Food - Drink
How Bang Bang Chicken Got Its Name
By WENDY LEIGH
One would expect anything with "bang bang" in its name to be super spicy, but names can often have nothing to do with flavor. Although different restaurants have their own variations of bang bang chicken, regardless of how the dish is prepared, there's a pretty universal consensus on how it got its name.
Per Taste of Asian Food, the name "bang bang" comes from the Asian continent, and the spicy chicken recipe potentially dates way back. Bàng bàng ji recipes come from authentic Chinese Szechuan cuisine, and the word "bang" is the Mandarin pronunciation for a traditional stick used to bash the chicken meat for the dish.
Some assume the name refers to the noise from the stick, but a "banging" noise would unlikely be described that way in the Chinese language; Three Hungry Tummies suggests "bang" is the Mandarin slang word for "fantastic.” Besides the name, the dish also differs in the authentic Asian preparation versus the American one.