Step Up Your Stir Fry: No Recipe? No Problem

Are you ready to make a stir-fry, but even better? You know what I'm talking about. The tender protein, crunchy veg, and the sauce that coats everything perfectly. And the best part is, you don't need one of these. Or even a recipe. If you follow these seven simple steps, you're going to have delicious stir-fries every single time. And to prove you do not need a recipe, at the end of the video, we are going to play a game of Wheel of Stir-fry. Jazz hands. Step one. Prior preparation prevents a poor performance. Make sure you are ready before you start cooking. Stir-fries happen fast, so you don't want to be cutting things once you're cooking. When cutting veg, make sure it's the correct size. Think about the density of the vegetable. So something like a carrot, you want to slice slightly thinner than something like a capsicum or a bell pepper. Because of the density. The carrot is going to take longer to cook than the capsicum. Think about your aromats and have them all ready. Have your chili sliced nice and fine. Peel your ginger and then grate it really finely. Crush your garlic, ready to go. The finer you crush your garlic, the more pungent it's going to be. But the faster it burns as well. For the meat, three most common ones. Chicken, pork and beef. The chicken and the pork we're going to treat the same. We're going to slice them thin on the angle. You want to keep it all the same size so they cook evenly. You don't want it too big because it will take too long to cook. And if it's too thin and too small, it's going to overcook quickly. On the pork, if you see any silver skin like this, you can remove that also. It's going to be tough and not cook fast enough when it's in the wok. And beef, super important. We slice against the grain on an angle with the beef. Similar to the last two. Not too big, not too small. Step two, marination and velveting. Velveting. So what does it do? Well, it tenderizes meat and also it makes it absorb water, which means it makes it heavier, which is why a lot of Chinese takeaways like to do it because they're kind of making the meat stretch a bit further. Now, you can velvet any meat you want. Personally, I don't bother velveting chicken and pork at home. I only really do it with beef and only when I'm doing it with tougher cuts like rump or chuck or flank like I'm doing today. Now, there is a couple of different ways to do this. Some people use egg white. Some people use Shaoxing wine instead of water. This is probably the most common method. For roughly every 500 grams of meat, you're going to add one teaspoon of bicarbonate soda and about 50 mils of water. You're going to mix that up really well and set it in the fridge for an hour to an hour and a half for it to absorb the water. After that point, you're going to rinse it really well under water and get all the bicarbonate soda off, dry it, and then we can move into the marinade part. Marination. This is a step that I think is often missed in households and it's actually really important and it doesn't need to be overcomplicated or too crazy. I use a really simple marination of light soy sauce, Shaoxing cooking wine, and a little bit of cornstarch across all of these meats. What that does is more think of it like rinding the meat as opposed to marinating the meat. It also doesn't take forever. Even if you do it right before you cook it, it's better than not doing it at all. Ideally, you do it, mix it, put it in the fridge, and leave it there for 35 to 40 minutes before you start cooking it. As a general rule of thumb, if you've got one kilo of meat, you're going to use one tablespoon of soy sauce, half a tablespoon of Shaoxing cooking wine, and half a tablespoon of cornstarch. Step three, the sauce. Quite possibly the most important part of a stir-fry. Ah, there, there, I said it. And it doesn't have to be complicated. If you've got oyster sauce, hoisin, some fish sauce, some soy sauce, and some ketchup, then you're covering most bases. I'm going to show you three sauces that can be completely interchangeable today with each other. But like everything with stir-fries, make sure you have it ready before you start cooking. So for the beef, we're going to do a black pepper sauce, which has got ketchup, soy sauce, oyster sauce, and lots of black pepper. For the chicken, we're going to go super simple. Oyster sauce with cashews. So we have oyster sauce, light soy sauce, and cashews. Not really a sauce, but you know what I mean. And for the pork, we're going to go hoisin and chili sauce. So we're going to use hoisin sauce. I'm going to use a little bit of fish sauce with the pork. I think it works really well, but you could just use soy sauce. And chili in the aromatics. Step four, how to cook on a wok in a domestic kitchen. Now the reality is not everyone has a 55,000 BTU gas burner at their home. So this is how you cook on a wok without one of those. We need to make sure we're doing things in batches. If we try and put everything in the wok at the same time, it's just going to boil, the temperature's going to come out of the wok. No bueno. Most veggies you can get away with cooking in the wok. However, I've found that broccoli and broccolini is one of the ones that can't. Take a pot of water, bring it to a boil, season with a little bit of salt, and blanch your broccoli in there for two to three minutes, then remove it and let it cool slightly. Now the truth is you can blanch all your veg ahead of time, but broccoli is the only one that I think is really necessary. If you have a really weak burner, like an electric burner, not an induction one, you might want to blanch all your veggies ahead of time. So oil, you want to use a high temperature oil that's not going to burn and oxidize. I like to use peanut oil. If you've got someone who's allergic to nuts in your family, then you're going to have to use something like a canola oil or a vegetable oil. And if you're not into seed oils for whatever reason, then you can use animal fat like tallow. Step five, cook your meat first. Now we don't have the beauty of a lot of heat, so we need to make sure we keep heat retention in our wok. One of the ways we do that is by sealing our meat off first. Add a good drizzle of oil to your wok, and then in batches add your meat to it and toss it for one to two minutes just to get some color on the outside. Remove it from the wok and repeat with the rest of the meat until it's all ready to go. Hot tip, if you've got one of these, you can turn the temperature of your wok up a little bit. Step number six, cook your veg, and then add your meat back to your veg. Put your wok back on a high heat and add a little bit more oil. Then you're going to add your aromats and fry them for about 30 seconds just to open them up and balloon them. Now you're going to start adding your veg. Add your hard veg first and your softer veg as the hard veg starts to cook. So think things like carrots first and then capsicums and then soft things like zucchinis and courgettes. Once your veg is about 60% cooked, you're going to add your meat back to the wok and toss it through. Step number seven, add your sauce. Add your sauce to your wok around the outside so it evenly distributes throughout the whole wok, and then optionally you can add a little pinch of MSG if you're that way inclined. It's also a good time to taste and see if it needs any more sweetness. If so, a little bit of sugar will sort that out. If at this point your sauce isn't sticking to your stir fry very well, you're going to add about half a tablespoon of cornstarch or cornflour to a bowl with about a tablespoon of water. Let that dissolve and then pour that over your stir fry and toss it through. Once the heat activates that cornflour, it'll thicken your sauce nicely. It'll become all shiny and it will stick to everything really well. Alright, it's the thing I've been looking forward to all day. We're now going to play a game of Wheel of Stir Fry. Jazz hands. So I've got some chicken. I need three other vegetables from this to make a stir fry from. I'm really hoping for some kind of green, some kind of onion and something else. Maybe a mushroom. Let's see. Ingredient number one. Broccolini. That was not rigged. I promise you. Alright, duck, do you want to spin? Okay. This is your spin. What's it going to be? Red onion. Yes. Okay. Broccolini, red onion. We're doing well here. Some mushroom would be good for well-rounded, but we can kind of make anything work here apart from more onions, and that would be weird. Ingredient number three. Come on, shiitake. I'm going to call that oyster. So we've got broccolini. We've got red onion and oyster mushrooms and some chicken. Let's make a stir fry. So as I'm running through this, I'm going to talk about some of the steps I was talking about earlier. So first step is get your chicken to marinating. I'm not going to velvet the chicken. I don't think chicken breast needs to really be velveted. Beef, I probably would. We're going to slice our chicken nice and thin. And before anyone jumps in the comments and asks, no, I don't wash my chicken. But if you like to wash your chicken, then you do you. So place that in a bowl. Go clean the ends. Now to marinate. Soy sauce. Shaoxing cooking wine. Corn flour. Oh, I need some more. Mix it well. Make sure it's all nicely distributed and you don't have lumps of corn flour. And set aside. You can refrigerate if you're not going to be cooking for like more than half an hour, but at room temperature is perfectly fine. Next step. Super important. We're going to get everything ready. All our veg ready. So before we start cooking, we have everything good to go. And remember what I said about broccolini. It's one of the only veggies that I will always pre-cook first. So I'm just going to trim the ends because they got a bit dry and weird. And these are all about the same size. We don't have to stress too much about the thickness. And we will cut it down into kind of mouth-sized pieces. Now you notice these two are quite a bit thicker. So I will split the bottom of these just so that they cook at the same time that these do. Salted boiling water in there for two minutes. I'm not sure if it's cheating. I guess it's not because I kind of set the rules. But I didn't count this ginger and garlic that I'm also going to use. I think I'm not counting that because there's always ginger and garlic in my fridge anyway. I don't know if I'm weird like that. Grating ginger and garlic is also really great if you don't have a lot of it. There's some scientific reason. Not sure what. But especially with garlic, the more fine you break it down, the stronger it is. I might be making that up. Broccolini's been cooked. We'll drain it off. And just run a little bit of water over it. It doesn't need to be cold. We just want to stop that kind of immediate cooking. Right. Red onion. I think I'm going to keep the red onion quite chunky. I think you can do that with red onion. It's a bit sweeter. Not quite as harsh. It's like a brown onion. So I cut that into like five pieces and then we'll just break the petals up. And that's the kind of size of petal I'm looking for. They're not all going to be that size because the closer they get to the core, the smaller they are. But around that size is perfect. Onion, good to go. Chicken's marinating. The only thing left is these oyster mushrooms. Now these will take literally seconds to cook. I'm just going to pull them apart. I don't want them too small as well or they'll just dissolve. There's nothing worse than kind of soggy mushrooms. Mushrooms are delicious, but I think people have PTSD because they've eaten soggy mushrooms and I understand why. This will literally toss through right at the last second because you've got to be realistic with how much temperature you can get out of these pans. You've got these mushrooms super crispy in a commercial-sized or a commercial-grade wok with heaps of heat. In a domestic wok, you don't really have the heat to do it and you end up using heaps of oil and they just soak up the oil and it kind of gets a bit gross. The only other thing we need is our sauce. So like I said before, I'm just going to use a bit of oyster sauce. So that's good to go. And I might use a little bit more soy sauce. If our sauce in the wok isn't thick enough, we can then also thicken it with a little bit more cornstarch slurry, but it should be fine because we've marinated our chicken in cornstarch. Let's get cooking. All right, we've got our wok lovely and hot. Not quite. It'll get hot soon. We'll wait. Be patient. What we are going to do when this wok is hot is we're going to cook our chicken first. Potentially in batches. We'll see how it kind of reacts the first part that we put it in and then we'll remove it and we'll continue cooking the veg. I can see my wok's hot now because it's starting to smoke on the outside. We're going to add a decent amount of neutral flavoured oil. I'm using a peanut oil here. Make sure all that wok is covered in oil. You can put heaps in there and then pour some out. I think that's kind of dangerous in a domestic setting, but if you are kind of conscious of how much oil you're consuming, you definitely can pull some out if you need to. It's just really important that you get all the wok covered in oil because you're almost seasoning a wok every time you use it. Let that oil come back up to temperature and in goes our chicken. I'm going to do it in batches, two batches. And you've really got to resist the urge to do that action too much because in a restaurant style wok you've got so much heat underneath you can afford to take this off the heat. In a domestic wok, you just lose, you can hear it just then, you can lose temperature straight away. So our wok's back hot again. We're going to add a little bit more oil in with our onions. Once your onions are set, I'll just let them sit there for like 30 seconds. You're going to get some nice little bits of char on them. Now we're going to add our blanched broccolini, ginger and garlic. Chicken back to the equation. You notice I haven't lifted this wok once. We try and keep as much heat in there as we can. Still haven't added the mushrooms either. That's deliberate. Worth mentioning, if you were using a kind of a more dense mushroom, like a button mushroom, a portobello mushroom, or even a shiitake mushroom, I would have added them in now. But because of these oyster mushrooms are so delicate, we are going to add them right at the end. So oyster sauce, light soy sauce around the outside, around the outside. Stir that through. You can see that soy sauce on the wok has immediately pulled all the heat out of it. That's why I haven't added those mushrooms yet. Because of the cornflour that's on the chicken, I don't need to add a slurry. If I was pulling this back and sauce was pooling at the bottom, I would add a slurry. But because it's not doing that and it's sticking to the veggies and the chicken, we're all good. We're going to let the heat come back into the wok before we finally add the mushrooms and then we're good to go. Alright, heat's back up. In with the mushrooms. Toss those through quickly. And we're done. There you go. There's my just invented broccolin, broccolin? Broccolini, chicken, oyster sauce and oyster mushroom stir fry. There's my seven step guide to creating delicious stir fries at home. If there's only two things you take away, remember to make sure you're completely ready before you start cooking and cook in batches because your home wok is not a restaurant wok and it will not keep up. Thank you for watching, legends. We'll see you next week for another recipe. And I'm going to use a comically large spoon to eat my stir fry. The old wheel of stir fry, is it alright? That's delicious.