Beef and Cabbage Stir Fry That Tastes Like Takeout #cabbagerecipe #chinesetakeout

We all love ordering takeout, but it takes forever and it's not too cheap anymore. So in this video, I'm making my version of a beef and cabbage stir-fry that tastes like it came from a takeout. Tender beef, delicious vegetables, and a glossy sauce that clings to everything. We're just making it at home. We're keeping it a little cleaner and making it taste as good as the takeout, if not even better. For the full ingredient list, check the description box below, but enough talking, let's get cooking. For the beef, for this beef and cabbage stir-fry, We're going to use a sirloin steak. Sirloin steak. Sirloin is lean, flavorful, and not very pricey. We're going to slice this really thin, but it's really hard when the meat is raw. So we're going to take this and we're going to throw this in the freezer for about 45 to 60 minutes. So it freezes up a little bit and it makes it a little bit more solid. Not only are we going to throw the beef in the freezer, we're going to throw this little knob of ginger in there. Later in the recipe, we're going to shred it. And when ginger is frozen, it shreds a whole lot easier than when it's not. For the veggies for this, here we got a cabbage, one onion, Nice big carrot and some scallions that we're just going to use the greens of. Let's start off with the cabbage. So I'm going to take the little core end and cut that off the bottom so the cabbage lays nice and flat. Knife's going to go through the top. Now we're going to cut the cabbage in half. And now from here, I'm going to cut nice thick ribbons, maybe about a little less than an inch. I don't want the cabbage to be super shredded for this recipe. I want nice thick pieces that are going to be about as thick as the steak that I'm going to cut. And recently I've been not cutting out the core, but instead cutting around the core of the cabbage because it helps hold everything together while I cut my pieces. Then I leave the core all intact. If I see that there's any pieces that are a little big, I might come back and cut them a little bit. And if I see any pieces that the core is still attached, I'll just cut those right off. I like to cut up enough cabbage to fill up a large bowl. It looks like way too much, but cabbage shrinks down a lot when you cook it. So always start off with more than you think you need. For the onion, we're gonna cut down nice thin strips. And after I prep everything, I'm putting it all in the individual containers because they're all going to go in at different times into the pan. Now for a carrot, we're going to give it a light peel and we're going to cut little matchsticks, except we're not going to do it by hand. I'm not a big gadget guy, but one of the tools I do like to use to cut down this is the Japanese mandolin. The mandolin has these nice little insert blades that allow me to cut down the carrot into really fine matchsticks. Always put a cut glove when using a mandolin. It's one of the most dangerous tools in the kitchen. It'll save you a lot of time, but getting your fingers stitched back on, that will really slow down dinner. How I like to use this is I like to pin it up against my chest. I'll use the other hand to keep this nice and still, and I'll work the carrot long ways. Down the mandolin so I get nice, long matchsticks. And you can see how fast this is going to work on this carrot. And even though I have the cut glove on, as I get closer to the end, I'm going to be really careful to not shove my hand right through these super sharp blades with a lot of force. I usually like to get close enough and then I'll just snack on the rest. But you can see how fast that mandolin took care of those carrots. This knife work would take forever. We're gonna garnish this dish with some scallion greens. So I'm gonna cut off the ratty tops. When you're cutting scallion greens, push them down a little bit. Makes it a little easier to cut through the tubes. And then with a nice sharp knife, nice and thin on a little bit of a diagonal, it looks just a little prettier than going completely perpendicular with it. So our sirloin steak's been in the freezer for about 45, maybe 60 minutes, and you can see it's about half frozen. Just makes it so much easier to slice thin. I'm going to take off this little fat cap on the outside. If you want to keep that, you can. I'm trying to watch my cholesterol a little bit, so anytime I can trim off a big chunk of fat off this meat, I will. And now most of the time on a sirloin steak the fibers run this way. So we're going to go on a little bit of a diagonal and we're going to cut nice thin slices. And if your knife is sharp and the meat is semi-frozen you can see how easy it is to cut nice thin slices and the meat doesn't mush underneath the pressure of the knife. Although you shouldn't be using a lot of pressure, the sharpness of the knife should be taking care of the cutting. And if you don't want the beef really long, you can take the pieces and just cut them in half so they're a little bit more bite size. I probably should have just cut a sirloin steak lengthwise before I cut it this way, but whatever gets the job done. Now let's season our meat with a little marinade that's gonna help tenderize it and make it a little bit more flavorful. We'll start off with a little soy sauce. And here I got a little bit of baking soda. Baking soda is gonna help tenderize the meat. This technique is called a velveting, and it's used in a lot of Asian and Chinese cooking where they make beef in a stir fry and it's super tender. We'll add a little bit of water. So here I got some potato starch. Potato starch is a great alternative to corn starch. I actually prefer it a little bit more. And we're gonna take a little spoonful of this potato starch It's gonna help thicken our sauce and help coat the meat. You're also gonna see this a little later in the recipe when we make our marinade. And although the soy sauce has salt in it, I always like to add a little bit of salt because soy sauce is salt plus flavor. So I don't wanna over flavor the meat, but I do wanna add just a little bit more salt, which really enhances the natural flavor of the beef. Some fresh ground black pepper. And a little bit of oil. Here I'm using olive oil. I almost exclusively cook with olive oil. A lot of people say that's a sin in Asian cooking when you shouldn't use olive oil to do high heat cooking. I don't think any of that is a real thing. Olive oil handles high heat just fine and it gives me a really nice sear and it's a preferred oil in my kitchen. So now I'm gonna get in there with my hands and give this a nice mix. I want everything well coated with everything that we put in the bowl. Once this is nice and well coated, I'm going to let it sit out at room temperature for about 45 to 60 minutes. That's going to give plenty of time for the rest of the beef to defrost. It's also going to give time for the baking, soda to help tenderize the meat, and for all the flavors to come together. We're going to prepare a sauce in advance, so when we start cooking everything, all we got to do is put everything in the pan. It's all prepped. We don't have to get all the ingredients out. So we'll start off with some low-sodium soy sauce. Here is a little bit of oyster sauce. Some rice vinegar for some acidity, honey for some sweetness. A lot of times Asian cooking uses sugar. I prefer to use honey as a sweetener and it totally works in this sauce. Some toasted sesame oil. Here's that potato starch again. This is gonna make the sauce nice and clingy and thick. A little bit of water. Now we're going to microplane in a couple cloves of garlic and if you don't have a microplane you could just do it finely finely finely minced or use the paste that's in the tube but you want the garlic to almost like disappear into the sauce. And now let's take that ginger that we threw in the freezer with the meat and we'll use the back of a spoon just to clean up the skin. Works much better than a peeler. The fibers on the ginger run this way so even though it's frozen we're just going to go on a little bit of a diagonal and look how easy it shreds. And when we do that, we don't get any of like the long strings that hang off. It just grates nice and cleanly. And now we'll grab a fork or a whisk and whisk everything together. We gotta get that potato starch and the honey to all mix together. Everything's prepped. The perfect thing to serve with this is some rice. So let's get some rice going. So when we're done with our beef and cabbage, we have rice ready to go. So here I got my carbon steel pan that's kind of like in this wok style. So it's got a high rim and I got it heated over a high heat. You can see that it's smoking hot. I'm gonna give it a spray with some oil. And then in goes about half the beef. I'm going to try to spread it around the pan so we don't overcrowd the pan and I can get nice charring on my beef. Once I spread it around the hot pan, I'm going to let it sit for about a minute so we can get some nice color on it and then we're going to give it a nice mix and cook it all the way through. So after about a minute you can see that we got really nice color on this beef. So now I'm going to give it a little mix. I may flip over any individual pieces that still I can see the the pink on. After a couple of minutes we'll remove the beef from the pan. I'm going to let the pan reclaim a little heat, give it a nice light coating with oil, and then we're going to put the rest of our meat in. So once we get the rest of our beef cooked we're going to remove the second batch. I'm going to turn the heat down to a medium and we're going to start cooking our vegetables. And you can see our beef is now fully cooked and has a lot of great color and flavor. So now to the pan, I'm going to add a little bit of oil and we're going to cook our onions first. I'm going to spread out the onions on the bottom of the pan because the onions are going to release a lot of moisture and this is going to be the first step in reclaiming all that flavor that's in that pan. I'm going to let the onions sit for a little bit so they get just a tiny little bit of color. They start to cook and the moisture starts to remove the fond that's on the bottom of the pan. Once the onions are starting to look a little glossy I'm going to take my spatula and start scraping up the bottom of the pan and it also makes it nice and easy to scrape up and clean up. All that flavor on the bottom of the pan. Once the onions have taken on a little bit color, nice and soft, we're going to start to put in our cabbage. And usually what I like to do is put in a little bit of cabbage, mix it, Let it wilt and then keep adding some more a little bit at a time to not overcrowd the pan. I also like to do this step too because the onions are on the bottom of the pan and if we just leave the onions there with a big pile of cabbage on top the onions are going to burn and the cabbage isn't going to cook and get that direct contact so this gives me an opportunity to not burn the onions. And always keep your tongs handy so as the cabbage falls out of the pan you can always just pick it back up and throw it right in. You're bound to lose a couple of pieces. Now you can see the entire bowl of cabbage fits in here. The cabbage still has to cook down a little bit but that entire bowl is gone. So now I'll cook this over just medium maybe like a medium highish heat depending on the strength of your burner. For about 10 to 15 minutes, stirring it pretty regularly. Once it softens up, I actually like to let it sit for a little bit to get a little bit of charring on the onions and the cabbage. Brings really nice flavor to this dish. Once the cabbage is fully wilted, we got some room in the pan. I'm gonna throw in my carrots. Based upon on how crunchy you want the carrots, that's when you figure out how to throw them in. If you like the carrots really, really tender, throw them in much earlier. I like to wait because I like the carrots to have a little crunch. It gives a really nice contrast to the texture of the softer cabbage and the softer onions. I'll just work them into the cooked cabbage and onions, and we'll let this cook for a minute or two before we add our beef back in. So now before the carrots lose their crunch, all of our cooked beef is going to go back in. I'm going to give this a mix so it's Nice and well incorporated, the vegetables and the beef, and then we're going to add our sauce. This is also going to allow the beef to come back up to temperature as it's probably cooled for a little bit as it was sitting on the side. So now we're going to give the sauce just a little mix before we add it in. And once we add it in, we're just going to mix and we're going to cook for about 30, 45 seconds, maybe one minute, but we don't want to cook it too much. Just enough for the sauce to thicken and cling to all the vegetables and the beef. And I'll pour it over over it rather than all in one spot. And I'm just gonna give this a nice mix until everything is nice, glossy, and well-coated. And this dish is almost home. So here we're gonna do the black and white sesame seeds. I always like to go a little bold to get a really nice pop of color. And the sesame seeds add a nice little micro crunch. And now some of those scallions that we cut up before. And how amazing does this beef and cabbage dish look? It smells fantastic, I cannot wait to try this. So let's give our rice a little fluff with a fork. Nice base of some rice. And let's get a nice scoop of our beef and cabbage. Look how amazing this looks. Glossy, saucy beef, cabbage. And if you want to, not necessary, but if you did want to be a little extra fancy, another extra sprinkle of some sesame seeds. Some scallions. This looks fantastic. I can't wait to try this. This is gonna be an epic bite. That is divine. Mmm, cabbage and the beef tastes like takeout, but I've never even seen beef and cabbage on takeout. It's not a traditional like takeout Chinese recipe, but the flavors are there. The vegetables got a little bit of crunch, but they're super tender. I just love cabbage too, so cabbage anyway. Raw, cooked, braised, it's fantastic. That sirloin's not necessarily known for being super tender, but once you do that velveting with the baking soda and you let it sit enough and you cook it right, it's so flavorful and so good, just melts in your mouth. If we're just meeting each other and this is your first time here, like, subscribe, get the notification bell on, drop me a comment. Let me know what you thought about the video. And if you make the recipe, let me know how it came out for you. Don't be nasty in the comment section though. And if you're into beef and cabbage, check out my ground beef and cabbage bowl. Really nice beef and cabbage recipe. I hope to see you there. Thanks.