Blanche your vegetables before you stir fry to improve texture and increase batch sizes. A technique akin to reverse searing steaks, or parboiling potatoes for fries.

Time: 3/5
Waiting for water to boil is passive time that lets you telescope your tasks

Effort: 4/5
Put in more work, get more results.

Cook it twice for a texture nice

Getting the texture right on vegetables in a stir fry is challenging. To get proper Wok Hei you need high heat, but that leaves the centers grassy and raw. If you go lower and slower to give the heat time to permeate, you run the risk of not evaporating off excess water quick enough and ending up with a soggy stir fry. Some knife tricks help with getting Wok Hei, but not every ingredient is amenable to such modifications.

I’ve suspected for a long time that restaurants get around this problem by doing most of the cooking before the vegetables actually hit the wok. Kind of like how you reverse sear a steak, or parboil potatoes before making fries. So, I was excited to see what would happen if I blanched my broccoli before I stir fried them with some beef for a classic combo. 

Usually it’s too much effort to bring a huge pot of water to boil just to blanche some veggies. But the equation tips over considerably when the water is already hot from making sous vide chicken for pasta salad. It tips over even more when I need boiling water to cook the pasta for said salad. Bam, triple kill!

Which is great, because stir fry is inherently hard to scale up (unless you go for atypical, low heat, meal prep friendly stir fries like shrimp and egg, or tomato and egg). Having the prepping process for pasta salad synergise with a stir fry means more meals for the week, and more variety.

You don’t even have to cook the vegetables right away. Once they’re blanched, they can sit in the fridge for two or three days until you come home late one evening and want to throw something quick and easy together. For the folks who feel reluctant to go all in on meal prep, give ingredient prep a try – cut and marinate your proteins, wash and blanche some veggies, learn a few good stir fry sauces, then mix and match away.

Like many of my experiments, this one was a partial success. While I’ll never expect to get good Wok Hei with a domestic stovetop (not to say it can’t be done with small batches and little tricks), I did manage to nail the texture. No excess broccoli exudate (yum) to water down the sauce, no weird florets that are somehow both burnt and raw.

Will I do this again? Maybe, if I had a pot of water going for something else. The pre-blanching trick was a neat way to increase the batch size for meal prep. But unless I had a good reason to wait for water to boil, I’m probably falling back on the most foolproof way that a home cook can use to be happy with their cooking – lowering expectations.

Dramatis Personae

Broccoli – 2 heads, large

Not the easiest vegetable to prep, because tiny bits of the florets fly off everywhere when you try to break a head down. But I didn’t notice how much I like broccoli until my SO pointed out how I would try to feed us broccoli like every month.

Hang on to the stems too. Trim the woody outsides, and the core is good for eating. Set them aside and give them a head start in the blanching, because they take a bit longer to cook than the florets.

Beef – 2lbs

Take any tender cut, slice thin, and marinade. I had some pre-marinated beef from a restaurant supply wholesale store’s closing sale, and I won’t call it cheating because nobody should feel ashamed of using store bought shortcuts to put nutritious and budget-friendly food on the table. It’s still miles better than fast food, and not that much slower.

Should you want to replicate the marinade, I suggest beginning with something like a tablespoon each of oyster sauce, light soy sauce, and Shaoxing wine. Add a teaspoon of sugar, and a dash of baking powder. The alkalinity of the baking powder tenderises the meat, but it means you don’t want to leave the beef marinating for any longer than about half a day lest it becomes unpleasantly soft.

Aromatics

I had some ginger on hand so I went with a few slices of that, plus a couple cloves of garlic. It’s always nice to doctor up your off-the-shelf cooking solutions to make them feel more home-made. No factory seasoning can beat the aroma of freshly cut aromatics bloomed in hot oil.

Ginger, garlic, shallots, scallion whites, use whatever you fancy. The more the merrier, within reason. 

Sauce

Just the marinade left over when you remove the beef, plus a teaspoon or so of corn starch to make a slurry. Or, mix up something similar to the sauce I used for my Beef and Leek stir fry for a good all-rounded solution.

Water

The ingredients list looking a bit underpopulated, so I thought I’d mention the water. Salt it properly, like you would pasta water, and that way the broccoli will be seasoned from the inside out.

When blanching, keep in mind that the residual heat will continue to cook the vegetables after they leave the water. The broccoli will also get more heat when they get stir fried with the beef. Pull them out a minute early and let them steam off in a colander, or shock in ice water if you’re not cooking them immediately.

Executive summary

1. Cut and marinade the beef.
2. Make rice. Bring pot of water to boil, and salt liberally.
3. Wash and cut vegetables. Prepare aromatics.
4. Blanche broccoli in vigorously boiling water for two or three minutes, or until they’re a hair undercooked.
5. Remove broccoli from water. Optionally shock in ice water. Allow to drain. 
6. Put a pan on high heat. Stir fry aromatics in a bit of oil until fragrant.
7. Add beef and stir fry until slightly pink.
8. Add drained broccoli and marinade. Stir to combine.

Play by Play

Last things first. I had three heads but only needed two. That last one can hang out for a while until I think of what to do with it – I would have blanched it too if I had the fridge space. No ice bath since I’m cooking immediately, but the texture would probably be even better if I iced the batch anyway.

Aromatics in the wok. Ginger goes first because it’s sturdier and you want a little colour on them, while garlic goes later because the reverse is true for them.

Beef in once the aromatics smell nice and fragrant. Stir vigorously until slightly pink and almost done. This gets cooked a bit longer, and it would be a pity if the beef gets over cooked and lose its tenderness.

Yes, I’m overcrowding the pan. No, the wok hei isn’t going to be good. But there’s a trade off to be made between quality and quantity, and tonight I value the latter over the former.

Time to plate up and eat. If you like things a bit saucier, you can always whip up some extra stir fry sauce and toss before you serve.

Nothing spectacular, but it’s solid for a weeknight.

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