Serious Eats: Recipes
Dinner Tonight: Five-Spice Beef Stir Fry
I completely botched a stir-fry recipe earlier this week, and I'm not proud of it. I thought I had the technique down, but this meal was bland and greasy with limp vegetables and tough meat. I had obviously tried to cook too many of the ingredients at once, crowding the pan and lowering its temperature. I didn't get the kind of excessive heat needed. When I tried to correct this, the vegetables began to stick to the sides of the pan, so I added more oil, which only made it greasier. I could barely eat the meal. The next day I was so beside myself that I had to avenge my stir-fry mistakes.
I will admit that I picked this recipe almost entirely because it had Chinese five-spice in it. The flavorful spice mixture would certainly be the aromatic lift my dish needed. To solve the overcrowding problem, I stir-fried everything in batches, only combining the vegetables and meat at the last second.
The adjustments worked. The vegetables were properly seared and slightly crisp, and the meat was browned but still tender. The best part was the sauce, which I poured in at the end and thickened beautifully to cover all the ingredients.