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Stir-fries made easy

Ten top tips for successful stir-fries

Do all your stir-fries end up looking the same? Do you start with lots of colour and end up with an anaemic mishmash? Follow these tips and get it right next time.

1. Keep it simple – no more than three or four ingredients in the wok at a time.
2. Have some delicious sauces ready to hand – either good-quality shop-bought or, better still, ones you have made yourself and refrigerated or frozen.
3. Don’t add oil to a wok that looks as if it’s drying out. Instead add a splash of water to create intense steaming heat – just the thing.
4. Put hard vegetables in first – obvious but vital.
5. Never use unmarinated tofu – it’s a waste of space.
6. Add tamari or soy sauce towards the end or it will just stick to the pan and make that awful bitter taste.
7. Use the real McCoy Chinese wok – they’re the cheapest, thinnest, and also the best, because they conduct heat rapidly and evenly. Stop the rust by filling with salt and heating to a very high heat the first time you use it. When the salt is burnt black, discard it, rub the wok with oil and proceed, oiling it before and after each use. Dry meticulously.
8. Cook noodles and rice separately and throw into the wok at the last minute.
9. Remember that stir-fry is another way of saying sauté, so European combinations can work well cooked this way. For instance, try stir-frying a fennel bulb, cut into 8 segments, in a little oil with large chunks of red pepper or tomatoes or both, some finely sliced garlic, black pepper and plenty of basil. Delicious – and it only takes minutes.
10. For the genuine article you should stay away from olive oil – it is just too foreign to eastern tastes.

Stir-fry shopping list
The following ingredients are basic to a good stir-fry. Most of them can be kept in your storecupboard, others will need to be bought fresh.

• noodles
  
• rice
  
• almonds or cashews
  
• arrowroot
  
• fresh chillies
  
• coconut milk
  
• ginger
  
• garlic
  
• groundnut oil
  
• lemongrass
  
• oyster sauce
  
• oyster mushroom sauce
  
• sesame seeds
  
• tabasco
  
• tamari
  
• tamarind
  
• yellow bean paste

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