The Secret To Restaurant-Worthy Stir Fry Is In Your Pantry

Chinese food is among the most popular cuisines to take home because stir fried food retains its vibrant flavors and textures even after a long car ride home. While stir frying is an easy cooking method, the texture of restaurant stir fries is notably better than their homemade counterparts. The good news is the secret to a restaurant-worthy stir fry is probably already in your cupboard: corn starch, a pantry staple that acts as a sauce thickener and meat tenderizer.

Chinese culinary traditions use corn starch in a tenderizing method known as velveting, which they use on poultry, red meat, pork, beef, seafood, and even tofu. Velveting is crucial to meat because it both tenderizes the meat and increases its capacity to absorb the stir fry sauce you'll cook it with. To velvet meat, you'll make a corn starch slurry versus a roux with egg whites, water, soy sauce, Crisco Pure Canola Oil, or a combination, massaging the pasty mixture into the preferred protein. Then, you let the meat sit in the fridge for around 30 minutes. Then, rinse the meat and use it in your stir fry recipe as indicated.

The second application for a corn starch slurry is for thickening the stir fry sauce, which is used in many stir fry recipes. Simply stir in a tablespoon or two of corn starch with the other sauce ingredients, making sure to combine the mixture thoroughly. Then, add it to your stir fry over medium-high heat, and it should become velvety and viscous in a matter of minutes.

While corn starch like this Argo 100% Pure Corn starch is a sauce thickener and protein tenderizer, you can also velvet the meat with baking soda, whipped egg whites, or a combination of the two. If you really want to mimic the velveting steps employed at restaurants, you can use oil or water blanch the meat before stir frying it in the wok. Oil-blanching meat is essentially flash-frying it in hot oil for less than a minute. If you'd rather not waste oil on this method, you can add a tablespoon of this Amazon Fresh Peanut Oil to water, bring it to a boil, lower it to a simmer, and add the meat for a minute.

While you might think a stir fry recipe is a matter of throwing all the ingredients into a wok, there is a strategic order to cook each ingredient. To ensure a successful stir fry, the wok should be ultra hot and dry before you add a tablespoon or two of oil. The meat is usually the next ingredient to throw in the wok, essentially searing it for a minute or two before removing it at about 80%doneness. Then, you can bloom the aromatics and vegetables, adding the meat back in when you add the sauce so that all ingredients are perfectly cooked by the time the sauce thickens. Our recipe for spicy beef stir fry exemplifies the corn starch velveting and the proper cooking order of meat before vegetables for the optimal texture.