Whip up this filling pork noodle stir-fry for a quick and easy midweek meal. Heat the oil in a vegan stir fry noodles or frying pan. Add the mince, break it up with a spoon and fry over a high heat for about 8 mins until browning.
While the meat cooks, boil a kettle, then pour the hot water over the noodles. Set aside for 5-10 mins to soften. Add the ginger, garlic and veg to the pan and stir-fry for 2-3 mins. Mix 1 tbsp soy sauce with the cornflour to make a paste. Add the remaining soy sauce, the chilli sauce and 2 tbsp water. Drain the noodles and add to the pan with the sauce. Cook until the sauce coats the noodles, adding a splash of water if needed, then serve.
This website is published by Immediate Media Company Limited under licence from BBC Studios Distribution. When you make a stir-fry, you need a really hot wok and you should cook the meat in batches. Check out all five tips to help your stir-fry turn out great. Danilo Alfaro has published more than 800 recipes and tutorials focused on making complicated culinary techniques approachable to home cooks. If you add too many items, it will cool down your wok.
Your food will simmer or steam and not fry. You really want it to fry—especially meats. Also, if you add all your ingredients at once, you are not accounting for all the different cooking rates of your foods. For instance, hard carrots need more time to cook than shrimp or thin strips of chicken breast. Check out these five cooking tips that can make your stir-fry a sure bet.
To make a good stir-fry, you absolutely must have an extremely hot wok. A sauté pan works well, too. Not getting the pan hot enough is one of the most common problems for home cooks. This is true in general, not just with stir-fries. Restaurants have extremely powerful stoves pumping out mega-high heat, which enables them to get a beautiful sear on meats and cook foods quickly so that they do not spend too much time in the pan. If you have ever seen the gigantic burners they have in Chinese restaurants specifically for the stir-fry wok, they’re called “volcanos” because they get so ridiculously hot.
Those things blast out 75,000 BTUs, which is about ten times hotter than the average burner on a home range. If you have a high-end range, it might feature one extra-hot burner that approaches 12,000 BTU. That is definitely the burner you should use. But even with that, you simply do not have the equipment to duplicate what a cook in a Chinese restaurant is able to do using one of their volcano burners. That is not to say you should not try it, but it is going to be challenging.
So, since you cannot produce the same heat as a Chinese restaurant, you have to heat your wok for a long time. Think about heating your wok for 5 to 10 minutes over the highest heat on a gas range that you can get. Just heat it dry with nothing in it. If you have to, close the kitchen door and turn on the vent fan while this is happening.
Note, you cannot do this with a non-stick coated wok. Once the wok is really hot, add some oil. Use the most refined high-heat vegetable oil you can find. That is usually a refined safflower oil or a refined sunflower oil. Adding cold meat will instantly cool off your wok.
To avoid this, let the meat sit out at room temperature for 20 minutes before you cook it. You can marinate it during this time with soy sauce and a little bit of wine. Then, when you are ready to cook, remove the meat from the marinade, drain it, and pat it dry before you add it to the wok. When you are shopping for the meat at your supermarket or butcher, you will sometimes see strips of beef already cut up for sale as “stir-fry meat.