Ken and Curt are current and former coworkers of mine, respectively, and these two Chinese guys have started to show me the real way to do stir fry, fast, hot, and with tons of flavors. Curt introduced me to black bean stir-fry one day at lunch, and not long afterwards I tried making it on my own based on his recipe. I thought I was hot shit cooking with an ingredient that only had the nutrition information in English on the label, that is until Ken saw me eating it for lunch. After some mocking of my technique, he started letting me in on little secrets of the actual stir-fry technique, and supplying me with proper ingredients! So, after much learning, here is how to make some killer black bean stir-fry…
What you need:Beef for stir fry, cut super thin (we use top round, because we buy it in bulk from Costco) ~1 lb
One onion cut into strips, again, thinner is better, ~1/4” wide
One red bell pepper, did I mention stuff should be cut thin?
Snow peas, these you don’t have to cut
Fermented Black Bean Paste (more on this later)
For the marinade
1/2 cup dry sherry
1/2-cup soy sauce (go for the real stuff from an Asian grocery store that was actually made from fermented soy beans, so much more flavor!)
Garlic (~2-3 cloves diced fine)
What you do:
Mix up the marinade, and drop in the beef for at least an hour. Remember, slice the beef super thin. Start some rice cooking, and the clock is ticking at ~20 minutes, just enough time to bring it all together. Slice up the pepper and onions and set them aside for easy access.
Now, get your wok out and get it going at full blast, turn up the burner to 11, 10 just isn’t going to cut it. At this point you will want to turn on an exhaust fan, open a window and take the battery out of your smoke detector. Stir-fry is all about cooking food really fast, on super high heat. It keeps the meat from overcooking, and it gets the veggies hot, but they stay crisp.
Put some olive oil in the wok, and when it’s hot, drop in some of the black bean paste (a teaspoon full to start), break it up into the oil and let it cook for half a minute. This helps open up the flavors of the black bean. You can add it later, but it doesn’t taste as good. Now start cooking the meat, a little at a time, keep it moving in the wok, and as soon as it is almost done, dump it out into a bowl for holding for later (if you have a big arse wok, you don’t need to do this, but ours is small, and too much food in it drops the heat too fast). Each handful of meat should only take a minute or two. Cook up all the meat, adding oil and black bean as necessary to make sure all the meat gets seasoned.
Now, toss in the onions with whatever oil is left in the wok (shouldn’t be much), as soon as they are broken up in the pan, toss in the snow peas. Like the beef, keep them moving around in the wok, sitting=burning. The onions and peas will take 3-4 minutes to cook, but the peppers only need about 1-2 minutes tops, so… After 2 minutes with the onions and peas, toss in the pepper, and keep tossing in the pan. The rice should be just finishing up now, so toss the meat back in the wok and toss everything together. Serve it up and enjoy!
Black Bean paste:
You have some options here… We started out with pre-made paste, just scoop some out of the jar and you’re good to go. It tasted fine, but it had MSG in it. Then Ken gave me a package of just the fermented black beans, and suggested we make our own paste. It’s pretty easy, just take the black beans, and put them in a food processor and blend them with some olive oil, ginger and garlic. There is no precise ratio of the ingredients, so just go by feel, keeping in mind that the goal is to taste the black bean, not to mask it with garlic or ginger! You should be able to get either at a good Asian grocery store.
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