Tips to elevate your everyday stir fry
Rebel and Demon chef shares one of his favourite recipes
I’ve cooked the occasional stirfry over the years — pineapple chicken comes to mind — and it always seemed to me to be a reasonably quick, tasty way to serve a meal, but nothing to write home about; nothing, that is, until I tried cooking Chef Eric Chong’s Beef Stir Fry with Singaporean Black Pepper Sauce. The result: a flavour explosion.
Chong was the 21-year-old winner of the first season of “MasterChef Canada,” a chemical engineer by training and a cook by passion. He has since left engineering behind and become partners with one of the show ’s j udg es, c hef Alvi n Leung, in Toronto restaurant R&D (Rebel and Demon) on Spadina Avenue.
Grocery chain T&T reached out to Chong this fall with a request to create a few flavourful, Asian-inspired recipes for the holiday season. On offer: Wok Fried Lobster with Chinese Lobster Sauce; Char Siu, marinated roasted pork; and the beef.
“I chose three of my favourite dishes that could be done at home, but aren’t your common options,” said Chong. “I simplified them to reduce the intimidation factor while offering cooks some new flavour profiles.”
Indeed, the three recipes are simple enough for the home cook — more or less. I had to think twice when I saw the term deglaze, which means loosening all the browned bits sticking to your pan by adding cool liquid. In addition, the Wok Fried Lobster with Chinese Lobster Sauce requires the cook to kill a fresh lobster, a task I am not quite brave enough to attempt.
“Once you cook a lobster one time, your nerves vanish,” Chong reassured me during our conversation, but I’ll take it on faith.
I chose the beef, a stir-fry, which seemed like an easy option for a reluctant cook like me. It’s quick, for starters — ideal for a weeknight meal after work is finished.
The recipe required me to cut a slab of flank steak into pieces for frying in a wok or a pan; chop some aromatics — garlic, green onion and ginger — and
cook the aromatics separately with butter before adding oyster sauce, soy sauce and spices to the mix. Once the sauce was cooked, I stir-fried the beef on its own before adding the prepared sauce to the pan.
I put rice on to cook while I was involved with the sauce and served it with the finished dish. Chong suggests pairing the beef and rice with gailan, Chinese broccoli, but any tasty green vegetable will work. He also suggests using jasmine rice, rather than the long-grain variety I had on hand.
Not only is it simple and quick to prepare, but it is incredibly delicious — the flavour invades the taste buds like a conquering army.
When I suggested to Chong that the stir-fry would work equally well with chicken or shrimp, he said that was one of the ideas behind these recipes.
“I tried to choose sauces that you can create in a big batch and use in different ways,” he said. “The black pepper sauce is originally for Singaporean crab and it works with almost any protein.”
Stir-fry, Chong noted, is the quintessential home-cooked meal and it doesn’t matter if the ingredients are cut prettily — another bonus for the inexperienced or haphazard cook.
“It’s all about the flavour; it should be the flavour you remember,” he said.
There are, however, secrets to creating a stir-fry that tastes good and Chong designed his recipe accordingly. An extremely hot pan is one key; not overcrowding the pan is another. The third is not to throw everything into the pan at once. His recipe calls for cooking the sauce in a pot first and cooking the meat in a wok or a frying pan before adding the sauce.
“You want to sear the protein before adding the other elements because it develops much more flavour that way,” Chong advised.
Now I understand why my past efforts at stir-fry never reached their full potential — although a good recipe that doesn’t skimp on butter, a.k.a. calories, certainly helps. In fact, it was a revelation to realize that I could produce such a tasty dish.
Having such success with the stir-fry is empowering and I will certainly be tempted to try the Char Siu, if not the lobster (although perhaps I can buy pieces already shelled). Chong, himself, remembers shopping for lobster as a child, accompanying his grandfather to T&T.
“My grandfather was a dim sum chef in Toronto and had his own restaurant,” Chong says.
Stir Fry Beef with Singaporean Black Pepper Sauce
Ingredients:
2 lbs (900 g) beef flank steak
8 cloves of garlic
1/4 cup (62 ml) sliced ginger
3 bunches green onion 3/4 (185 ml) cup unsalted butter
3 tbsp (45 ml) shaohsing (Chinese rice cooking wine)
1/4 cup (62 ml) T&T Premium Light Soy Sauce
1/2 cup (125 ml) T&T Pure
Honey
1/4 cup (62 ml) plus 1 tbsp (15 ml) oyster sauce
1/2 cup (125 ml) plus 3 tbsp (45 ml) water
1 tbsp (15 ml) plus 1 tsp (5 ml) T&T Black Pepper
1 tbsp (15 ml) plus 1 tsp (5 ml) ground black coffee
2 tsp (10 ml) T&T White Pepper
2 tbsp (30 ml) T&T Canola Oil
Directions:
1.Slice the beef into 1/2-cm thick slices and set aside.
2. Roughly chop the garlic, ginger and green onion (don’t worry about making it pretty, we will be blending the sauce after).
3. Place a medium-sized pot on medium-high heat and toss in the butter.
4. Continuously swirl the pot or stir the butter with a wooden spoon until it is foamy and browned (approximately 3 minutes).
5. Once the butter is browned, turn the heat to high and add the chopped ingredients to the pot.
6. Sauté for 5 minutes or until the aromatics are soft and golden brown.
7. Deglaze the pot with shaohsing and scrape off any bits from the bottom of the pot.
8. Add the remaining ingredients except for the beef and canola oil to the pot.
9. Bring the sauce to a boil and then simmer for 5 minutes.
10. Purée the sauce in a blender (or you can use a stick blender). (If you do not mind the chunks of garlic, ginger and green onion in the sauce you can skip this step)
11. Heat a wok or large pan on high heat and add the canola oil.
12. When the oil begins to shimmer/smoke, add the sliced beef and stir-fry until the beef is coloured (approximately 3 minutes).
13. Add the black pepper sauce to the wok and simmer for 5 minutes (if you do not want your beef too saucy, you can save some of the sauce for future use).
14. Serve with steamed rice and a side of gailan (Chinese broccoli).
Reluctant Cook is an occasional series about people who know how to cook, but are looking for motivation and inspiration in pandemic times.