The Basic Dance of Stir-Fry

This column only got writ through the editor’s good graces, as she held off deadline to let me get my world a little less disorganized and chopped up than it’s been recently.  Has anyone ever considered introducing a bill in the Congress or the Legislature or the City Council or something to outlaw inconvenient deadlines?  (Considering the current City Council, a couple of the flakes on there would probably be dumb enough to vote for it.)

Chopped up, which reminds me of what I was going to write about this month.  I mentioned several months back that I’m an Oriental cooking nut.  Now if you play word association games with Joe Q. Normal out in the street (only if you want to be bored by conventionality; it’s a lot more fun to play word association with Ms, because they associate everything with anything and you can go crazy trying to make out the semantic leaps that go with), he’s gonna say “Chinese” at you when you say “Oriental cooking” at him.  And that means this month is about Chinese cooking.

I like doing Chinese cooking for several reasons:  besides I like eating the stuff, it lets me use up all sorts of odd vegetable bits I had left over in the fridge, and I can get my wife to eat her vegetables.  She positively refuses to eat much of any kind of ordinary Western-style cooked vegetable except spinach, and since the Chinese regard cooking vegetables to death as a major culinary crime, then that’s just fine, although I still haven’t managed to get green peas past her.

There are some additional giggles to be had if you get into this seriously, because you wind up going to Oriental grocery stores to find some of the supplies, and what a Taiwanese, mainland Chinese, or Laotian label writer who has “had the English” in grammar school can’t do to a description shouldn’t be done anyway.  What he does do is often hysterical.  Try “braised duck web in delicious sauce with tree ear.”  It’s OK, but be warned that what you got here is duck feet with mushrooms.

Austin is fortunately blessed with all sorts of Oriental groceries, run by Thais, Viets, Chinese of one sort of another and most generally having a fair shot at what you needed.  My absolute favorite in town is the Oriental Market at (more or less) the corner of Guadalupe and Airport Boulevard.  The owner, Chai Damrong, has been around for an awful lot of years, has caught armed robbers, survived one major torching of his store, and came back for more and bigger.  He started out as a pharmacy student at the University of Texas who was tending a Fina station on that corner across from Airport Haven, and had a shelf or two of groceries from home that he kept for friends.  Pretty quick Chai found that keeping a grocery store paid sorta better than pumping gas, and the Fina station part got more neglected in favor of selling chai pow yu and shiitake.  As often happens with these operations, like Topsy it “just growed,” and the store now takes up several times the space he started out with, has developed a building of its own, a meat market with barbecue, fish market (with some of the best prawn prices you’ll find), and a good selection of most stuff you could ever think of needing, as well as some things where you ask “whatever do you do with that?”  Now my father swears he was Chai’s first Anglo customer back in 1970 or 1971 (I’m not very clear on the exact date any more).  Whenever it was, I pretty soon got to go in when we’d stop by on the way back to Comanche, and when I got to cooking this stuff myself, I became a recognized regular customer.  Matter of fact, Chai was upset when Dad moved to Houston because it meant he never came by any more, and about half the time when I go in I get asked, “When your dad gonna come see me?”

The point of all this (other than it’s a nice story) is that you do well to make friends of the owner, because he can tell you what it is you need for something, which can be very useful if you know the Japanese name for whatever-it-is and they’ve got the same thing with the Thai name on it, and you don’t know the difference, and he can tell you if you didn’t buy the best-quality brand and he thinks you’d be happier with another brand.  Listen to him.  Like Mr. Science, “he knows more than you do,” and probably not because he has a master’s degree (in Science!).

Now when you get to buying food in these shops, expect that everything comes in a Large Economy Size.  It is also very true that many Oriental families in the Old Country are very large and you use up a lot cooking for them.  This means that you should expect to find quart (or even gallon) bottles of soy sauce, large cans of mushrooms or bamboo shoots, half-pound bags of spices, rice in minima of five pounds (and up to fifty-pound bags, if you have storage space and know what to do with it all).  I wish I had a useful suggestion for what to do with all the extra amount afterward if you don’t use it all, but about all I ever figured was just to go ahead, cook up a lot, and eat leftovers.

The other great reason for asking questions of the owner is to find out something about what you need for implements.  Many of the groceries also carry kitchen tools and pots; some are light-gauge junk, but some are real deals because (and it is really true) Third World labor costs are monstrous cheap.  I got both my cleavers over there for a couple of songs, and they do just fine.  There is one thing where I recommend being very careful, and that is if you decide to buy a wok.  The best ones are spun steel, and are treated liike cast-iron pans.  For their care and feeding, refer to my remarks several months back on taking care of cast iron.  To summarize it, season the pan by baking on oil to a hard, blackened finish, and then never ever wash it with soap!  After each use, rinse the pan with very hot water and wipe clean with paper towels.  Don’t buy a stainless steel wok; you can’t get a good seasoning to stick, and it’s made for people who “cook in high heels” and think every single pan in the world is supposed to shine.  Balderdash!  Also, it’s a wise idea to use wooden utensils so you don’t scratch the seasoning, which isn’t quite as fragile as Teflon, but ought to be.

Boy, that was a lot of warnings and stuff, wasn’t it?  Now, if you’re still with me, let’s talk about what to cook this month.  I got the basic idea for this from Barbara Tropp’s The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking.  She describes this sort of recipe as one found in almost every peasant home, and it uses whatever you happen to have.  I put in things that I like, but it will take to almost anything you happen to have some of.

STIR-FRIED BEEF WITH VEGETABLES

DO ALL YOUR PREP WORK FIRST:
Slice the beef into slivers about ¼” by ¼” by 1½”, making sure all the gristle, sinew, and fat has been trimmed out.  Mix together the marinade ingredients in a bowl and add the beef, stirring to make sure all the beef is coated.  Cover and let marinate two hours on the counter, or overnight in the refrigerator.

Put the dried mushrooms into a bowl of hot water and let them soak for twenty minutes.  When done, slice off and discard the stems.  Squeeze the caps to remove the extra water and any sand that may still be involved in the gills, then slice the caps thinly.  Peel and slice the other vegetables, keeping each separate for now.  Mix together the cold water, soy sauce, and cornstarch in a measuring cup.

GET READY TO FRY:
Heat the wok or a heavy frying pan very hot.  Add two tablespoons of the oil; wait until the oil begins to smoke.  Add the vegetables one at a time so the pan doesn’t cool off too much.  (If the pan gets too cold, the vegetables will absorb the oil and taste greasy.)  Add the crunchiest vegetables first (carrots) and fry, stirring and tossing, working your way down to the quickest to wilt (bok choy).  Sprinkle the vegetables with the sugar and kosher salt, then splash in the rice wine.  It should “explode” in a great hiss and cloud of steam.  Add the water quickly, then cover the pan, lower the heat a notch, and let the vegetables cook undisturbed in the steam a couple of minutes.  Uncover the pan, turn up the heat to evaporate the rest of the liquid, then turn the vegetables out onto a platter.  Quickly wipe the pan clean and return it to the heat.

When the pan is hot again, add the remaining oil and wait until it begins to smoke once more.  Give the beef slivers a quick stir to recombine with the marinade.  Pitch in the ginger, green onions, and cayenne (this is called infusing the oil).  After a few seconds, dump the beef into the pan.  Cook, stirring, very quickly until the beef is almost completely brown, then dump the vegetables back in.  Give the cornstarch mixture a quick stir, and pour it over the mixture, tossing to combine.  Let the whole thing cook for a minute, then return it all to a heated serving platter.  Serve with rice; should serve four to six, depending on how hungry everyone is.

first ran: January 1989

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Text ©1988 by Sam Waring. All rights reserved.
Created: Sun, 25 Apr 2004 at 21:26:29 UTC