3-Ingredient Orange Chicken Sauce Is Faster Than Ordering Takeout

One of the frustrating parts of being an adult is learning that your mother was right: You do, in fact, have food at home. If you're craving takeout at an inconvenient time, it's easy to get caught up in resenting the stuff you have in your fridge. When visions of sweet, savory orange chicken from your favorite fast food Chinese place dance in your head, the sight of some chopped up chicken pieces under wan refrigerator lighting can feel like cruel mockery from the Grocery Gods who guided your hand when you went shopping a few days ago.

But worry not! Although you'll need quite a well-stocked pantry in order to exactly approximate the shiny, tangy bites of perfection that your Chinese place offers, you can get a pretty close approximation with three ingredients – soy sauce, barbecue sauce, and orange marmalade — that you may already have in your kitchen. It's a simple, tasty sauce, and it'll be ready before your delivery driver can even put some shoes on.

The first and most prominent of these three ingredients, as you can imagine, is the orange marmalade, which adds a deeper citrus flavor and is tasty enough to make Paddington Bear proud. It's the ingredient that adds that precise mixture of sweetness and tang that any good orange chicken delivers. The barbecue sauce comes next, adding more sweetness and a little smokiness that will be more than welcome in your dish. Then, of course, there's soy sauce — because no succulent Chinese meal would be complete without it.

Start with one cup each of marmalade and barbecue sauce and add 2 or 3 tablespoons of soy sauce depending on how much umami flavor you prefer. After that, all you have to do is stir to combine, put the sauce in a saucepan or a microwave to heat up, and let the flavors get to know each other. Before you know it, you'll have a quick and easy sauce to enrich any bite-sized chicken meal. The sauce goes perfectly with homemade chicken, but if you're in a real hurry, you can go ahead and toss some of the best frozen nuggets or popcorn chicken bites in a big bowl of the stuff. We promise we won't tell.