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You can make anything delicious by chopping it into pieces, then tossing it around in hot olive oil with spices.
Thatâs about it! Go impress your girlfriends!
One or two details follow for you nerds who like that sorta thing.
When food touches hot surfaces it browns. If thereâs oil involved it browns even better. Browning make it delicious. Sugars caramelise; aminos react with sugars to breed innumerable new flavour compounds (the Maillard reaction).
If you stir-fry a whole carrot, only the outer surface will be browned. All those sugars and aminos will stay inside, sheltered, merely heated, their secret flavours unblossomed. If you slice it into pieces, every side of every piece can be browned. Thus the method: cut stuff in pieces, toss it in hot olive oil.
Heating food in general will soften it, release nutrients, efface antinutrients, and make it pleasantly warm to chew on. Now if you chop the food into differently-sized pieces, the big ones will take more time to heat to the core. By the time a big one is starting to get lukewarm on the inside, the small ones are already pieces of coal. So you should aim to chop food at roughly similar sizes. Donât stress over this too much, though. Approximately similar is good enough. Like if youâre cooking mushrooms whole and theyâre very different in size, chop in half the ones that are about double the smallest ones, and move on with your life.
Capitalists will try to sell you one knife for each imaginable subvariety of food; but most chopping is best done with a single good knife, that big one with a wide triangular blade. Itâs called a chefâs knife, or if you studied the sword and prefer Japanese blades, a santoku. It pays off to have a decent allpurpose knife and a sharpener, rather than buying a boxed knife set. You donât have to go all-out knife nerd on this and budget install payments on a thousand-euro professional overhyped brand-name knife that you must oil whet and buff every evening. But a decent, ânot literally the cheapestâ chefâs knife and a convenient, kinda crappy instant sharpener will already make a lot of difference. Chopping food will be ~pleasant~.
Some of the rare other knife types that are actually useful every once in a while: paring knives and bread knives.
Most vegetables which are peeled in European culture do not need to be peeled. The peel is food too and often delicious.
Oftentimes thereâs something unappetising at the very tips (e.g. leaves, woody nodes etc.). Chop these off first; that helps with all the rest of the process. You can figure out ways to eat them too if youâre thrifty, but seldomly by cooking together with the main part; the textures are different.
It pays off to learn a bit of cutting technique. Most things can be cut efficiently in a similar way:
If thereâs some ingredient that you use often and it always takes time & toil to cut, it pays off to look up online about the chopping technique for that specific thing. Professional kitchen personell is super pressured for latency and throughput; this is awful and exploitative and we all would be better off if we could cook slow food all the time, but as a silver lining it has at least developed a whole encyclopedia of efficient, field-tested, safe methods to chop things.
Stir-frying means you use just a bit of oil, and you stir things periodically to hit all surfaces. Itâs not immersion frying; you only need a little drip. If the pan surface is coated in oil, thatâs enough oil. Howeverâkeep in mind that the foods will absorb some of the oil (thereby increasing in deliciousness points). If youâre cooking many things, you might need to recoat the pan every so often. If youâre carefully infusing the oil with flavours, and you plan to stir-fry lots of things in it, maybe it pays off to start with a thicker amount.
Some people distinguish Western âsautĂ©ingâ, done at a high temperature in a short time, and Chinese iron-wok âstir-fryingâ (=ç chÇo), done almost instantly at an extremely high temperature you probably donât have the oven for. I call both of them âstir-fryingâ because I donât like the word âsautĂ©ingâ. I can only do the Western type because I have a crappy stove from Ikea.
The traditional rule is, hot pan cold oil: warm up your pan first, and only then add oil. This makes it easier to spread and coat it evenly, and also prevents overcooking the oil. Warming first doesnât matter that much for non-sticky pans, but thereâs no reason not to build the habit. You can test if the pan is hot by sprinkling some water on it and waiting for it to sizzle; or simply hover your hand a few centimetres away. If the pan is non-sticky and smoking, you warmed it too much; take it away, open the windows, and let it cool. The smoke of the black coating is unhealthy, and more importantly tastes bad.
Stir-frying is relatively fast, and typically you donât need to stir all the time. You can do other kitchen things and just toss the stuff once in a while.
As discussed before, the goal of stir-frying is to brown the surfaces on a combination of frying and searing (direct hot metal contact). But at the same time youâre also cooking the food, in its own dripping water and hot steam as well as the irradiating metal heat. How much cooking vs. browning determines the texture.
If you want a lot of browning for soft things like tofu or sausages, chop them with wide-contact, flippable surfaces, and leave them searing for a good while on each side.
Some things take a long time cooking before theyâre edible and tasty (potatoes, broccoli). Some take a long time to cook, but are edible raw, so how soft/brown you want them is a matter of taste (carrots, tofu). Some things cook very fast and will become burnt or soggy if you glance at your cellphone (greens, preboiled noodles). If youâre cooking things together you have to account for the order, or some of your food will be burnt or mushy before the other food is ready. Cooking things all in a pot, adding one after the other, is convenient and great to combine all tastes, but it will impede browning due to crowding. Mushrooms cook relatively fast and basically never overcook, so theyâre versatile to add at any point.
Consider also the water content of ingredients. Adding something very watery like zucchini or pak choi will make everything else steamed.
Salt increases osmotic pressure, pulling water out. (So do sugar and MSG, but usally you only use a pinch of these). This is why you can salt-dry food for preservation.
Conventional cooking wisdom claims that this effect is big enough to make watery ingredients, like onions and greens, soggy and impossible to brown. I donât know how much of this matters in practice, but you could prevent it by adding salt only at the end. On the other hand, salt penetrates vegetables very slowly; adding it at the beginning will result in a better flavour.
Frozen vegetables will be mushier and less tasty. Thatâs just how it is. Theyâre still a great thing to have around and still taste great. Chop and freeze your fresh veggies if theyâre going bad and you canât cook right now, or buy a few bags to keep around.
In a stir-fry context, frozen veggies add a lot of water, and thus shift the balance a lot to steaming. Counteract this by throwing the vegetables, still frozen, on the largest shallow pan you have that can still fit them, oiled and heated to the hottest you can make it resonably go, and toss them often til the ice is gone. Then set aside the veggies, do the aromatic oil ~after~wards, and put the veggies back in, so that all that steam doesnât carry your precious aromatics away. Definily donât stir-fry any fresh veggies along with the frozen ones; do it separately and mix them later.
Many commercial frozen vegetables come pre-seasoned; read the bag so you donât overseason.
By now it should be clear that ready-made bags of different vegetables, all mixed together, will have disadvantages. On the one hand theyâre super convenient for a 15-minute meal in a low-energy day; just warm a pan, throw oil in it, throw a bag, toss til itâs done. But the distinct ingredients will have varying sizes, water content and cooking times, and you canât control for it. One might say that these products are a⊠mixed bag.
The usual utensil for stir-frying is a large pan. âLargeâ because all the foods will be touching the metal; food piled atop itself will only cook, not brown. âPanâ because the low, open sides let the steam go out faster, tilting the cook-to-brown ratio towards browing. But if youâre ok with food more on the cooked side, thereâs nothing wrong with stirring everything in a big pot, one at a time; itâs more convenient and makes less of a oily spillage mess. The first things you put will get a chance at browning, and the later ingredients will just cook, so you smoothly shift towards a big pot lunch. The seasoning will still take.
One way to have many crunchy ingredients is to stir-fry one ingredient at a time, then mix them all at the end. This works well, but now it isnât fast & convenient like stir-frying normally is.
If you want to go fancy you can seek for a better material than your average aluminum frying pan. The point of better materials is to get more heat with a more even distribution, while not smoking or making the food stick. Stainless steel is one step up in heat quality, but a bit more troublesome to avoid food sticking to it, and harder to clean than non-stick. Cast iron and carbon steel are the best, and you can find not-horrible-expensive ones if you lurk in the aftermarket; but they take a special kind of maintenance to keep a patina. Cast iron rusts if you donât do it right, so if buying used, examine it first. (Iâve never cooked with copper because Iâm not married to a billionaire.)
The superior stir-fry utensil is the Chinese round-bottom wok. The round bottom distributes the heat much better, and facilitates tossing and tumbling the whole thing. Sadly I have an European electric glass stovetop, which makes round bottoms really hard to work with (plus itâs not nearly hot enough anyway). With flat bottoms you have to pay attention to how some corners of the pan get hotter than others, then move the pan and/or toss things attentively so that all of them get some time scorching at the good spots.
You need to add seasonings for food to taste good. For some ideas see:
How to season anything with five flavours plus pain
How much seasoning is a tricky goldilocks zone. Most home cooking lacks salt and seasoning, and the #1st and most dramatic step to make it taste better is to add more salt and more seasoning. However, itâs easy to go overboard, and you canât remove salt after you add it. (Adding chopped potatoes to the pot, or diluting a box of soy cream to improvise a rice/pasta cream sauce, might help offset the excess seasoning; if youâre lucky.)
So you should taste as you go. But you canât trust that too much either, because it takes time for the salt and seasonings to soak into stuff. Something that tastes bland right after you mix in the salt and chilis might have become an inedible brine of hurt by the time itâs cooked. Thereâs no way around this other than starting cautiously, and getting an intuitive feel for it. Taste it often, notice how it develops, and donât be ashamed to ask your girlfriends to add salt/sauces at the table; itâs less delicious after the food is done, but safe to do, personalisable, and #valid.
Itâs efficient to cook more than you need and store leftovers for the next couple days, but keep in mind that the seasonings will develop even further.
Thereâs a frying resistance spectrum to seasonings: from hard stuff that never burns, like salt and MSG, to soft delicate things, like fresh Mediterranean herbs. As a rule of thumb for all sorts of cooking, itâs best to add spices as soon as possible; but for stuff that burns easily in the oil, you have to wait until almost done. So typically I brace my stir-friends between two rounds of seasoning. You get a sense for this as you explore each type (e.g. dry rosemary can usually take the fry times of a home stir-fry; onions will char at high heat). Fresh green herbs like basil or mint go great after cooking, as a garnish; but many of them are nice stirred in at the end, like spring onions, celery or thyme.
A special case are aromatics; delicious prickly stuff best infused into the oil itself. This includes all spicy and allium-y things (chili, ginger, garlic, onions), as well as the numby (Sichuan flowerpeppers, jambu). Fry them in the oil first, before doing anything else, and the flavour will soak the food so much better. But the problem is, the aromatics may burn from sitting there during the whole time. You can spoon them out when theyâre crisp, stir-fry the rest of the food, and add back the aromatics right before everything is done (or, for unchewable stuff like cloves or flowerpeppers, just leave them out). Garlic and to a lesser extent onions can take a good deal of frying and still be nice and crunchy at the end, but donât overdo it. Garlic powder or paste is a lot less aromatic, but you can just dissolve a bunch into the oil and forget about it. Infusing chillies into the oil this way makes them a lot stronger; be cautious. If you like food a bit spicy but not too much, you can remove the chilli seeds, where most of their delicious poison concentrates.
Depending on the ingredients, at the end of the process youâll probably have oil or emulsion left in the pan. This is great to mix along with the vegetables in a neutral base like rice or pasta. You can either pile it atop the rice/pasta on your plate, or add the rice/pasta to the stir-fry pot to toss it too. (This is perfect for old leftover rice; the same dryness that makes it less tasty by itself also makes it more brownable in a stir-fry).
You can also turn the whole thing into a creamy sauce to top pasta or other dishes. Add coconut cream, soy cream, or just water with some flour or starch to thicken it. The leftover water from boiling pasta or potatoes is already starchy, and perfect for this purpose. An easy pasta recipe is to stir-fry mushrooms while the pasta boils, then use some of the pasta water to turn the stir-fry into mushroom sauce. Boil it for a while to reduce and thicken; you might need to add a bit of extra starch anyway. But be careful; if anything at all is charred, the charcoal taste will take everywhere in your sauce! Tilt the balance towards cooking with just a bit of browning, to be on the safe side.
Many people like to add sauce to pasta by just scooping a ladleful on top of a plate. Looks great in photos, but the flavour will seep in much better if you toss your whole pasta along with everything else in the stir-sauce pot for a while. For best results cook the pasta in salted water without oil, dry it well in the colander, and toss it into the sauce still hot.
Youâll see a lot of English-speaking people claiming that you canât cook with olive oil: it becomes unhealthy, it burns easily, it tastes bad. Theyâre all wrong. Thereâs science on this; look it up if you must, but Mediterranean cuisines have fried on olive oil for literal millenia, and as we all know Mediterranean cooking is objectively best cooking.
Thereâs a nugget of wisdom in that myth; olive oil does smoke fast compared to most. Thatâs still way above the temperature you need for home sautĂ©eing anyway; Iâve never had a problem with olive oil smoking, and Iâm a very distracted girl who has burned a ton of stuff. Also notice that the smoking point is *not* the breakdown point, when oils start getting unhealthy compounds. Olive oil is actually one of the most resistant ones to breakdown.
You might think olive oil is too expensive to cook with. In countries like Italy or Portugal itâs an unglamorous everyday staple, but in many other places itâs become this luxury delicacy market, with niche imports reviewed on bourgie rags for their flavour bouquet like overrated wine. None of this matters when using it for frying. Go to the discount supermarket and grab the cheapest big bottle of olive you can find, in price per mL. Grab a bunch of them if theyâre on promotion. If you do this itâs just a bit more expensive than the cheapest soy or canola, and incredibly more tasty. The final difference on your overall monthly groceries expenses is minimal.
(I like keeping a decent one around for salads and other raw-oil uses; again my rule of thumb is ânot literally the cheapest oneâ.)
It *is* a bad idea to use olive oil for very high-heat stir-fries, like in Chinese-style wok hei. This is not due to any of that FUD about free radicals giving you cancer, but just because itâs hard to cook if thereâs smoke all over the place, plus the smoke detectors in Europe are so annoying.
As mentioned I donât have the gear for this to even be an issue anyway, but I like to keep Chinese sesame oil around for when I want some variation in aroma. It tastes very different than olive, but also delicious, and it can stand up to wok hei if youâre going for that. Chinese peanut oil is a great pick too. For some reason the European brands have no scent and taste like nothing, so I only buy Chinese-made, again going for quantity in price per mL.
Some people dislike olive or sesame because they add flavours to the food. These people are wrong; the flavours they add are delicious. They donât overpower your food at all. You can even use olive oil for baking, and it doesnât make your chocolate cake taste like olive oil; it makes it taste great. The only reason I donât do that all the time is the cost. Unlike baking, stir-frying takes very little oil, so itâs doable to use the nicer oils for it.