You Should Probably Skip This Chicken Dish At Panda Express

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Panda Express is an iconic fast food chain that's responsible for some of the nation's most well-known Chinese American dishes. For example, Panda Express invented orange chicken, a sweet, savory, and citrusy dish that is our favorite Panda Express menu item. We put it in first place on a list of 15 Panda Express ranked menu items. But the chicken dish you should probably skip at Panda Express is the teriyaki chicken, which came in last.

We based our ranking on taste, texture, general customer appeal, and whether the dish in question lived up to our expectations. Teriyaki may be of Japanese origin, but it's become an American staple offered on Chinese American menus, too, so we still expected Panda Express to deliver a flavorful version. Unfortunately, neither the chicken or the sauce met our expectations. As our teriyaki sauce recipe indicates, the dish should blend sugar and soy sauce with spices and aromatics for a sweet, umami-rich glaze that coats and enhances the savoriness of stir-fried chicken. But Panda Express's version was thin, tasteless, and woefully overcooked. The sweet and savory sauce was almost imperceptible; we think that all traces of seasoning evaporated out as the chicken was cooked for longer than it should have been. A tasteless sauce was the first disappointment, followed by the unpleasantly stringy and mushy consistency of the chicken. While teriyaki sauce packets are available, no amount of extra sauce could overcome the state of the overcooked chicken.

We took to Reddit to find that many Panda Express customers feel the same way we do about the sub-par teriyaki chicken. One Reddit thread describes the chicken as "slightly rubbery and slimy" while the "edges of the meat also become dry and stringy." Customers also thought the dish had very little sauce and that overall it tasted off. Another Reddit thread called the chicken meat fatty with weird cuts of meat that's "seriously lacking sauce." Some respondents questioned whether the meat was chicken at all or whether "Panda might have sold its soul to the lab grown frankenmeat agenda."

It's safe to say that the texture of stir-fried chicken meat at Panda Express is the main source of disappointment among Redditors. The tastelessness and lack of sauce only highlights the unpleasant texture. So you might want to stick to the lightly fried, cornstarch-crusted orange chicken for which Panda Express is most famous. You can always cook your own easy teriyaki chicken at home using our recipe. Or make life even simpler by stir-frying chicken with one of a pick of store-bought teriyaki sauce brands; we ranked Kikkoman Takumi Teriyaki sauce (available on Amazon) as the best bottled sauce.