter teaspoon of salt, an eighth of a teaspoon of citric acid, and a quarter teaspoon of MSG. And no, MSG is not on their official ingredient list, but hydrolyzed soy protein, hydrolyzed corn protein, and autolyzed yeast are. These three ingredients all mimic what MSG does, but they're doing more than just adding umami, so I'll show you how to replicate this effect when we marinate and velvet the beef. Whisk this over medium heat until all the solids dissolve and the sauce is smooth. Don't let it boil. Then pull it off and let it cool to room temperature. Once it's cooled, whisk in one teaspoon of cornstarch and about a sixteenth of a teaspoon of xanthan gum. The sauce will look thin right now, but it'll thicken when we cook it later. That's the pre-made sweet and sour sauce, and you can keep it in the fridge for a couple of weeks. So, the sauce is solved, but the beef is where this recipe gets really interesting. One of the first things I learned when I started researching this is the beef at Panda Express arrives already breaded, par-fried, and frozen. They just pull it out of a bag, drop it in the fryer, and toss it in the sauce. There's a very specific reason they freeze it, but before we get to that, let's talk about what cut of beef they're using. The official ingredient list just says beef. It doesn't specify which cut, but when I see two separate tenderizing agents on the same label, sodium bicarbonate and sodium phosphate, that tells me they're likely using a more inexpensive, tougher cut. At home, we don't have that problem, and we can use something more tender. I like using flank steak, which is the standard cut for most Chinese stir-fry dishes. To prep it, you'll slice the steak with the grain into pieces about one to one and a half inches wide, then take each section, turn it perpendicular to you, tilt your knife to about a 45 degree angle, and cut into quarter inch strips. Slicing against the grain shortens the muscle fibers, and that's what keeps the beef from getting tough. Once the beef is sliced, it goes into a marinade, and this marinade is doing two things for us. It's tenderizing the meat with baking soda, but it's also how we're going to sneak in those umami compounds I talked about when we made the sauce. Remember those three ingredients from the sauce section? Hydrolyzed soy protein, hydrolyzed corn protein, and autolyzed yeast? They all deliver glutamic acid, which is the same thing MSG does, but the autolyzed yeast also delivers something extra called nucleotides, and when you combine all three, a small amount tastes dramatically more savory than a large amount of any one alone. And you can cover two of the three with a single ingredient, better than bouillon roasted beef base. Have you ever wondered what would happen to this company if someone came out with better than better than bouillon? But let's look at the label. Hydrolyzed soy protein and yeast extract, and the MSG in our sauce handles the third. It's the exact same system, but with stuff you can actually buy at a grocery store. To marinate the beef, add half a teaspoon of baking soda to the beef strips, and massage it in. This raises the surface pH of the meat, which is what keeps thin strips like this from tightening up and squeezing out moisture when they hit hot oil. Then add two teaspoons of soy sauce, two teaspoons of cold water, and one teaspoon of better than bouillon. Toss everything together until the marinade is evenly distributed, then cover and refrigerate for at least 45 minutes. While the beef is in the fridge, let me show you why Panda's breading stays crunchy for hours and yours turns soggy right after you sauce it. Most recipes online coat the beef in straight cornstarch, but remember how much vinegar is in this sauce? And vinegar turns cornstarch to mush. It's the same reason we added xanthan gum to the sauce. Panda Express uses a modified food starch instead. It doesn't absorb oil, and it won't turn gummy when we sauce it later. You can't buy it at a grocery store, but we can build something that does the same job. Instead of one starch, we can get close by blending three different flours, cornstarch for the crispiness, rice flour for a crust that stays dry even after saucing, and all-purpose flour to give the whole thing enough structure to hold together. The last thing in the blend is nonfat dry milk powder. I know that sounds strange for a fried beef coating, but Panda uses whey protein in theirs for faster browning and to keep the oil from soaking into the starch. Dry milk powder is the grocery store equivalent of the same ingredient. If you had told me a month ago that the secret to Panda's crunchy breading was essentially baby formula, I wouldn't have believed it either. I understand if you need a moment with this information. To make the blend, add seven tablespoons of cornstarch, three and a half tablespoons of fine white rice flour, three and a half tablespoons of all-purpose flour, one tablespoon of dry milk powder, and a quarter teaspoon of white pepper to a large bowl. Whisk everything together and set it aside. We now need a binder to make that starch stick to the beef. And here's something I didn't expect to find. Eggs aren't anywhere on Panda Express's ingredient list. At the factory, they use wheat gluten as the binder and carrageenan to keep the meat from drying out through frying, freezing, and frying again. At home, egg whites do both. They bind the starch to the beef and they form a barrier that traps moisture when they hit the hot oil. But before we start the breading, let's get our oil heating up. Fill a large pot or a wok with vegetable oil. Then add a tablespoon and a half of beef tallow to the oil. Panda Express lists beef fat as an ingredient, which means somewhere in their product development process, someone pitched the idea of frying the beef in beef. And corporate said, hell yes. Because it gives the coating a savory, meaty richness that neutral oils don't have. Bring it up to 325 degrees, and while it's heating, we'll bread the beef. After it's marinated for at least 45 minutes, pull it out of the fridge. In a separate bowl, whisk two egg whites until they're frothy, but not peaking. Pour the egg whites over the beef and toss them until every strip is evenly coated. Then take a few strips at a time and press them into the flour blend. Press hard. You want a thick, uniform coating on all sides. Once the oil hits 325 degrees, fry the coated beef in batches. Don't crowd the wok. When the breading sets, move them around a bit so they don't clump together. We're only par-frying the beef here, so it'll only take about 3 minutes per batch. Scoop out the strips once they're pale gold. They might look underdone, but they're going back in the oil for a second fry before the final cooking. Drain them on a wire rack and let them cool to room temperature. Once they're cool, spread them in a single layer on a baking sheet lined with foil, uncovered, and put them in the freezer for at least 6 hours, but overnight will give you the best results. And I know it sounds bizarre to freeze something you just pulled out of a fryer. This is the part of the recipe that requires a little bit of faith. You are uncooking something you just cooked so that you can cook it again. But this is the single most important step in this recipe, and it's why Panda's Beef stays crunchy and yours doesn't. When you freeze the fried beef, the moisture inside the coating forms ice crystals. Those crystals fracture the starch from the inside, and the starch itself hardens as it cools. When it hits the oil a second time, you get a coating that's drier, more brittle, and able to stay crunchy even after you sauce it. Freezing also means you can cook ahead. The pound of beef we just prepped makes 2 batches, so keep the second half in a freezer bag and it'll stay good for about 2 months. The next time you want Beijing beef, you just skip straight to the second fry and you can have dinner ready in about 10 minutes. So the beef is in the freezer. Let's talk about the 2 ingredients that are missing from every Beijing beef recipe online. You'll find ginger and chili in a lot of Beijing beef recipes, but not a single one I found is using them the way Panda Express does. The first missing ingredient is a garlic ginger infusion. In Chinese cooking, there's a technique called jiang shui, or ginger water, where you steep ginger and scallions in water and strain out the pulp. Dumpling makers use this infused water to get ginger flavor into fillings without messing up the texture. We're doing something similar here, but we're keeping the solids because we want them in the sauce. And you want to grate the ginger, don't mince it. Grating breaks the fibers apart and releases the juice, which is what you're actually after. To make the garlic ginger infusion, whisk together 2 teaspoons of grated ginger, 1 tablespoon of minced garlic, a teaspoon of vegetable oil, and a teaspoon of water. The water extracts the aromatics from the ginger, and when this hits the hot wok later, that water has to evaporate before the oil can get hot enough to scorch the garlic. Then set it aside. The second infusion is more involved, and it's one of my favorite techniques in this entire recipe. So take a quarter cup of crushed red pepper flakes and stir in 2 tablespoons of water until they're evenly coated. You want a wet sand consistency. Then heat 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil to 275 degrees and slowly pour it over the flakes. It's going to foam up, violently. That's the water turning to steam, and that's exactly what you want. If you pour hot oil over dry chili flakes, you have about 2 seconds before they go from toasted to scorched. The water absorbs the initial heat, evaporates, and while it's doing that, the oil is extracting color and flavor from the chilies instead of burning them. What you end up with is a concentrated chili paste with a deep red color and tempered heat with no bitterness. We'll only use about 2 teaspoons for this recipe, I probably should have led with that, but keep the rest because it'll stay good in the fridge for weeks. And those two infusions are what every recipe online has been missing. I know the prep on this recipe is a lot of work, but from here, the actual cooking takes less than 10 minutes. So bring your oil back up to 375 degrees. And remember, we're only cooking half of what we prepped, so take 8 ounces of the beef directly from the freezer to the fryer. If you thaw it first, you'll undo everything the freezer just did for you. We'll fry this for 4-5 minutes until the crust is a deep golden brown. They'll bubble hard when they go in, this is completely normal. That's all the moisture from the ice crystals burning off, and it's exactly what you want. When they look good to you, remove them from the oil and drain them on a wire rack. Heat a clean wok or a large skillet over medium-high heat until it's lightly smoking. Then add a tablespoon of vegetable oil and swirl it around to coat the surface. Add 2 teaspoons of the garlic ginger infusion and 2 teaspoons of the chili paste and saute them for about 10 seconds. Then toss in 2 ounces of bell pepper and 2 ounces of onion and stir fry for 30-45 seconds until they're just barely softened. Pour in the sauce and bring it to a rapid boil and let it reduce until it thickens up and starts to look like a glaze. Add the beef and toss everything together for 15-20 seconds, or until every piece is coated. Once every piece is glazed, you're done cooking. Then put it on some white rice, and that is Panda Express Beijing Beef, reverse engineered from their official ingredient list. But before the taste test, there's something about this dish that's been bugging me. Beijing Beef is not Beijingese. The name was most likely invented by copywriters. The dish itself is probably a mashup of two traditional Chinese dishes from completely different parts of the country. The first is Guaobaorou, a sweet and sour crispy fried pork from Harbin in northeast China. That's the source of the crispy coating and the sweet and sour glaze. The second is dry fried beef from Sichuan, which is where the chilies and the crispy shredded beef come from. Panda Express took one dish's technique and the other dish's flavor profile, swapped the pork for beef, and named it after a city that had nothing to do with either one. And I respect that creativity. If you want to try the alleged inspirations for yourself, I went to Lucky Bento VIP Cuisine here in Houston for the Guaobaorou and Mala Sichuan Bistro for the dry fried beef. So shout out to both of those places. Y'all's food is incredible. Alright, back to the taste test. This is the closest you're going to get without actually working at Panda Express. The breading is still crunchy 20 minutes after I made it. And you've got another bag in the freezer for next time. That's what happens when you stop freestyling and start following the official ingredient list. Orange chicken has the same problem this dish does, and almost every recipe online gets it wrong for the same reason. If you want to see how I solved it, check out this video right here. Thanks for watching. See you next time. Alright, let's see what's in my fortune cookie. Meet me in the bathroom. What kind of place is this?