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Stirfry...more like SUCK-fry!
Killgrimage
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm bad at stirfry.
Really, I've tried doing it many times, with different sauces. My chicken always comes out tasting bland, and the sauce is either overpowering and gross, or too thin and there's not enough taste. I want to try with tofu but I'm afraid.
H/A do you have any good recipes that you've tried and loved? Because I don't.
Really, I've tried doing it many times, with different sauces. My chicken always comes out tasting bland, and the sauce is either overpowering and gross, or too thin and there's not enough taste. I want to try with tofu but I'm afraid.
H/A do you have any good recipes that you've tried and loved? Because I don't.
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I've had really good results with this recipe for cashew chicken:
http://rasamalaysia.com/chinese-food-recipe-cashew-chicken/
My standard stir fry is a basic veggie stir fry. The trick to getting that right is to cook your vegetables in batches. Start with longer cooking things like carrots and broccoli. Cook them until tender and then transfer to a bowl. Then move on to faster stuff like bell peppers, onions and mushrooms. AS each ingredient is done, add it to the bowl. When all you're vegetables are cooked, put them back into the pan and add in some chopped garlic and give it a quick stir. Then add in enough soy sauce, hoisin, oyster sauce and a sriracha to coat the veggies and serve with rice.
Equal parts hoisin sauce and oyster sauce. About 2 tablespoons of each (can use more if you're making a lot of stir fry). After it has combined with all the ingredients take a taste of the sauce - if it's a bit too bitter add a little more oyster sauce. Cook it like Newton said, but if you want to add meat, I suggest you cook some garlic in oil and right when they start to brown throw in some cubed chicken breast or beef. Let that brown, then start tossing in veggies.
Either cook the chicken in another skillet or wok, or cook it first and put it aside. You can add whatever sauce to it that you want when you cook it; I'll also sometimes throw certain stuff with the chicken like mushrooms.
Then just cook the vegetables afterward like normal.
I don't know what to say about using too much or too little sauce. I generally don't make precise measurements, although I'll try to add maybe a little bit first and then sequentially more as it cooks if it looks like it needs more.
Basically this came about after Wil Wheaton posted a tweet about some sweet and sour tofu that he made from Trader Joe's. I did it with meat instead, but it didn't taste that good :?
Any tips on stirfrying tofu?
I do something similar, I usually add meat first, along with longer cooking veggies, such as carrots, and once the meat has browned, add the rest of the veggies. I like to get my peppers and everything to still have a little crunch to them, so it avoids getting them over cooked and soggy by adding them too early.
Your wok should really be hot enough that cooking takes all of 4 or 5 minutes tops. Transferring meat to and from other woks seems to defeat the main benefits of a stirfry - minimal cooking effort.
My stirfries got heaps better when I learned that the wok had to be piping hot the entire time.
So once my oil is hazing at the bottom of the wok (you know, has that hazy smokey surface), I'll run the oil around the wok and throw in the meat. Keeping the meat moving so it doesn't stick, I'll add a very generous amount of a spice mix. I use one called 'Chinese Stir-Fry', it's got heaps of garlic and sesame seeds and stuff.
If it's Chicken, I'll usually do this slightly longer than normal, because I'm paranoid about Chicken.
Once the meats brown, I'll throw in all of my vegetables at once. This should cool down the wok a fair bit, but it heats up again quickly so everything has to keep moving. I'll throw in a few dollops of Oyster Sauce, maybe more spice mix too.
Once the greens start to brighten up (this should take about 2 minutes from the time I put the vegetables in) I'll throw in the noodles I prepared before I heated up the wok. Another 2 minutes mixing them through, and it's done.
The vegetables should be crisp, almost raw, for their flavour to come through. If your carrots are sagging, you probably overcooked them.
I often chop up enough vegetables for 4 stirfries at the one time, cooking only what I need each night (or maybe double that for lunch the next day) and keeping the rest in the fridge. It's good to come home from work and just pull out fresh, ready ingredients from your fridge. Healthy!
That's not how marinading works. Not even close.
I find this threat interesting because I just made stirt fry last night and it was a little lacking in the sauce department. I went the safe route and cooked the chicken beforehand (sauteed then baked to finish) then chopped it up and threw it in when the veggies were all done. I don't own a wok and I wasn't about to try and fake it with a frying pan.
desperaterobots sounds like he knows what he's doing.
You're better off with a frying pan than a wok. The curved bottom of a wok doesn't work well with standard stoves. You end up with one tiny hot spot and that's about it. You don't get enough cooking area to do anythng properly. No residential stove is going to get a pan hot enough to do a proper stir fry in the first place, but a flat bottomed frying pan will get you much closer than a wok.
You probably shouldn't be trying to stir-fry if you're on electric, a whole different thing.
A non-stick pan woks (ha!) fine on electric, not as great as a wok, but it gets the job done.
But generally, yeah, a wok is not designed for a flat cook area, gas, electric, or induction.
Uh... wut?
I was wondering why the food always seemed to take forever since the recipes always say "2 to 5 minutes." I guess this is the reason!
Maybe I can turn my wok into a hat or something, I dunno
Yes, the wok works best over open flame because it better heats the entire surface.
Marinades do not cook meat.
They do not "break it down" they do not "tenderize" it they don't do anything other than add flavor and moisture.
A marinade requires at least two ingredients to be defined as such: Oil and Vinegar.
Guess what Vinegar is: It's acidic. Yay!
Guess what acid does to meat: It cooks it. Whee!
How do you think ceviche is made without killing or poisoning people who eat it? I'll give you three guesses and the first two don't count.
Ceviche is raw fish. So is sushi. Neither are poisonous.
For stir-frying, I thought the point of the wok was that you're supposed to move the contents around so you don't overcook everything. So why would it matter whether you can heat the whole thing at once? Aren't you not supposed to?
Yeah I think the design of the wok is supposed to make it so the food at the very middle/bottom of the pan gets most of the heat, so that you can add things to a stir-fry and push cooked ingredients out to the edge so they don't get overdone.
Still, since there's barely any flat surface on the bottom of a wok, it won't do as well on an electric burner as on a gas burner. Electric burners transmit heat most efficiently by conduction, and the rounded surface of the bottom of a wok means not much of the pan is getting the full heat of the burner, even the concentrated portion that's supposed to be getting the heat. Gas burners work by radiation of heat, so the curved surface doesn't matter as much.
Have you ever even used a marinade?
Furthermore, a marinade needs an oil and an acid (and a salt), of any kind. Vinegar is one option for the acid. Citrus juice is my personal favorite.
If you left meat in a marinade for like two weeks you'd have pickled meat, but only if you used like 90% vinegar. A day or two in the fridge with any reasonable kind of marinade is going to have no effect on the meat whatsoever except for adding flavor and helping it retain moisture.
White meat chicken, in particular, almost requires marinating to absorb any kind of flavor and to stay moist during cooking.
My asian-style marinade, which I used for my stir fry, is olive oil + soy sauce + fresh squeezed lemon juice + ginger + garlic. It's quickly becoming one of my favorite things to do with chicken.
On a side note, I asked my boyfriend about chemical cooking, which is something people do I guess. But he said that acetone was what people used, not acid. Either way I don't think I'd be interested in eating meat had just sat in a corrosive liquid that comes out of batteries or takes off nail polish :P