Stir Fry for Dummies (the dummy is me - help!)

Cafe Society
1

I want to learn how to stir-fry simple meals, so I am turning to the collective wisdom of the Dope for tips. As is often the case, I’ve found some potentially useful sites that have good tips, but most of them don’t take into account the fact that I am seriously lacking when it comes to cooking knowledge or skills.

I have a carbon steel wok (which we just bought yesterday, so I think it needs to be seasoned, right?) My basic questions are:

  1. Are there any good sites that have simply-described recipes for very simple dishes? (Seriously–I’m talking noodles, chicken or pork, a few veggies, mushrooms…maybe a few mild spices to give it some kind of Asian flavor)?

  2. What kind of noodles do people use in stir fry? I’m thinking of the ones that look kind of like spaghetti noodles. You have to cook them separately before you stir-fry them, right?

  3. What do you stir-fry in? Oil? Chicken broth? Teriyaki sauce? Soy sauce? Does it depend on what you’re cooking?

Seriously, I’m an idiot, but I’m an idiot who wants to start cooking more healthy food that you can make fairly quickly. So please speak to me in small words so you don’t spook me. Thanks! :slight_smile:

2

Random data point.

Stir fried red meat is too heavy. Chicken too light and dry. Pork is just right.

3

My mother made stir-fry about twice a week the whole time I was growing up. She used 1 pound meat and about 1 quart diced veg for the three of us, and she would cook 1 cup of rice (dry measure) to go with it. Favorite combinations were beef and broccoli, chicken and sweet peppers, or pork and cabbage.

The basic recipe is:

Cut your protein into bite-size pieces. For each pound of meat, ad 1T corn starch, 1t soy sauce, and a splash of dry sherry. Stir and let sit while you prep the veg.

Cut your vegetables of choice into bite-size pieces. Whatever other vegetables you put in, have onion, minced garlic, and minced fresh ginger among them, and keep them separate from the rest of the veg.

In a small bowl, combine 1T corn starch, 1 T soy sauce, and a splash of warm water. Stir and put aside.

Heat 1T oil in your pan, until it’s hot enough to make a drop of water dance. Add the onions, garlic, and ginger. Stir fry a couple of minutes, until they’re softened. Add the rest of the veg. Stir fry 2-3 minutes, just to take the raw edge off. Remove all vegetables to a plate or bowl.

Heat another 1T oil in your pan (it won’t take nearly as long as the first time). Give your meat another stir, and plunk it in the pan. Stir-fry until the outside appears to be 100% cooked; no raw sides showing. Dump vegetables on top of the meat, dump your little bowl of sauce on top of all that, cover, and lower heat to medium. Let cook about 5 minutes.

She liked to add a little white pepper to chicken stir-fry, and a handful of raw peanuts or cashews just before serving is nice, too.

Done. Serve with rice or noodles.

4

Sattua:

I do pretty much the same thing, but I wouldn’t stir-fry the the garlic and onions for more than a minute, and I wouldn’t cover the whole thing on low heat at the end for more than 2 minutes. Five minutes is going to result in over-cooked vegetables, at least on my stove.

5

Sez you. We make stir-fry with chicken all the time, and it doesn’t come out dry or too light.
I like stir-fry with steak, too. I’ve never had a problem with it.

6

Best Shrimp Fried Rice recipe I’ve ever had. Courtesy of The Fresh20:

INGREDIENTS
For shrimp fried rice with asparagus, carrots & snow peas
2 Tablespoons grapeseed oil
3 inches of fresh ginger root, peeled and grated to yield 11⁄2 Tablespoons
2 garlic cloves, minced or pressed
3⁄4 pound fresh, medium shrimp, peeled and deveined *chicken tenderloins can be substituted, just cut them into small pieces
1⁄2 pound asparagus, root ends trimmed, cut into1 inch pieces
1 cup snow peas (about 3 ounces), roughly chopped
1 medium carrot, peeled and grated
1 red bell pepper, cut into small dice or very thin strips
3 cups cooked brown rice * see prep guide
1 Tablespoon toasted sesame seeds
2 Tablespoons low sodium soy sauce

For shrimp fried rice with asparagus, carrots & snow peas

  1. Heat a large, nonstick sauté pan over medium/high heat. Add oil and once hot add ginger and garlic – stir and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds.
  2. Add in shrimp and cook until they begin to turn pink, about 1 minute.
  3. Add in asparagus, snow peas, carrots, and red peppers - stir to combine and cook for 2 minutes.
  4. Add in rice, sesame seeds, and soy sauce. Stir to combine and continue to cook until warmed through.
7

Agreed. You just have to time things right. I mean, haven’t we all been to Chinese restaurants that served perfectly good stir-fried chicken and beef dishes?

As for noodles, you can use pretty much any you like. Again, adjust the time per the particulars of the noodles.

8

A wok may not be your best choice depending on what your cooking surface is. Woks are designed to sit down through a hole in the surface on Chinese stoves so the entire underside surface of the wok is in contact with the heat. For a typical American cooking surface a frying pan is a better option. Most of a wok’s sides will be up in the air on an American stove.

Also, the more wet the food is the harder it will be to achieve a good crusty surface because the water has to evaporate from the food before its temperature can go up enough to be browned. So you might want to dry vegetables with some paper towels before you put in on the heat.

Another thing is to cook each ingredient by itself and then combine everything for a final heating. This way nothing is on the heat long enough to be overcooked so nothing gets rubbery or soggy.

If you want to do fried rice you should wash the raw rice under running water until the water runs clear. This removes the starch which will make the final dish sticky. Once the rice is washed cook it like you would do otherwise, then spread it out on a cookie sheet and keep it in the refrigerator for a day or so so the rice is dry and the grains are separated.

I have been cooking since I was 7 years old- almost 41 years ago. These tips come from the cookbooks put out by Cook’s Illustrated Magazine. It isn’t uncommon for these people to make something 100 or more times in order to get the recipe, ingredients and technique absolutely perfect. They have America’s Test Kitchen and Cook’s Country TV shows on PBS. Back episodes are available on DVD. If you want to learn how to cook, their cookbooks are your best investment.

9

Chinese restaurants generally use peanut oil. I think it has a higher smoking point than other types of oil so the food can be cooked at a higher temperature without being burned.

Also, you’ll have to experiment with soy sauce, oyster sauce, seseme oil and rice wine vinegars. The sodium content from brand to brand can be different by a thousand miligrams. Even if I didn’t have high blood pressure, some of the brands can be too salty to be palatable.

10

Thanks for the tips! I’ll read through them and for now pick the ones that aren’t scary (seriously, you guys have no idea how pathetic I am in the kitchen. I’m ecstatic because I can do steaks in the toaster oven/broiler thing, and I can make meat loaf using my mom’s recipe. That’s about the extent of my cooking ability.) :slight_smile:

11

Stir fry can be the easiest thing in the world to do, if you aren’t going for absolute Oriental restaurant authenticity. My wok pan is the one pan I leave on my stove top at all times - I use it that much. If I have time, I can get fancy with my veggie, protein, and spices selection, make long-cooking rice from scratch, and make my own sauce. But it’s perfectly good with a package of stir fry veg from the produce section, a chicken breast or 1/2 lb of shrimp, and one of the commercially-available Chinese cooking sauces. I slice everything nice and thin (meat by hand, veg in the mandolin or processor), pop 1 Tbsp of oil into the wok pan, roll it around to coat the pan, when piping hot, toss in the meat to flash cook (2-3 mins for shrimp, 4 mins for chicken), set aside on a plate and keep warm. Add a little dash more oil, cook the veg until just starting to get tender, reintroduce the meat, add 1/4 cup of sauce and stir thoroughly until everything is nice, warm and sauce coated. Remove from heat, pour on some rice or lo mein noodles and you have dinner. I even use boil in bag rice sometimes, although that’s not my preference. It isn’t bad when time is short and you’re hungry.

12

stillownedbysetters, this sounds exactly like the sort of thing I’m going for. I have no illusions that I’m going to cook stuff that tastes like it comes from a Chinese restaurant. I just want something I can make quickly that will taste good. My tastes are very simple - not into complicated recipes or a lot of spices. Chicken, mushrooms, a few veggies, and noodles or rice would make me happy.

When you say “commercially-available Chinese cooking sauces,” which ones are you referring to?

Also, does oyster sauce actually contain anything from an oyster (stupid question, I know, but the spouse is allergic to seafood and he gets justifiably cranky if I try to poison him :slight_smile: )

13

Just butting in to say, no , it won’t taste at ALL like from a restaurant, but it will be fun to try cooking in a wok,
anyway! A friend of mine who was a master at it said Americans cook food cut too small, cook it for too long, and at too low a heat.

Oyster sauce may have oyster extract in it, or oyster flavor. It depends. There’s vegetarian oyster sauce made from mushroom. Read the label, that should make it clear.

14

I don’t know all of the details, but oyster sauce is made from oysters.

15

I’ve been cooking stir fry for a good 20 years now, and I didn’t know this. I wonder how the taste compares and I wonder if there’s any difference in the sodium content?

Do they may the vegetarian version with oyster mushrooms- being sarcastic?

My personal experience with various brands of oyster sauce is that a major ingredient is sugar so it acts as much as a thickening agent for the sauce as it does as a flavoring agent.

I’ve also tried just about every kind of noodle on the market and still cannot figure out what my favorite Chinese restaurant uses in its beef lo mein.

16

Happy to help, Infovore.

The secret to the Chinese sauce names is that they refer to what they were designed to be served with - duck sauce was designed to do with duck, oyster sauce was designed to go with oysters, etc. Neither duck sauce nor oyster sauce contains any duck or oyster meat, juice, or any other portion of the animal. If you don’t want to get too adventurous too quickly, just try stir fry sauce, labeled just that way, or sweet and sour sauce. I like to dink and dunk around with my sauces - a little Hoisin, a little Kung Pao, a little plum sauce, a little orange sauce, a little duck sauce, etc., until I find a combo that I like. But plain old stir fry sauce is absolutely workable.

Good luck and have fun stir-frying. It really IS fun when you get the hang of it. It won’t be long before you’ll be experimenting and tossing in whatever veggie or protein you have available.

17

:dubious: So you put soy sauce on soy and plum sauce on plums?

18

I’ll agree with you regarding the duck, but the majority of oyster sauce that I have ever used does most definitely contain extract of real oysters. The bottle that I currently use for stir-fries lists “oyster extract preparation”, together with mussels, at 7% among the ingredients – certainly at high enough levels to potentially cause allergy problems for the OP’s spouse.

Vegetarian (mollusc-free) alternatives exist, of course, usually mushroom-based as mentioned by previous posters.

19

Oyster sauce tastes nothing like oysters but as other posters have said it does contain an ingredient referred to as “Oyster extract”. Exactly what oyster extract is I have no idea, but it’s the main ingredient in the bottle I have. It also contains a relatively small amount of “Fish Paste” made from “crustacean shellfish”. The ingredient list on the bottle I have is as follows, in the order it appears by quantity:

Oyster Extract (Water, Oyster, Salt)
Water
Sugar
Salt
Modified Tapioca Starch
Soy Sauce Extract (Water, Soybean, Wheat, Salt)
Lactic Acid
Caramel Color,
Disodium Guanylate,
Yeast Extract
Disodium Inosinate
Guar Gum
Fish Paste (Crustacean Shellfish)
Benzoic Acid as Preservative

I disagree also that oyster sauce is intended for oysters, or at least that oysters are the main reason it exists. I’ve been cooking Chinese stir-fry dishes for 30+ years and have seen many Chinese beef, chicken and vegetable recipes that call for oyster sauce.

Infovore, would your spouse also get cranky if you made a large no-oyster sauce meal which he gets most of and a smaller separate dish for yourself that contained oyster sauce? It’s a really delicious sauce, especially with beef dishes such as Beef & Broccoli or Beef & Snow Peas. It wouldn’t take much extra time to cut up and marshall the ingredients for a second stir-fry, especially if the second is a small one just for you. Then you could have part of the dish your husband’s having plus the oyster sauce dish you made for yourself. You’ll be missing out on a lot of tasty dishes if you have to rule out oyster sauce altogether.

20

The thing is, I’m not even sure he’d have a problem with it. We eat Chinese food at restaurants all the time, and while we’re not super-adventurous about what we order, if the stuff is as ubiquitous as it sounds like it is, he may well have eaten it already with no ill effects.

Maybe we’ve never ordered anything that contains it, though. Mostly we get boring stuff like chow mein and fried rice, though sometimes he orders Mongolian beef.