Dumpling Stir-Fry
It had to be done, I told myself, as I added supermarket pot stickers to the broccoli stirfry. So it might as well be done by me. There were cherry tomatoes in the stir-fry too, which greatly improved the sauce. This proud moment marked a maturation of my stir-fry game, as I had reached the point where I know the rules well enough to improvise.
Stir-fry can get you in trouble. It seems like a simple thing, until the eggplant is chewy and the broccoli is mushy and it doesn’t taste like it does at the Chinese restaurant, but some hippy concoction of balsamic vinegar and burnt soy sauce.
Many stir-fry mistakes start with the intention to make it in the first place. Why are we doing this? If it’s to clean out the fridge on a Friday night, because the next day is farmers market, that’s not enough.
Executed properly, a stir-fry can be a celebration of fresh produce, not a waypoint between the back of the fridge and the compost pile. It should be a stage for the bright colors and crisp textures of the season.
But like any stage, too many actors can get in each other’s way. Don’t be too busy with your stir-fry. Even if each and every veggie is the freshest specimen under the sun, you don’t want to use them all. A proper stir-fry involves restraint. Choose one or two veggies and let them be the main event. A star, balanced with a co-star and perhaps a supporting protein or two, bound together by a sauce that tastes like a stirfry is supposed to, aka how it tastes in a Chinese restaurant.
Here are some other easy stir-fry mistakes, based on my extensive personal research.
Not hot enough. High heat is necessary for imbuing the contents of the wok with a smokey glow called wok hei, which translates to “breath of the wok.”
Not wok enough. Use the heaviest wok you can, as a light wok will lose its heat when stuff is added.
Not blanched enough. The veggies should be cooked in advance in boiling water. You don’t want to worry about getting this or that vegetable perfectly cooked in the pan all at the same time. The stir-fry simply adds flavor and wok breath.
Cooking too much at a time. An overfilled wok means the veggies don’t all get the time they need against the hot wok, in the hot oil. Meawhile, adding too much stuff can cool down the wok, killing that wok hei buzz.
Cooking in sesame oil. Sesame oil — toasted sesame oil, I should emphasize — is for flavoring, not for cooking. Fry with a heat tolerant oil like safflower, peanut or frying blend. Believe it or not, extra virgin olive oil works fine too.
Not enough oil. In these times of calorie counting, it can be tempting to pull back on the fry oil. But then your wok won’t get hei, and that’s no fun.
Adding sauce early. It should be added toward the end of cooking to coat the food, but not cook with the food.
That dumpling stir-fry? It started as just a broccoli stir-fry. I added cherry tomatoes to the sauce, so their sharp, savory flavor could mix with the soy sauce, oyster sauce and sesame oil, jacking the umami. But I wanted a bit more. Not too much more, because I like to keep my stirfry on the simple side. I settled on pot stickers. Because I can.