Hong Kong Black Pepper Beef & Potato Stir Fry!

Cooked street food style, the flavour of this black pepper beef really comes out from the combination of black pepper and lots of chilli. Flash fried wok hay to its full extent. It's Hong Kong style black pepper beef. This recipe is from my new book Hong Kong Kitchen which is out on pre-order now. Hey guys, Jeremy here from School of Wok, London's premier Asian cookery school. Welcome back to Wok Wednesday and this is a proper Hong Kong street food dai pai dong Wok Wednesday. This black pepper beef and potato dish is really famous in actually one particular place in Hong Kong. A place called Oi Man Sang which is kind of like an outdoor full on high octane gas fire kitchen. And they do great wok cooking there. I'm just sort of chopping up quite large chunks of potato. And you think some Chinese food isn't very potato heavy but this dish I'd say probably has quite a lot of influence from British culture and cuisine. You could use roast potatoes or roast sweet potatoes for this and just kind of freshen the leftovers up. I'm going to deep fry these in a sec, get them nice and crispy and they're going to go with this amazing rib eye steak. I've got a red onion, I probably only need about half of this red onion. I'm just going to cut that into sort of rough cubes or dices, quite large chunks really. Spring onion, everything really quite similar so rough chop. Once you get to the white, maybe halve it length ways so it sort of opens up the flavour a bit. And that can go together with the onion. Selection of large chillies and this is to add a lot of colour to the dish and a bit of the sweetness of the chillies. So I'm just going to again do it in chunky dices. All of this is going to go sort of flash fried into the wok together. It can be quite rough and ready. Dai pai dong is the big licensed street stands in Hong Kong. They are really like quick, really really quick cooking on the hobs. I wouldn't even call them hobs, they're kind of like these like cauldrons of wok burners that have like 64 different jets of gas coming up. The fire is so strong it can singe your eyebrows off. They'll cook a stir fry in those places in less than a minute. Obviously at home it might take a little bit longer but you can follow the same principle. The coriander is just to garnish later but add flavour too. So I've got a fair amount there just to throw in at the end. Now the marinade, I'm going to start with a bit of garlic and ginger, finely chopped. When you're at the dai pai dongs or any sort of restaurants in Hong Kong, you've always got a sort of prep side of the kitchen and then the cooking section. And on the prep side they've got sort of basketfuls of all the veg and trays or little pots of all the pre-prepped base ingredients like your garlic and your ginger, spring onion. All ready to go for the order to come in. So we're following a similar sort of principle here even when you're cooking at home. Get it all prepped and ready. Finely chop your ginger and garlic together. There's something very satisfying about preparing a delicious stir fry like this. All those lovely varied colours but it does come together quite quickly. This ribeye, great piece of meat. I'm going to go for nice thin slices so I can sear the beef really quickly. It's great to have that little bit of marbling in there which is why I like ribeye for this. You don't have to worry about cutting it too thin at this point because you can always give the meat a bit of a bash just to thin it out some more. And I quite like, even with a stir fry, to have it slightly medium or on the under cooked side of things. Now that the meat's prepped, you can carry on with the marinade. We've got a pinch of salt and sugar. We use sugar in our marinades because we believe that everything we cook has its own sweetness so you're trying to accentuate that sweetness somewhat. White pepper. That's going to go really well with the black pepper sauce. Sesame oil. And some corn flour or corn starch. Give that a good mix through with all that ginger and garlic. Make sure that corn flour gets rubbed into all the pieces of meat. I'm going to cook this the classic street food way where I blanch the meat in hot oil, basically deep frying. If you don't want to use so much oil, you can just sear it on a really high heat in a frying panel wok. Now you want to see that each piece of meat has a slight sort of creaminess around it from that corn starch. Once it has, then let that sit as long as you can. You could just cook it straight away like I'm going to do or leave it overnight covered in the fridge. Now the first thing I'm going to do is fry the potatoes. I'm frying these on a medium heat to start because I want to double fry them. Get them really crispy but make sure that they're cooked through. Just let them bubble away. This fry will probably take at least 6-7 minutes. So pretty much cook them 60% through. So after the initial fry, on a sort of low to medium heat to cook them through, just let them sit for 2-3 minutes before you then fry them again. Meanwhile, I'm just going to make up a quick sauce, a base of sauce. This here is a black pepper sauce. It's basically black pepper and oyster sauce. If you can't find it, you can just use lots of black pepper and about a tablespoon and a half of oyster sauce. Light soy sauce, about one tablespoon and then more black pepper. It's a black pepper beef after all. I want it to be really nice and peppery, this. And that black pepper will work and interact with the chilies really well. I've also got some chicken stock just to help sort of this sauce wrap around the beef last minute. Now, half a teaspoon of sugar just to balance out the flavor. Right, for the second fry of your potatoes, I want the oil still to be nice and clean, so I'm not going to fry the beef until afterwards. You want it on a really high heat. I'm going to dunk it in for about 30 seconds to a minute max. Carefully lay the potatoes back in again to crisp up well. Straight out with your extra crisp potatoes. And then whilst that's still on a high heat, we're going to go piece by piece with your beef, just separating them out as they go in. You don't want them to stick together. Just give them a little shimmy for any of the sort of groups of that ribeye to separate out nicely. And with this spider here, it's quite useful because I can kind of place it nearby in a heat-proof bowl. And once my beef has a good bit of color around the outside, you don't want to overcook it. So I can take my, and do this very, very carefully. This is street-side cooking. I can pour this straight over like so. And then my wok, you see, is coated with that frying oil. So you shouldn't need too much more to finish off this dish. From here, we want to load up heat and finish off the stir-fry. And my onions, spring onion, and chili, or my mixed chilies, can all go in on that smoking hot temperature. That sizzle is really important. You want those chilies to kind of blister as they're hitting the wok. My beef, in a second, will come back in along with the potatoes. Beef in, extra crisp potatoes. Great color from that second fry. The black pepper sauce makes you get all that flavor into the wok. And a quick flick through. Look at the color on that. And that sound is fantastic. And then a little bit of chicken stock. Not too much. I want this to be a dryish stir-fry, not too wet. And that will just coat around the potatoes last minute. So the potatoes don't come out crispy. They just kind of hold their sweetness in. Coriander at the end. One last flick. And that's done. You can see that once you finish wrapping that sauce around the meat and the potatoes, you get this lovely caramelization around it all. That's a sign of a good stir-fry. The lovely thing about this dish is when you stir-fry it right on that high heat, all the flavors from the chili get intertwined with the meat and the potatoes. And it's not actually that strong. Perfect with some rice and some veg. One of my favorite dishes from Hong Kong. If you like this dish and you want to learn more, not just from Hong Kong, but all types of Asian cuisine, don't forget to like, comment, subscribe. Ding! Hit that notification bell. And we'll see you for more spice.