Anyone have a recipe for a basic “brown” sauce like we find on Chinese food so often? It seems like it’s some combination of soy, ginger, garlic, sugar, etc… presumably thickened with cornstarch.
I want to stir fry more and I hate using the gloopy stuff they sell in bottles at the grocery store. I think a nice basic sauce would go well on either beef or chicken, with assorted whats-in-the-fridge veggies, adding chilies as desired.
Here’s a recipe with brown sauce, taken from this thread. Looks yummy. I haven’t personally tried these recipes (yet) but the eGullet folks seem to think they’re wonderful, and eGulleters tend to have pretty good taste.
Thanks - doing some more googling around it sounds like most of them use oyster sauce. Which is something I’ve never tried before (well, I guess I’ve had it, at restaurants).
Some have beef broth, some have chicken - I guess that’d be a matter of taste and choice by whichever meat I’m cooking.
soy sauce. vinegar. sugar. siracha/chili paste. that’s ALL you need. the ratios are to taste, but i like to use equal soy/vinegar ~ 1/4 cup of each. 1-2 tablespoons of sugar. couple squirts of the siracha to kick it up a notch… and that’s as basic and delicious a terriyaki sauce as you could hope for.
Terriyaki isn’t basic stir-fry though, it’s high on sugar.
The usual Chinese food restaurant flavour I encounter around here in stir fry is definitely based on oyster sauce. Which doesn’t taste like oysters. Start there, I’d say. I usually just make my stir fries with oyster sauce and a bit of ginger.