311 recipes. Page 9 of 13
Quick and delicious stir-fry recipes
The abalone flesh is stir-fried in butter with garlic scapes, while the innards cut away from it get a light toss in soy sauce and go on top of rice. Past a minute the flesh turns tough; it spends only about 45 seconds in the pan.
This jeyuk bokkeum starts by searing: pork with only a thin coat of gochujang marinade is spread across a very hot pan and left untouched for about two minutes until the edges darken. Onion and scallion join only after the pork has browned.
Dried shredded squid (jinmichae) is usually done in gochujang; this version uses butter and soy sauce, so it comes out rich and sweet-salty. There is only a pinch of chili flakes, so it is not spicy.
Dried filefish jerky is tough and dry straight from the bag; a glaze of gochujang, soy sauce and oligosaccharide syrup softens it until the pieces bend instead of snapping. Kept in the fridge, it holds for five to seven days.
Made in spring with webfoot octopus (jjukkumi) full of roe, each bite comes with little pops. The octopus is rubbed hard with coarse salt to strip its slime, blanched briefly, coated in gochujang sauce and stir-fried over high heat in under two minutes.
The chili sauce looks too thick, but no water goes in: the octopus releases its own liquid as it cooks and loosens it. The pork belly is browned in the pan first, and the octopus joins it over high heat for just a minute or two.
Fresh bamboo shoots are only around for a short season in spring, so most of the year this banchan is made with canned or vacuum-packed shoots. Fresh ones need at least 30 minutes of simmering in rice-rinsing water to remove their acrid bite; canned ones need a thorough rinse to lose their tinny smell. Soy sauce and garlic keep the seasoning light, and the point is crunch: cooked too long, the shoots dry out and toughen.
Bamboo shoots sliced thinly across the grain stay crisp and outweigh the beef, and the dish eats more like a vegetable stir-fry with soy-marinated meat running through it. Beef round is very lean and toughens quickly, which is why the meat is seared briefly, lifted out, and only returned for a final toss once the bamboo has cooked down on its own.
Garlic and mixed miso are rubbed into the chicken breast, cut across the grain into 2 cm pieces, and it rests in the fridge for 15 minutes before cooking. Carrot goes in first because it needs longer, then cabbage and green pepper, and the pan comes off the heat once the cabbage edges turn translucent and have picked up the miso left in the pan.
Kale, usually eaten raw as a leaf wrap in Korea, is stir-fried here into chili-seasoned pork. It stays bright green and stands out against the red meat.
There is no sauce in this curry: minced pork is fried with spice paste until it breaks into dry, separate crumbles. The aroma and heat of this shortcut version differ from the original because it uses commercial Thai red curry paste in place of the southern Thai paste, which has its own mix including turmeric and pepper. The pork should end up with no liquid left at the bottom but not crisp like a snack. Finely shredded makrut lime leaves add a citrus lift against the spice.
When kimchi has gone too sour, this is the first thing many Korean households think of making. The kimchi is cut without squeezing out its juices and fried with onion over medium heat until the liquid in the pan cooks down and clings to the leaves. Besides rice, it often goes on top of ramyeon.
Beef marinated with pear juice and sugar is stir-fried over high heat with aged kimchi. The kimchi's sourness and salt make it less sweet than ordinary bulgogi, and its juices soak into the meat as they cook together. Regular napa cabbage kimchi works if there is no aged kimchi on hand.
Well-fermented sour kimchi goes in, and its sourness does the job of a sauce. When the kimchi is salty, the rest of the marinade goes in a little at a time rather than all at once, and wrapping bites in lettuce takes the edge off the heat.
Most of burdock's aroma is near the skin, so it is scrubbed clean with a brush rather than peeled. A dried red chili in the pan leaves a little heat trailing behind the sweet soy flavor.
Perilla leaves plus ground perilla seed give soy-glazed tofu a double dose of that nutty, minty perilla smell. The tofu is seared firm beforehand, so the pieces keep their edges.
Perilla oil and shredded perilla leaves make this smell much stronger than the usual potato stir-fry. The soy sauce is poured into an empty spot in the hot pan and allowed to bubble before it is stirred through, and in that moment it picks up a faintly scorched, toasty smell that carries over to the potatoes.
Smoked duck comes already seasoned, so the soy sauce is kept light, and no oil is added because the duck's own fat is enough to cook the onion and sauce. The sauce is gochujang with maesil-cheong (green plum syrup), and two cheongyang chilies go in with the onion.
Twenty perilla leaves go in, but they never actually cook over the flame. The soy-marinated beef is stir-fried, the heat is turned off, and only then are the leaves folded in for twenty seconds of residual heat; any longer and they blacken.
Perilla sprouts are far more tender than perilla leaves and smell only faintly of perilla, and here they are tossed with browned tofu in thinned doenjang (Korean soybean paste). Thickly shredded perilla leaves can stand in when sprouts are hard to find, though the scent gets noticeably stronger and the bite tougher.
A light dusting of flour holds moisture in the cut crab and gives the sweet-salty soy glaze something to grip, and it ends up on your fingers as you work through the shells. Buy the crabs live and clean them just before cooking for firm, springy meat; frozen crab loses water as it thaws and turns soft.
A shallow slit in each shishito pepper (kkwarigochu) lets the soy and oyster sauce seep inside and keeps the peppers from bursting in the pan. The chicken tenderloin they cook with has almost no fat and a mild, clean taste.
The shishito peppers stay in the oil until a few dark blisters appear on the skins, which is where their slightly bitter aroma comes from. The tiny anchovies are toasted separately in a dry pan beforehand until crumbly, and they only rejoin the peppers when the heat is lowered and the syrup goes in.
Instead of being stirred into liquid, the doenjang (Korean soybean paste) is fried at the edge of the pan in the fat from the pork, which cooks off its pasty smell, before the blanched cauliflower goes in. There is no broth at all, and the heat goes off while the cauliflower stems still have a little firmness.