Tips

Composition

We often think of stir-fried dishes as restaurant-style “meat plus sauce” (plus a whole pile of vegetables) – think lemon chicken, sweet and sour pork, or Mongolian beef. For home cooking I want you to think a little differently.

A home-cooked stir-fry should really taste of its ingredients. This recipe is pork and capsicum, and should taste of those two things. Don’t try to clean out the fridge so that you can add in an entire vegetable medley. More ingredients will just confuse the flavour.

When it comes to sauces (in this case, oyster sauce, a bit of Shaoxing wine and soy sauce) they’re added sparingly as seasonings to the main ingredients. The sauces shouldn’t overwhelm the taste of the ingredients. You want a dish that tastes first and foremost of pork and capsicum, not of oyster sauce, and in any case the main component of any final “sauce” will be the liquids released by the meat or vegetables that we then thicken by adding a little starch (more on that below).

Marinating the meat

A basic stir-fry marinade is more of a coating than a marinade. It contains ingredients to season the meat such as salt, soy sauce, Shaoxing wine and sometimes sugar. There’s also starch to help the meat brown, give it a silky texture in the sauce, and to help the sauce coat the meat.

One ingredient I also often add to the marinade is a little bicarb. Bicarbonate of soda is alkaline, which inhibits protein bonding, which will keep the meat more tender. In Chinese restaurants, meat is often soaked in water that has had baking soda added to it and then rinsed to give that signature texture, but I find adding just a little to the marinade is much easier.

This marinade doesn’t have to sit on the meat for very long. Ten minutes is fine, but there’s nothing wrong with marinating for longer (or shorter).

Stir-frying technique

Technique is all-important, and for home cooking, there are a few simple things to bear in mind.

1. Firstly, don’t overload the wok. I will most often fry each ingredient separately, removing each from the wok after it’s fried, and then combine them together very quickly at the end. This avoids overloading the wok and turning your stir-fry into a stew.
2. Secondly, when frying the meat you want to get your wok very, very hot, then spread the meat in a single layer so that it browns. It doesn’t need to brown all over, but that initial sear is very important for that “wok hei” (breath of the wok) flavour. Use a little more oil than you think you need for this step. Not using enough oil is a common mistake for wok frying.
3. Lastly, the final step is creating the sauce in the wok. This process is more like creating a pan jus or gravy than it is dolloping on a sauce. Once you’ve recombined everything in the wok, the oils, seasonings and liquid released by the ingredients will often create a bit of liquid. Thickening that liquid with a slurry of cornflour will create the “sauce” for your simple stir-fry. Drizzle in a little cornflour mixed with cold water while tossing the wok. Just eyeball it and stop when the sauce is silky and coating the ingredients. Don’t skip this step. It’s absolutely vital for completing a good wok-fried dish.