311 recipes. Page 10 of 13
Quick and delicious stir-fry recipes
Kohlrabi is firm and a little sweet, and even stir-fried it still crunches between pieces of springy shrimp. The red bell pepper is there more for color than flavor.
Flour whisked into miso turns this eggplant and green pepper stir-fry into something closer to a thick, clinging coating than a sauce. Small dried sardines fry in the oil with the eggplant for a salty, savory note, and the finished pan should have no loose water beneath the vegetables.
Kongbul, short for kongnamul bulgogi, piles soybean sprouts onto spicy gochujang pork so every bite of meat comes with a crunch. The sprouts only get about a minute over high heat, so the pork sauce has to be reduced to a thick glaze before they go in, or the water they release leaves everything soupy. It is served spooned over rice.
The ingredients match the usual boiled-and-dressed soybean sprout side dish, but here the sprouts go straight into an oiled pan and pick up a faint smoky note. The lid never goes on. Covering the pan traps steam, which turns the cooking into steaming and keeps the raw, beany smell in.
Soybean sprouts pick up the beefy richness of thin-sliced brisket (chadolbaegi), because the fat the brisket renders is the only oil used for the chili sauce. Brisket this thin browns in a minute or two and the sprouts should stay crunchy, which makes the whole cook brief and fast. Blot off only the excess fat; wiping the pan dry leaves nothing to fry the paste in.
At Sri Lankan street stalls, kottu is made by chopping roti on a griddle with two metal blades, clattering away; at home a knife and a single pan do the job. The bread soaks up curry powder and soy sauce among cabbage, carrot and egg, and only its edges turn a little crisp.
Biting into a Sichuan peppercorn leaves the tongue tingling, and in kung pao chicken that numbness matters as much as the heat. Dried chilies and peppercorns are fried in the oil first so the chicken is coated in that flavored oil, and the roasted peanuts go in at the very end to stay crunchy.
In this Peruvian beef stir-fry, French fries get tossed right into the pan and rice sits on the side of the plate. Soy sauce and red wine vinegar bring salt and sourness together, and only half a teaspoon of ají amarillo, a yellow chili paste, goes in. Plate it as soon as the fries have taken on a little sauce, before they go limp.
Mala xiangguo takes the numbing, spicy flavors of Sichuan hot pot and puts them into a dry stir-fry: beef, lotus root, shiitake, and bok choy get only a thin coat of mala sauce, with no broth at all. Everything is patted or shaken dry first: with nothing simmering, any water left on the ingredients just pools in the pan.
Take the garlic scapes off the heat while they are still bright green and they stay crisp to the core; longer than that, the color dulls and they turn tough. For anyone who eats less heat, hold back some of the gochujang sauce and add it bit by bit, tasting as you go.
Bacon cooked slowly over low heat gives up smoky fat, and that fat becomes the base for stir-frying the garlic scapes, with little or no extra oil needed. Since bacon is already salty, the soy sauce is scaled back to taste, and a spoonful of syrup leaves a thin glossy coat that balances the salt with sweetness.
Garlic scapes taste of garlic without the sharp bite of the cloves, more sweet than pungent, and even people who shy away from garlic tend to keep reaching for them. Their season runs from spring into early summer, when the stalks are at their most tender.
Garlic scapes are crisp with a slight chew, which gives lean chicken breast something to bite against. Oyster sauce and soy leave everything glossy.
Clam meat is mixed among crisp, oyster-sauce-glazed garlic scapes, and since the clams are barely more than warmed through, they stay plump and tender.
Even boiled butterbur stems often keep tough outer fibers on the thicker pieces. Snap each one, and if strands come away with it, peel them off then and there. The ground perilla seed goes in while a little broth still covers the pan bottom, so it wraps the stems in a thick coat instead of clumping in one spot.
Blanched and dressed straight away, butterbur stems keep a clear bitter edge; simmered and stirred with soup soy sauce and water for five minutes or more, they turn much milder. In spring it appears on mountain-village tables next to gondre and chwinamul greens.
This one is built on sliced garlic browned slowly over low heat until it loses its bite. Clam meat and minari (water parsley) are tossed in that sweet, toasty garlic oil.
The beef and minari (water parsley) go in at equal weights, which keeps the minari's slightly bitter aroma clearly present behind the soy-seasoned meat. The minari gets only 20 to 30 seconds in the pan, enough to soften the leaves while the stems stay crisp.
The small potatoes cook whole in their skins, and in a mixed batch the little ones split while the big ones stay raw inside. Matching them by diameter is where it starts. Once the miso, sugar and mirin go in, the pot is shaken rather than stirred, glazing the soft potatoes without breaking them.
Seaweed stems are thick and springy and crunch audibly when you bite them. Salted stems vary a lot by brand, so after soaking, taste one strand and rinse again in fresh water if it is still too salty.
Where most seaweed stem stir-fries finish with sesame oil, this one is cooked in perilla oil and coated in plenty of ground perilla seed, which pushes the nutty flavor right to the front. The salted stems soak in cold water for at least 15 minutes to draw out salt, but leave them much longer and the taste of the sea goes too.
Snappy seaweed stems and springy shrimp end up in the same bite. Soup soy sauce is the only seasoning, with the rest of the salt coming from what is left in the stems, and the ground perilla seed is scattered over right after the heat goes off.
Pork shoulder is browned until its fat runs, then seaweed stems join it for a quick toss. The roasted taste of the pork mixes with a smell of the sea, and the stems keep their snap.
Covered and cooked in a little soy-seasoned water, the radish strands turn translucent and bend easily around a chopstick. Made with winter radish, the dish comes out noticeably sweeter.