311 recipes. Page 7 of 13
Quick and delicious stir-fry recipes
Dry-frying, gan bian in Chinese, means cooking the beans over high heat with very little stirring until the skins wrinkle and pick up brown spots. This home-style version seasons them with doubanjiang, garlic and ginger and leaves out ya cai, dried chilies and Sichuan peppercorns, so the result is salty and gently hot rather than numbing. Crumbly fried pork settles in between the beans.
Tofu is blanched in salted water for 3 minutes and cut into thick slabs, and sour aged kimchi is stir-fried with pork shoulder and onion to go alongside. The blanching firms the tofu's surface so the thick slices are easy to pick up, and a spoonful of the hot kimchi on top seasons the outside. When it is served with soju or makgeolli, the tofu and the stir-fry go on separate plates.
Once the seared tofu goes back into the pan, it is never stirred with a spatula; shaking the pan coats it in the red kimchi oil instead. The riper the kimchi, the more its sourness fades as it cooks, leaving a deeper savory taste.
Pressed dry and broken up by hand into a mix of large curds and fine crumbs, the tofu is cooked over high heat with only occasional turning until the edges turn lightly golden and the crumbles are loose and fluffy. Seasoned simply with soy sauce and sesame oil, it works spooned over rice or packed in a lunch box, since there is no sauce to leak.
Seasoned with nothing but soy sauce and sesame oil, it has no heat at all. On the plate, golden pan-fried tofu sits among orange carrot and green pepper.
Pork shoulder has enough fat running through it that a fast, very hot stir-fry in gochujang marinade does not dry it out. Color is a poor guide to doneness, though, and a thermometer should show the thickest piece at 75°C or higher for more than a minute.
The sourer the kimchi, the better this turns out. It fries with the pork for a good while, until it deepens to a dark red and picks up the taste of the meat.
Ketchup, chili sauce and a splash of vinegar make a sauce that leans sweet and tangy rather than hot. Shallow-frying the shrimp in a starch coat, rather than deep-frying them, leaves a coating that turns silky in the sauce while the meat stays springy.
Chewy squares of Korean fish cake (eomuk) are mixed with crisp onion and carrot. Soy sauce and oligo syrup give a sweet-salty glaze, and a cheongyang chili tossed in at the end adds a little heat.
Dried fuzhu, folded sheets of bean curd skin, need at least 2 hours of soaking, so this dish starts well before the wok is hot. Once softened, their spongy layers soak up the store-bought mala sauce, numbing and chili-hot, and turn chewy.
Gai pad med mamuang is Thai cashew chicken with onion and bell pepper. This version uses oyster sauce, soy sauce, and sugar, with no fish sauce or dried chilies. Cut the chicken thigh into 2-3cm pieces and the vegetables into chunky 3cm pieces before heating the pan. Mix the sauce separately so it can be added quickly after the chicken and vegetables have cooked. Use roasted cashews: this recipe adds them for only the final 30 seconds and does not include a separate roasting step. Lower the heat before adding the sauce, and stop reducing while it still coats the chicken with a glossy glaze. Add the cashews last and serve immediately to keep their crunch.
Thick 1 cm half-moons of eggplant get a seared face before they are turned, so the pieces hold their shape and only the centers go soft, unlike limp versions of this banchan. Stirring too early stops the browning, and stirring too long makes the slices collapse.
Eggplant in summer drinks oil readily. Here the cut pieces are salted briefly and patted dry, which cuts down how much they soak up, then stir-fried with pork in a salty soy and oyster sauce.
Salt is the only seasoning. The heat goes off when a strand of potato bends without snapping, which leaves a little crunch in the middle.
This has been a fixture of Korean school lunches and staff cafeterias for decades. The potato is cut into thin, even matchsticks; when the widths vary, the thin strips break while the thick ones stay underdone.
The potatoes here are cubed, not shredded, at about 2 cm. Their corners are browned first; then a gochujang, soy and sugar sauce goes in and cooks down until almost nothing loose is left in the pan. What remains is a red, glossy coat on each cube rather than sauce on the plate.
There is no gochujang or soy sauce here, only salt and pepper, so what you taste is plain potato and sweet shrimp.
The soy-based sauce takes a tablespoon of ketchup. Half-moons of potato go in first, and once their edges turn translucent the sausage follows, letting its fat soak into the potato. From cutting board to plate it takes around ten minutes, which keeps it manageable on a weekday morning.
Flakes of green gamtae are scattered through a glazed stir-fry of tiny anchovies and sliced almonds, giving a familiar banchan an extra sea smell. Gamtae is a seaweed from Korea's southern coast, milder and less bitter than sea lettuce.
The Gangwon version of soy bulgogi includes shiitake. Thick slices of the mushroom soak up the marinade along with the onion, and even with pear juice in the mix, the salty soy comes through before any sweetness.
Thin beef that hits the pan in clumps steams instead of searing. So before it goes into the soy and pear-juice marinade, every stuck-together slice is peeled apart and laid flat.
Because its soy and pear-juice marinade still tastes right once cold, Seoul-style bulgogi often goes into lunchboxes. Apple juice can replace the pear juice and tenderizes the beef much the same way.
Chicken breast, sliced thin across the grain, is seasoned with soy sauce, garlic and ginger and seared quickly. The fussiest part is the knife work: slices of even thickness cook at the same pace.
Garlic goes into melted butter, then the shrimp, and as soon as they turn pink the soy sauce, sugar and cheongyang chili go in for a thirty-second finish. There is no time to measure anything in those thirty seconds, so the seasoning is set out before the burner goes on.