This Beef and Broccoli Will Rival Your Favorite Takeout

What's up, dude? Have you ever wondered why the beef at Chinese restaurants is so soft, silky, and tender? There's actually just one simple trick behind it, and you can probably do it right now with the ingredients you have in your pantry. Today, I'll show you exactly how to master that technique and make beef and broccoli at home that doesn't just compete with your local takeout, it might just be better. Now let's go! For starters, when it comes to what cut of beef to actually choose for beef and broccoli, the most common one you're gonna see is flank steak. And there's some very good reasons for that, I'll explain in a minute, but if you can't find flank steak, you could use flap steak, you could use flat iron, you could use top sirloin, you could use skirt steak. Because the tenderizing method we're gonna use for this beef sort of equalizes all those textures, so I don't think it matters as much as people think it does. This piece of flank steak that I have is a little bit wide, so what I'm gonna do is on a bias, just start making these slices like so. If you feel comfortable doing it, you could slice towards you the Japanese way, but for most people, this is probably gonna make more sense. And I'm going about a quarter inch thick or so, couple slices on this other side. If you wanna get really clean slices too, you could sort of freeze this for 20 minutes or so, which makes it easier, but you don't need to. And so what I'll do now is just slice this whole thing in half, and then just continue with my slices like this, just have a more manageable bite here. And of course, all flank steaks are a little different, but the reason people use it for this is because it generally has like a line of fat running through the middle. This one doesn't really have it, you see it a little bit, but it just makes it great for these thin slices that you then cook. Like I use this for beef stroganoff, it's the perfect cut. There you go. Here you can see that line of fat coming through real nice, and that's all she wrote. And on another note, you always wanna slice against the grain. You can see it really easily on a flank steak, so this is a good demonstration. The muscle fibers are all running this way, so you wanna slice against them this way, right? That's just gonna make for a more tender bite. When you put it in your mouth, it'll just break apart easier. And so there's really no reason not to do that. Next, we have this sort of dual purpose marinade that's gonna tenderize it at the same time, starting with two teaspoons of soy sauce. And by the way, this is the brand I love for a lot of Chinese cooking. It'll make other soy sauce taste like garbage. Link in description. Followed by two teaspoons of oyster sauce, one tablespoon Shaoxing wine. I know a lot of you probably won't be able to find this, so you can just use dry Sherry wine that works as a good substitute, or just leave it out. One teaspoon of baking soda, and this is what really tenderizes that beef. Something about the pH, I just know it works. Two teaspoons of neutral oil. I just use peanut oil. About two and a half tablespoons of water. This actually gets absorbed by the beef and is really an important part. You'll see a lot of recipes that wash or rinse the beef. I don't do that, but you could do that if you want. One tablespoon of cornstarch, our thickening agent. And that is it, my friends. We're just gonna start by giving this a really good mix. It's a process called velveting the meat, and you can do it with any kind of meat. You could do this with chicken, you could do this with pork. Sometimes you'll see different flavorings, egg whites added. And generally, this meat will be double cooked, meaning it'll be poached once in water or oil, and then cooked in a wok to finish to serve to you. Once you got a nice mixy mixy, we're just gonna pop some saran wrap on this. Cling film, if you're from the UK. Pop it in the fridge for about 30 minutes. Next, we'll just prep up our vegetables and aromatics for the stir fry. And I like to use a little spoon here to peel ginger. Any kind of blunt object will do. Does a really great job of just taking away the outer layer of skin, whereas if you use a peeler, you're just gonna waste more ginger. Great trick if you didn't know it already. And then all I'm gonna do is just make these nice big plank-like slices. This is really just to flavor the dish. I'm not planning on eating this later on. Something like that is fine. Next, we'll do some garlic. And what I'm gonna do with this is just smash like so. And then I'll just peel and just take off that little top, and then I'll just leave these sort of whole crushed like this. And a couple carrots here. I'm just going for a standard circle, about a quarter inch. Half a yellow onion here. And I'm just gonna do a really big dice on this, just like that. And of course, our broccoli here. And I'll start from this end. Just take a little bit off. And then we want sort of big pieces here. So I'll chop that one up in a sec. But what I'll do is just run my knife through right under those florets. This is all good stuff. And then look, it sort of did the work for me. I might just break a few of these pieces in half. But honestly, right there, those pieces are looking pretty good. This was like a smaller broccoli. So if you have a bigger one, you might need to cut it a little more, but that's perfect. And then with these root pieces here, I'll just slice them up a little bit. There's nothing wrong with that. If for some reason it's old and woody, you might want to peel it down, but I don't think I need to. This next piece has a thicker stem. So what I like to do is just take off some of these little bottom florets, like so, to sort of reveal that stem. And then what I can do is just take a peeler and just run around real quick. And now that that's peeled, I can just cut the bottom into these little rings. I love broccoli stems. I don't know why people would ever throw these away. Pieces like that, I can just half. And then what I do is I just keep cutting up this and it just keeps releasing those perfect pieces of broccoli. And by the way, if you do want to split a big piece in half, don't cut through the whole thing. Just cut through the stem and then just pull it in half like this. Otherwise you just lose a lot of those tiny little, I don't know what they are, little, whatever this stuff is on top. Next step, to blanch our broccoli, I'm going to season up the water just a little bit, just to permeate that broccoli. Just go ahead and drop that broccoli in. Make sure to submerge it. And how long you do it is really up to you. If you want that broccoli to have a really good bite to it and be like a little bit crunchy, then maybe just do like 90 seconds to two minutes. If you want it on the softer side, you could go three minutes, four minutes. If you have no teeth, do it for like, I don't know, eight minutes. But do remember this is going to get cooked again. So I try to edge on that shorter side. So I'll do about two minutes or so. There we go. Just two minutes. And I'm getting mine straight into ice water because I want to stop the cooking process and then lock in the color. This is just that culinary technique known as blanching. The broccoli is just barely cooked through. It's still pretty hard, but again, it's going to cook another time. So for me, that's good. About three minutes in the ice water, and then we're just going to strain that off and then just leave that in the strainer to drain off any excess water. And I've recently come to the understanding that pretty much every dish that you serve with regular rice is almost always better with sushi rice. There's definitely exceptions to this, like biryani and what have you. But having said that, I just love sweet, sticky, delicious sushi rice where you can feel every grain in your mouth. So that's what I decided to make to go with this dish. It's a little bit of an in-depth process. So I'll put a link to the video where I show you exactly how to make it at the end of this one. But if you don't want to make sushi rice, just use whatever rice you've got. Now, before moving on, let me introduce the sponsor of today's video, Wild Grain. And they are the first subscription service that delivers baked from frozen sourdough breads, artisanal pastries, and fresh pastas. 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And my personal box had sourdough harvest bread, pumpkin cinnamon biscuits, maple Belgium waffles, apple cider donuts and slow fermented olive oil ciabatta, butternut squash and cheese raviolis and some really awesome butter croissants. And in the spirit of fall, I recently baked up some of the apple cider donuts and the pumpkin cinnamon biscuits and both were absolutely delicious and great to make in a pinch. Check out Wild Grain and their seasonal products by clicking the link down in the description and use code thatyoucancook to save $30 off your first box. Plus you'll get free croissants for life. Thank you Wild Grain for sponsoring this video. Now back to the recipe. Now, before we start cooking here, the last thing we need to do is just build this sauce. It's really simple. We're gonna use a lot of the same ingredients as before for the marinade. Starting with four tablespoons of the same soy sauce we used to make the marinade, about a tablespoon and a half oyster sauce, two teaspoons white sugar, half teaspoon white pepper, little bit more of that Shaoxing wine, two teaspoons of plain old white vinegar and about a tablespoon of water. And that's really all there is to it, my friends. Just give it a good mix, set aside and we're ready to cook. And I'm also taking two to three teaspoons of corn starch and just adding a little water to make this slurry. Take the tiniest whisk of all time and give it a mix. You may not need this, but it's good to have it on hand if you need to thicken up your sauce. You want it to coat everything nicely without being watery or anything like that. And if you don't have a wok, you can definitely use just a big saute pan for this. And I'm just gonna start by adding a bit of peanut oil. And what we're gonna do now is fry the beef once, right? We're gonna do this twice. You try to do it all in one go, you're just not gonna get the heat you need or the color on the beef. It'll end up just a steamy, sloppy mess. And once you see some smoke coming off of that pan, we'll go ahead and drop in our beef. And I'm not doing it all. I'm actually gonna do a couple batches. I'll just do half and then the other half. Otherwise I'll lose my sear. Always put a little more oil over the top and the sides like so. And essentially what we're doing now is just par cooking this beef with a little bit of color over the course of about 90 seconds. You just need to get a little bit of color on it, but you still wanna see some pink at this stage in the process because it's gonna get cooked again. And after that 90 seconds was up, I put it on a sheet pan lined with a wire rack and spread it out so it wouldn't keep cooking. Because if you stack this all up in a bowl, it's gonna steam to death and you don't want that. And once all your beef is seared off and on the cooling rack, just fire up your wok again and we can finish the dish. Now back into our wok with just a little oil and I'll start by adding our carrots and onions. And we're gonna start by cooking these for about 90 seconds, which point I'll add some green onions. And that's mostly from the bottom part here. Most important part about this wok cooking is keeping the heat extremely high, which is hard to do at home. 30 seconds on the green onions, now I'm adding those aromatics. Touch more oil if you feel like it needs it. And I'm doing those aromatics last because I just don't want the garlic to burn. And you can toss a little if you want, but you really don't wanna lose that heat, right? So keeping it over the burner and just using one of these little tools, I think is a better idea. Okay, about a minute with the aromatics, I'm gonna add my broccoli and just continue to cook. And something I personally like to do when I'm cooking with a wok at home is if I feel like I've lost my heat, I'll just get everything out. Like if you really wanna wok cook at home, you gotta do like individual portions, right? In Chinese restaurants, they have those wok burners. They're like hundreds of thousands of BTUs. They're like 10 times more powerful than your stove. So they can do that amount in one go, but on a home burner, it's almost next to impossible. A little bit more oil. And I can really tell by the sound that I lost my heat. Now listen. Much better. About two minutes with the broccoli, beef goes back in, give it a good toss. And now straight in with our sauce, as well as a little bit of sesame oil. Heat remains high. And now we get this nice saucy coating coming up. This is when the dish really comes together. And what you wanna do is peak the bottom. I don't really see much juice there, just a little bit. That's good. So again, with that cornstarch, I might not even need to add it, right? You don't have to. I'm actually gonna do just a smidge, just a smidge. What we don't want is like a pool of sauce, right? Smidge more. And there we are, my friends, happy days. There's basically no liquid in the bottom, just a tiny bit. Everything's nicely coated. Let's serve it up. With some of our incredible sushi rice here. And that's all she wrote, my friends. Beef and broccoli, done. All right, Marcus, here we go. Beef and broccoli. I'm going straight for a piece of beef. Beef first, come on. That is like a Chinese restaurant. Whoa, damn. If you've never tried this velveting thing, try it because you're like, wow. Beef is so much more tender. With the sushi rice, here we go. Gosh, chopsticks can be frustrating. Not for me. Try it with the sushi rice. Dude, that's a big ass chopstick. For me, it's normal size. Beef's crazy tender. The broccoli's awesome. It catches all the sauce and then explodes. That's true because the little tops hold the sauce. Might be the best way to eat broccoli, honestly. I love how much they're like sponges of awesome. I honestly didn't think I was gonna enjoy the broccoli as much, but damn, dude, you're right. The broccoli is fantastic. And make it with whatever kind of rice you like. I've just found that I almost enjoy everything more with sushi rice. I don't know, I just like that sticky, slightly vinegary, slightly salty, sweet sushi rice. It's just good. Like, what can I say? Make it. Thanks for watching today, my friend. And if you are a fan of written recipes, check out my Master in the Making ebook that will be linked down in the description. You'll also find a link to my gaming channel down there. If you're into gaming at all, definitely subscribe. And if you want another great takeout recipe, check out this orange chicken. It is honestly, seriously good. Otherwise, I will see you next time. You know I love you, and I'm out.