Beef And Broccoli

Beef and broccoli is a classic chinese dish. It’s simple to make and uses basic ingredients.

Read over this excellent recipe from The Woks Of Life. It does a good job to explaining the dish and how it comes together.

Beef

The beef in this dish is thinly sliced and tenderized with baking soda. This is the Chinese velveting technique and results in tender, juicy meat, even if cooked until “well-done”. It’s about 1% baking soda to meat. Toss the meat until the baking soda dissolves and is absorbed (meat mixture will seem drier).

Tough or cheap cuts of beef can and should be used here: flank, skirt, round, chuck. While ribeye would work, it seems wasteful given that chuck would be just as flavourful and tender.

Most steak cuts are already against the grain. You will want to cut in the same plane or on a bias that’s heavily skewed.

Broccoli

The broccoli is blanched to ensure it is tender crisp. It’s only tossed in the sauce at the end and is not actually cooked in the wok.

You can even substitute for chinese broccoli, gai-lan. Any vegetable that can sop up the sauce and bring a mild vegetal flavour would work.

Sauce

The sauce is a classic Cantonese combination of oyster sauce, dark soy sauce, light soy sauce, sugar, and water. The sauce will cook and reduce in the pan, so take that into account. There’s an opportunity to adjust saltiness when adding the cornstarch slurry, you can add more water at this time if needed.

Cornstarch needs to first be dissolved in water to form a slurry. This avoids the starches from clumping into gelled balls.

Cornstarch needs to be brought to high heat to fully swell. This only takes 20 seconds at a boil. Prolonged cooking of cornstarch will break it down, so add cornstarch at the very end, to tighten up the sauce.