Sorry about the huge delays here on the site, everyone. Last week was packed between my birthday and a few tight work deadlines and the beginning of this week was packed with Valentine’s Day stuff and even more deadlines. But, I’ve still been cooking and eating, plus I’ve got lots of archives to go through from the past month, so let’s jump in!
After getting my new wok seasoned, it was time to give that thing a real try out. In addition to the wok, my wife also got me Grace Young’s wok-centric cookbook Stir-Frying To The Sky’s Edge: The Ultimate Guide To Mastery, With Authentic Recipes And Stories which her research told her was the best of the bunch. I was flipping through and her recipe for Stir-Fried Ginger Beef (page 71) because it didn’t require buying too many new ingredients and seemed fairly easy for a novice like me.
The recipe calls for flank steak, minced ginger, soy sauce, rice wine, cornstarch, salt, pepper, peanut oil, oyster sauce, pickled ginger and scallions. We usually keep ginger in the freezer along with the other pantry items, but I did need to pick up oyster sauce and pickled ginger. For the rice wine, I checked at both the grocery and wine stores and neither had any, so I went with the also suggested dry sherry.
Okay, on to the actual recipe. Cutting up the meat into strips is the first step. That all went into a bowl with the non-pickled ginger, soy sauce, a teaspoon of sherry, cornstarch, salt, pepper and a teaspoon of peanut oil. In another bowl I combined the oyster sauce and a tablespoon of sherry. The rest of the prep included cutting up a quarter cup of pickled ginger and some scallions.
For the actual cooking, the book says to put the wok on the heat and you’re ready to go when a drop of water evaporates in a few seconds. So, once we got to that point, I swirled some oil in and then spread the meat in the wok. You’re supposed to let that cook for one minute and then stir-fry for 30 seconds before adding the oyster sauce mixture, the pickled ginger and the scallions and stir-frying again for another 30 seconds. I also picked up some egg noodle nests awhile back for an aborted recipe that worked out really well to serve the ginger beef on.
The flavors were fantastic. I love how the pickled ginger popped with the beef and the marinade. The thing that was difficult about cooking with the wok is how fast things go once you start cooking. As you can see above it’s a lot of steps that take a minute or less. I’d do one thing, stir, jump over to the book, read as fast as I could then jump back to the wok. It was a really fast paced, but also really simple and easy. I also like that so much of the cooking revolves around getting prepped ahead of time. Once you’re set, with everything, it’s game time. Honestly, boiling the water for the egg noodle nests took longer than all of making the main dish. I had a great first outing on the wok and can not wait to get into it even more.
Pop Poppa 