Tender marinated beef stir fry in a finger licking garlic-ginger pepper sauce. This one-pan restaurant style stir fry is one of the fastest and easiest recipes that you’ll make all year! Incredibly versatile, you can mix up the beef and the veggies for whatever you have at hand. The sky is the limit on variations!
Why make this recipe?
This is the recipe that gets me through work deadlines and delays that leave little time to cook! No long simmering or deep frying needed. Easy to cook and hands down delicious! Shake it up by changing the beef with chicken, tofu or shrimp. Jazz up the vegetables with variations in texture and taste with baby corn spears, mushrooms, water chestnuts, green beans and snow peas. Garnish options are endless – add peanuts or fried noodles or even crumbled Doritos for a satisfying crunch.
Ingredients
- The beef needs to be thinly sliced so it cooks quickly. I used beef stew meat thinly sliced against the grain. To help make the slicing process easier, I put the beef into the freezer for about a half hour prior to cutting to firm it up. You can also use other cuts like flank steak, sirloin, and tri-tip. Lean beef seems to work best – the cooking time is too short to render the fat.
- Vegetables – I use jalapeno, red peppers and red onion. Any type of fast cooking vegetables work – slice hard vegetables like carrots into thin slices or matchsticks to help speed up the cooking process.
- Garlic and ginger is used to flavor the oil as a base for that delicious sauce.
- Fish sauce provides that umami taste.
- Butter can be fully or partially substituted with oil if you like, but it really does add a lot of flavor to this dish.
- When added to marinades, corn flour helps bind the liquid ingredients and prevent overcooking in the wok. As a result you have much more flavorful, tender and evenly cooked meat.
How to make this recipe
- Marinate the beef – put the beef, soy sauce, egg, black pepper and corn flour in a bowl. Mix well then set aside.
- Pour all the ingredients for the Stir Fry Sauce into a bowl – fish sauce, soy sauce, ketchup, sugar. black pepper. Mix then set aside.
- Mix the corn flour and water room temperature in a bowl and set aside.
- Heat a wok or heavy bottomed skillet on high heat until smoking. Add the butter and garlic. Sauté the garlic until lightly golden around the edges. Add the ginger and continue to sauté until golden.
- Add the beef. Sauté for about 1 minute. Add the vegetables. Sauté for about 1 minute. Add the corn flour slurry. Sauté for about 3-5 minutes. Add the sesame oil. Garnish with sesame seeds. Serve immediately while hot.
Side dish suggestions
I love eating this dish with plain white steaming hot rice. However the dish also works really well as a side to other dishes like Ultimate Chicken Fried Rice. Chicken and Shrimp Fried Wontons are a great starter.
End this delicious meal with cold Shemai – Creamy Vermicelli in Sweet Rose Infused Cream and Mini Blueberry Pies.
Tips & Notes
Several factors contribute towards juicy, tender beef in this recipe. First, cutting the meat into thin slices against the grain, shortens the muscle fibers, essentially making the beef tender. Second, the ingredients in the marinade also help soften the meat. Ginger and soy sauce breaks down myosin, a tough protein found in meat. Finally the egg and corn flour in the marinade forms a thin coat on the meat which stops the meat from overcooking resulting in a plush and silky velvet” texture. The formal version of this technique is called “velveting,” a Chinese cooking technique that uses egg whites, corn flour and rice wine to get that soft and lusciously tender texture that is the hallmark of Chinese restaurant style beef .
Sliced flank steak is the most popular cut of meat to use for stir fry. However, almost any type of lean meat such as stew meat, sirloin, tri-tip, ribeye, top loan, tenderloin, shoulder center, shoulder petite tender and shoulder top blade is suitable for stir fry beef.
Because stir fry beef is cooked very quickly on high heat, lean meat is better since the fat in marbled meats don’t break down quickly enough resulting in hard rubbery pieces when stir fried. Cutting the strips against the grain is crucial for shortening the protein fibers so that the meat cooked on high heat has that melt-in-your-mouth texture.
I do recommend marinating meat for stir fries because it really does add to the flavor and lusciously tender texture. While 20 minutes is a good time to shoot for, I have had great results with only a 10 minute marination which is the time needed to prep the vegetable, mix the sauce and fire up the wok.
That being said – the recipe will still work if you don’t have the time to marinate the beef because a lot of flavor is already in the sauce.
The secret to tender, Chinese-restaurant style beef is to marinate the beef in a mixture of egg white, corn starch, salt and sugar in addition to other flavors like soy sauce and/or rice wine. For optimal results marinate the beef for at least an hour. I have had good results with beef marinated for a minimum of 20 minutes to 6 hours. Marinating beef over 24 hours is not recommended as the texture changes and the beef becomes very mushy.
My go-to beef stir fry marinade has only four ingredients: two tablespoons of soy sauce, 1 teaspoon blackpepper, one beaten egg and four tablespoons of cornflour for every pound of stir fried beef..
Finally, if you make this recipe..
I’d love to hear how it went – please leave a comment and rate this recipe. Above all, I love hearing from all of you and will do my best to answer each and every comment!
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Beef Stir Fry Recipe
Equipment
- heavy bottomed skillet or wok
Ingredients
Beef Marinade
- 1/2 lb beef thinly sliced flat and broad pieces
- 1 tbsp soy sauce
- 1 egg room temperature
- 1/2 tsp black pepper freshly ground, to taste
- 2 tbsp corn flour
Vegetables
- 1 jalapeno sliced, optional
- 1 cup red onion sliced thick, into cubes
- 1/2 cup red pepper sliced thick, into cubes
Stir Fry Sauce
- 1 tbsp fish sauce
- 1 tbsp soy sauce
- 1 tbsp tomato ketchup
- 1 tsp sugar
- 1/2 tsp black pepper freshly ground, to taste
Corn Flour Slurry
- 1 tbsp corn flour
- 1 cup water room temperature
Stir Fry
- 2 tbsp butter or 1/4 cup oil
- 1 tbsp garlic minced
- 1 tsp ginger minced
- 1/2 tsp sesame oil optional
Garnish
- 1 tsp sesame seeds optional
Instructions
- Marinate the beef – put the beef, soy sauce, egg, black pepper and cornflour in a bowl. Mix well then set aside.
- Pour all the ingredient for the Stir Fry Sauce – fish sauce, soy sauce, ketchup, sugar. black pepper and sesame oil. Mix then set aside.
- Mix the corn flour and water room temperature in a bowl and set aside.
- Heat a wok or heavy bottomed skillet on high heat until smoking. Add the butter and garlic. Sauté the garlic until lightly golden around the edges. Add the ginger and continue to sauté until golden.
- Add the beef. Sauté for about 1 minute. Add the vegetables. Sauté for about 1 minute. Add the corn slurry. Sauté for about 3-5 minutes. Add the sesame oil. Mix. Garnish with sesame seeds. Serve immediately while hot,
Video
Notes
- Freezing the beef in the freezer for a half hour prior to slicing makes it easier to cut thin slices
- Because the cooking time is so short its best if you prepare all the cooking ingredients before stir frying the beef
- Omit the corn flour slurry and use your favorite sugar substitute for a low carb option
Nutrition
- The nutrition information has been calculated using an online recipe nutrition calculator and is intended for informational purposes only and should be used as a general guideline. If the nutrition information is important to you, you should independently verify it using your preferred tool. The serving size assumes four servings per recipe.
