How to Stir Fry Any Vegetable - Three Basic Flavors and Recipes (蒜蓉炒西兰花/姜汁炒芥兰/虾酱炒通心菜)

No Chinese meal is complete without a veg dish, so we wanted to show you how to whip up a simple stir-fry of basically any sort of vegetable. We'll teach you three flavor profiles you can do. Garlic, which we'll show with broccoli. Ginger sauce, which we'll show with gai lan. And shrimp paste, which we'll show with morning glory. First up, broccoli with garlic. Cut your broccoli into florets, then smash some garlic to get the peels off. We're using about three cloves here, and just give them a good mince. We'll also mince a little ginger, not too much, cause we really want garlic to be the dominant flavor here. Now let's prep the basic sauce for vegetables. Quarter teaspoon salt, quarter teaspoon sugar, half teaspoon cornstarch, and optionally a sprinkle of MSG. Add in a tablespoon water, and mix. So when we say sauce here, know that this isn't some sort of gravy, we're just looking to coat the veg to get some flavor and sheen. Quickly blanch the broccoli in boiling water. Blanching first gives the broccoli a much more vibrant color and also makes it quicker to fry. All this needs is about 20 seconds, then you'll take it out and run it under cool water to stop the cooking process. Or if you're weird like us and outside, and don't have a sink handy, use an ice bath. Now to fry. First, long you. You'll long you by getting that wok piping hot, then shutting off the heat and adding in your oil. Swirling the oil around to get a nice nonstick surface. Flame back on medium high, add in that minced garlic and ginger. After a quick fry of about 15 seconds, when those are fragrant, toss in the broccoli. Once the broccoli goes in, we're basically gonna immediately hit it with the sauce. Because there's cornstarch in there, remember to give it one last stir, and then in with the sauce. Fry for another quick 15 seconds, being sure there's no obvious liquid left, and then out with the broccoli. Super quick, really tasty, and crazy versatile. If you're not really sure what flavor profile would go with your veg, default to this one. Next up, gai lan with ginger sauce. To prep the gai lan, separate the top of the stems from the bottom, almost like you'd do asparagus. Take off the leaves, and then just throw away this fibrous bottom part. Peel a solid chunk of ginger. Give it a nice smash, then a rough mince. Toss that into a mortar, and then just start pounding with a pestle. After about 4 minutes of pounding, this is what we're looking at. Now if you pressed that pounded ginger, what you'd get is called jiang zhi, or ginger sauce. If you ordered this dish at a fancy Cantonese restaurant, they'd usually use this ginger sauce without the ginger. But we're not a fancy restaurant, so we just kept it in. This time, that ginger is gonna form the base of our sauce. Add in a quarter teaspoon salt, half teaspoon sugar, half teaspoon cornstarch, and this time with our tablespoon of liquid, we're going half half water and liao jiu, aka shaoxing wine. Lastly, optional but heavily recommended ingredient, a nice sprinkle of white pepper. So, same deal, blanch the veg. Gai lan has those thick stems, so go stem side down and blanch those for an extra 10 seconds or so, then dunk the whole thing. Gai lan are a bit hardier than broccoli, so you'll want to blanch for a touch longer, about 30 seconds. You'll know it's done once the outside gets slightly transparent like this. Now to fry, just like before, long you, then toss in the gai lan. After about 15 seconds to evaporate away the liquid from the veg, toss in your ginger mixture. Stir it around for about 30 seconds, and then out with the gai lan. And stir fried gai lan's beautiful, yeah? This flavor profile is absolutely awesome, but definitely less versatile than garlic, and usually goes best with vegetables that have that sharper mustardy undertone. What else goes with ginger? Uh, gai choy, but I don't think you guys have over there. So, uh, ginger with gai lan is like the most classic one. Last guy, morning glory with shrimp paste. Now, if you've never worked with morning glory before, what you first want to do is snap it into sections and then throw away those hard bottoms. And then because morning glory's hollow, we'll briefly smash the stems to allow for a more even texture. So for the seasoning, our main attraction, shrimp paste. Shrimp paste's made from salted and fermented shrimp and has a very distinctive taste. A little goes a long way, so we're only using a half a tablespoon here. With that, we've got one minced garlic clove, and about an equal amount of ginger, and some chili. This is hong la jiao or paprika chili. It's not real spicy, but it goes great with shrimp paste. Slice those up, and then toss with the garlic and the ginger. That'll give all the flavor we need. So the sauce is just that basic veg sauce of quarter teaspoon salt, half teaspoon sugar, half teaspoon cornstarch, and a tablespoon of water. And, as I'm sure you could guess by now, the next step's a quick blanch. Only one tiny change, for this dish it's nice to add some sugar to the water, which helps season the morning glory and balance out the salinity of the shrimp paste. And then, just like the gai lan, go in stem first to give those stems an extra 10 seconds of blanching time. Then dunk it all in for a super quick 10 second blanch, and out. To stir fry, hopefully the long yous become second nature to you by now. And after that swirl, add in the aromatics. Give them a brief 15 second fry, and then in with the shrimp paste. Give it a mix, and add in the morning glory and fry for another brief 15 seconds. Add in the sauce, and after another 15 seconds, once that water's basically evaporated, out with the morning glory. Now this might actually be my personal favorite Cantonese vegetable dish. Morning glory's a classic, but this flavor profile actually worked well with most crunchy vegetables. And then you can also stir fry the shrimp paste, one with stuff like long beans or green beans, or some other crunchy vegetables that you would have, even zucchini. Now obviously this wasn't an exhaustive list, but it should be enough to get started. If you're wondering how best to fry some vegetables that are common where you live, a comment down below and we'll toss you some ideas. As always, there will be a detailed explanation in the reddit post linked in the description, and subscribe for more Chinese cooking videos.