A Better Way to Make Beef & Broccoli

Hey everyone. Welcome to my kitchen. I'm Bethany. And today's recipe, I'm going to be showing you how to make beef and broccoli. And this is my favorite way to make this because I'm actually cooking the beef in the oven. I think it gives the beef a better texture and it's just a lot easier than cooking it in a wok or on the stovetop. And we'll be serving this with a delicious sauce, some broccoli that we'll roast instead of steaming. Again, better texture. It's just so good. I love throwing this together if I need a quick dinner, I'm in a bind. So it's great for that. Everybody loves it. It's flavorful. So let's get right into it. So the first thing that we want to do is get our meat ready. So I have a little bit over a pound of flank steak. I like to use that cut. You can also use skirt steak or sirloin, but this can be a little bit of a tougher cut of meat. So to prevent that, we're going to cut it in a certain type of way. A lot of people say to slice with the grain. I just want you to know when I say that it means along the muscle fibers that you see. So the first thing that we'll do is slice straight down with the grain. And that's just so that we can have the right size of slices. If I cut the whole piece like this, the pieces would be too big. So if you have a really big piece of flank steak, you might actually need to do three slices and we're going to slice now against the grain. So we slice just with it. Now against it, we'll do about three quarters of an inch thick in slices. What we'll do is we're not going to cut straight down like that. I'm going to angle my knife on a diagonal and slice that way. And what this is doing is it helps the beef be more tender because we're shortening those fibers that can be more tough. And by cutting it on a diagonal, we're shortening them even more than they would be if we cut straight down. So we'll just slice these, I mean half an inch, it's hard to really say, I'd say half an inch. What do you think, Drew? That's like a third inch. Third inch? Okay. So maybe I wasn't accurate with the three quarters of an inch. And I really like the oven method that we're going to be using. I think that it just gives the beef such a nice texture and a little bit of like a browned crispy edge on it without having to use oils or a wok. Okay. We'll take that beef, put it in a bowl, and I'll slice the remaining piece of our flank steak. Okay. So after we've cut our beef, now we're going to marinate it. And this process is called velveting, but we're going to be using baking soda for this. And this is actually going to help those muscle fibers soften a little bit. I've done this actually with and without doing the baking soda, and I noticed a very big difference to using the baking soda. It was very tender. So we're going to do three quarters of a teaspoon of baking soda. Then we're going to flavor it just a little bit. We don't need a lot on this because we'll have a whole sauce that we're going to make. But we'll do one and a half teaspoons of tamari or soy sauce, one teaspoon of sesame oil, and a half teaspoon of maple syrup or a sweetener of any kind that you'd like to use. I like to use a natural sweetener, and that's just easier to use than honey. Then we'll just toss the beef with our velveting marinade. And this actually doesn't need to marinate long. It only needs about 15 minutes. So you can do 15 to 30 minutes. This is actually a traditional Chinese method with the baking soda. So we'll let this sit in our fridge while we make our sauce, probably 15, 20 minutes. So I'm going to be doing a third cup of a light tamari. It's less sodium than the full-blown tamari. And this is just a different type of soy sauce. You can just use soy sauce. Then to help balance out the sweetness, we'll do three tablespoons of maple syrup or a sweetener of your choice. Then to prevent our sauce from being overly salty without having to add a ton of sugar to it, we're going to do a quarter cup of just water. Then we're going to do a tablespoon of sesame oil. I think this is toasted sesame oil, so this has a little bit more flavor than regular sesame oil. Then we're going to do four garlic cloves pressed in here. I like to use fresh for this because I kind of want a really potent garlic flavor. You can just use garlic powder. You could do about a teaspoon of just garlic powder. Then we're going to do two teaspoons of freshly grated ginger. You can also use dried ginger. I would recommend cutting that in half because the dried ginger would be more potent. A sauce can really make or break a beef and broccoli. Sometimes I find that they're too sweet, they're too salty, or they're too thick from thickeners. I really tested this one a lot because I wanted the flavors to be just right. You can always add a little bit more sweetener if you like it a little sweeter. The ginger always gets stuck in this thing, so I have to use a knife to get it out. Then for a little bit of heat, nothing spicy, we're going to be using gochujang. This is a fermented chili paste. I really like this. You can keep it in your fridge forever. It doesn't go bad. It's great for just a little kick of heat and just a nice depth of flavor. I think it adds a little bit more depth than just using red pepper flakes. You can use this in a lot more recipes than just beef and broccoli. I put this with chicken marinades, so you can use it with anything that you want a little bit of spice to. Then to give our sauce a little bit of a thickener, we're going to be doing just a quarter teaspoon of cornstarch. I don't really like to use a lot of this because I think that the sauce can become too congealed in a way or too thick. And I think that in the many times I've tested this, that a quarter teaspoon was just enough for me. But you can always add more if you like a thicker consistency with your sauce. Then I have a mini whisk here. I actually got this specifically for the gochujang because I didn't want to use my big whisk for this sauce, and it's hard to mix together. So you will need a whisk to mix this because the gochujang is a little difficult to get incorporated. It smells so good. But I didn't mention a measurement. If you wanted to substitute the gochujang, you can just do like a quarter teaspoon of red pepper flakes. All right, that looks good. So now we're going to set this aside and grab our beef out of the fridge. Okay, so to cook our beef, we're going to use a big sheet pan. I've used a smaller one, and I just found that the beef actually started to steam in the oven. So we don't want that. We want it to have space. So I'm using a larger sheet pan, and we'll transfer our beef onto here. And we're not using any sauce while this cooks. That's why the marinade is helpful because it has some oil in there and some flavorings. But if we put some of the sauce in now, it will burn because we have our oven set pretty high. It's set to 450. So you want to get that preheated before you go to this step. And we'll just spread our beef out on our sheet pan. Before we put that in the oven, we're also going to cook our broccoli for the same time that the beef is going to cook. So I have a smaller sheet pan here. This is a very used and abused pan. Should probably get a new one for filming. But I have four cups of broccoli florets here. Drizzle this with a little bit of a high heat oil. Avocado or grasa has a frizzle oil, so it can handle the heat. Little bit of a sprinkle of salt. Coat that. I really like roasting the broccoli, as I said, because it just gives it a better texture and better flavor than steamed broccoli. So now we're going to put both of these in the oven, uncovered, at 450 degrees for 10 minutes. All right. So these are out of the oven. Now the broccoli is finished. And what we're going to do is first transfer that to a bowl. And we'll just cover it with some foil to keep it warm. I love the texture of it now. Once I cover it, it will start to steam a little bit and soften a little bit more past the roasted point. But that's okay. We need to keep it warm. I don't like cold food. We'll sit our broccoli in a warm spot and we'll finish cooking our beef. So next we have our beef that is cooked, but we want the texture to go a little bit more. So now we're going to broil this in the oven on high with our sauce. So one thing that you can do is do half of your sauce on the beef and then heat half of it up. I just put the whole thing in there because what can happen is some of the sauce can dry up on the pan. So it's your choice if you want to make sure that you have a lot of sauce. I actually don't like a ton of sauce. I think that sometimes beef and broccoli can be overly saucy. So I don't mind putting it all on here, but just note that some of it can cook up on the pan so you can save some of it for the side. But keep in mind that the cornstarch needs heat in order to be activated and to start thickening the sauce. So it won't thicken on its own. You do need to heat the sauce up for that. I'll shake the pan a little bit. I did try to mix this and the beef was not moving. So what we're going to do is now broil this for about two minutes, three minutes. You want to keep an eye on it. We're broiling it on high. And again, that's to give a nice crispy edge to our beef and then it'll cook our sauce too. All right, so our beef is out of the oven. Looks great. I cooked the beef a little bit past the three-minute mark just to get a little bit more of a crispy edge on it. And we want to make sure we get all the sauce that's on the pan when we serve it. Okay, so we have our bowl of rice here. I actually just used a rice pack. When I'm in a bind, that's what I use. They're great. I shared about those in my stuffed pepper video. Then we'll serve a little bit of our broccoli over top. I'm going to put the rest of our beef in another bowl to keep warm because I want to spoon the rest of that sauce over top. This pan is no longer hot. Some people are like, wow, I can't believe you're touching that pan. It's not hot anymore. It cools down pretty quickly, but you'll just use like a rubber spatula because that's going to really help get all that sauce off and you'll just spoon it. You can make extra sauce if you want. You could double the sauce recipe, but as I said, I don't really like a super saucy, you know, beef and broccoli. Okay. And then to serve it, we'll put a little bit of sesame seeds over top. This is totally optional. And there you go. Looks delicious. Now we can taste it. Okay, I'll get a little bit of the beef, some rice. So good. The meat is tender, flavor just right. Delicious. The sauce is just right. I was actually testing the sauce a lot because sometimes it was too salty. Sometimes it was too sweet. And I found that that water was really necessary to kind of pull back on that salt level. And even the sweetness, it just balances it out perfectly. I love the little bit of heat from the gochujang and it's not too much at all. It actually is barely spicy, just as a little bit of a kick background type of heat and just a nice depth of flavor. It's so good. It tastes delicious, better than takeout. And the sauce isn't so thick and congealed. I just think it's perfect. I love it. And one of my favorite things about this recipe is that crispy edged, browned edge texture on the beef. I think that it's a standout. I personally am a big texture person and I don't really like beef and broccolis that are velvety and soft. I like it to have that texture on it. And we did it in the oven, which gave it a better texture, better flavor and made it so much easier. What I like about this recipe is if I want to make it really quickly during the week, I'll have the sauce already made in advance and then you can also have your meat tenderizing in advance as well. And you just throw everything on a pan, bake it in the oven for 10 minutes, do a pack of rice. You don't have to make your rice. And it's done. It's so quick. It's delicious. Better than takeout. I think that this is great for weeknight meals. You can meal prep this. You can do it for lunch, whatever. I think everyone will love it. It's delicious. It's easy. It's quick. And it's healthy. But I hope you guys enjoy this. And if you do, you can leave a comment here on YouTube or you can leave a review on my website. I appreciate both. And I'm so thankful for all the support on our videos. And yeah, just grateful. So thank you guys so much. And as always, I'll catch you in the next recipe and I'll see you in the comments.