Fuchsia Dunlop's Easy Yunnan Beef Stir Fry | School of Wok Takeover

So there you are, excuse me, let's do that again. So hello, I'm Fuchsia Dunlop and I'm cooking on the School of Wok channel and I'm doing a recipe from my latest book which is called Five Tastes, The Magic of Flavor in a Chinese Kitchen. It's all about the wonderful flavors of China and how to use seasonings to create gorgeous flavors with often very little effort and the dish I'm going to do today is it's from Yunnan province from a place called Nakali and it's just a very simple stir-fry and the thing that's really interesting about it is that apart from the sort of maybe more conventional Chinese seasonings of chili and garlic and ginger, it's also got mint leaves and in Chinese cooking generally you don't use that many herbs, I mean coriander, you know perilla a bit, but in Yunnan province you start getting all those herbs that you find in neighboring Vietnam, you know the cuisines of Southeast Asia and so this dish has a particular Yunnan flavor because of the mint leaves which will be added to the wok at the last minute. So I'm going to start off by cutting the beef, so I'm going to cut it into very thin slices for wok cooking and with beef it's always ideal to cut it across the grain of the meat because then you get more tender slices, with chicken because it's very delicate meat it doesn't matter so much. This piece of meat is already cut sort of to make it a bit difficult but I'm going to cut on a diagonal to try and get very thin slices a bit across the grain so that they're nice and tender in the wok. The thing with cutting, so with a fast stir-fry dish it's really important to have the cutting as even as possible, so you know ideally the slices will be quite thin but the most important thing is that the thickness is about even because then you don't want a situation where some slices are so thick that they're still raw when the thinner ones are cooked first, so evenness is the most important thing here. And this dish is from a beautiful guest house in a place called Nakhali near Pu'er where they make the famous Pu'er tea and it's a family guest house and I stayed there for a few days and oh such lovely people and they made their own fermented tofu and all their own pickles and used local ingredients. It's on the Tea Horse Road, it's the route where people used to take bricks of tea from Yunnan where they were produced to other parts of Asia. There we are, so here's the beef which is sliced as evenly as possible and now I'm going to add some marinade, so a little bit of salt and then a bit of dark soy sauce and this will give it a lovely rich colour and some light soy sauce which will give it a beautiful savoury flavour. Then to keep the meat nice and silky I'm just going to mix that in. It's easier to do this by hand actually, you can do it with a spoon if you like but this is the easiest way to get it nice and evenly coated and so I'm just going to add a little starch and water, wet starch which is going to help keep the beef nice and silky, beautiful silky mouthfeel, so a little bit of potato starch and a little bit of water and I will mix that in as well just to close the meat and there we are, that's the beef ready and now I'm going to prepare the paliar, the accompanying ingredients and it's really just some lovely aromatics to give flavour to the beef. So a couple of red chillies and you don't want the really hot bird's eye chillies here, you just want you know a bit of heat and that beautiful red colour. So I'm just going to pull out the seeds, in fact these are pretty huge chillies so I might just use one and a half. So the book is called The Five Tastes and that's because unlike in the West where we have four classic tastes, in China you have five tastes, so sweet, salty, sour, bitter but also xin or la which means pungent and spicy, so seasonings like pepper, ginger, chilli, they all come into that category and with the book I've tried to sort of give ideas for using different combinations of flavours, so there's kind of sour and hot, numbing and hot, the dishes where you sort of match up sweet tastes and spicy tastes and this is a classic sort of hot and savoury dish. So we've got all these lovely aromatics and a bit of heat from the chilli, both dried chillies and fresh chillies and also the aromas of ginger and garlic and the mint you know fresh at the end of the cooking. I'm just going to see how hot the chillies are to see how much I need because the idea of this dish is not to blow your head off. So I think one and a half will be fine so I'm just going to and you see again the Chinese knife looks very heavy and clunky but actually you can use it for very delicate cutting as long as you hold it properly with your thumb tucked away behind so it's nice and safe. So here are the fresh red chillies which will give a beautiful colour and then just a few dried chillies for a different sort of heat those ones I'm just going to cut in half and they're soaked in water and that's a little trick because if you add dried chillies to hot oil it's really easy to burn them like they just burn in a second but if you just either soak them or scrunch in a little bit of water just before you cook it just buys you a little time so that you can get the flavour out of the chillies without burning them so that's really useful and then some garlic and with the garlic one trick to get the garlic out of its skins is to give it a little gentle little pat with the cleaver and then the skins will be easier to get off and one thing that's really interesting about China is they use so many garlicky vegetables many more than we do in the west so you have you know clove garlic like this but also garlic stems which is the most gorgeous vegetable and garlic chives pickled garlic and all kinds of leeks and other members of the garlicky oniony allium family in different parts of China. Okay these I'm just going to slice and that's one thing that I learned when I was at cooking school in China is that you can have a kind of harmony in a dish if you cut everything in the same way so here I'm cutting the chillies into slices and also the garlic and the ginger so they used to say which means cubes with cubes you know threads with threads slices with slices and that just means that it just looks nice and it feels nice in the mouth when things are cut into the same sort of shapes in the same dish and also of course with the beef it's sliced so having sliced aromatics feels kind of nice too a bit of ginger as well you know you don't have to waste the ginger peel you can smack it use it in marinades or add it to a stew for a stir-fry you don't want the skin because it has a less nice mouthfeel it's a bit coarse so for stir-fries you generally want to take off the skin of the ginger and then I'm just going to cut it these are called by the way thumbnail slices because well for obvious reasons and I'll cut the ginger into thumbnail slices as well so ginger, garlic, fresh chilli and then mint so these stems of mint they're quite thick so I'm just going to take off the little spriggy bits I don't want the the coarse stems in this dish but if the if the sprigs are nice and delicate you can put them in oh and the smell of mint already coming out and it's you know in Chinese thought as well because beef is a more kind of coarse meat and the flavour is a bit heavy you often use sort of aromatics so you find that with beef and you know lamb meat you often find coriander garlic to be eaten with them spices like you know star anise and Chinese cassia or cardamom and that's to sort of refine the flavours of the meat and that's what the mint is doing here as well and already you know that combination of flavours it's just giving it a more kind of you know flavour in the direction of Vietnam because actually Yunnan borders on Vietnam and so there's a whole overlap of flavours and ingredients there we are so I'm all set and now I just have to cook and the most important thing really when you're frying meat or fish stir frying you have to season the wok if you're using a non-stick wok this doesn't apply but if you're using a traditional Chinese wok you need to get the surface really hot first and then pour in some oil swirl it around let it get really hot and then pour off that oil and you create a kind of non-stick surface and if you don't do that you will find that you put the meat in and immediately it sticks everywhere and you get a crust on the wok and not only will you start getting you know the risk of having burnt tastes in the dish but also if the wok surface is a bit crusty it's more difficult to move the food around so it's a really good idea so I'm going to pour in a little oil and let it get really hot and carefully swirl it around the whole cooking surface and this creates this kind of magic non-stick surface. The funny thing is that I think you know when you watch someone stir frying you know people see Chinese chefs all very dramatic and all the fire and everything and it looks like something simple and fast but it's actually very technical and all these little details that people are thinking about and they won't you know if a chef is cooking you know Chinese chef is cooking you won't know what's going on and what the particular sensitivities of the heat and the wok and so on but here we are so now I have a nice hot surface ready to go and the first thing that's going to go in is my dried chilies and they're a little bit damp which is going to buy a bit of time but I'm going to put them in literally as soon as I put the oil in because otherwise they'll burn so I just want them to sort of start smelling delicious and slightly darkening but not burnt and then I'm going to put in all the other beautiful aromatics the ginger and fresh chili and garlic and this is called stir frying fragrance and you're waking up all the lovely flavours of these aromatics in the hot oil and use your nose to see when the flavour of the garlic and the ginger is sort of ripening and again you don't want to burn them you just want them to smell delicious lovely lovely and now I'm going to put in the beef and here just separating out the slices and can you see that the beef is slipping around the surface of the wok because I created the non-stick surface by seasoning it first and that's really important and just those few extra seconds of heating it with some oil pouring off the oil into a heatproof container and then adding fresh oil for actually cooking that's having a nice delicate stir fry and you want the beef to be just cooked so it's pretty much there and at that very moment when the beef is looking just done I'm going to put in all this lovely mint and just give it a lick of heat so you want the leaves to be wilted oh and then this lovely smell so you know added to all the ginger and garlic and chili is now that lovely fresh green fragrance of the mint and now it's all sizzling and the beef is just cooked and everything is smelling utterly delicious and now I'm going to turn it onto a plate and it's really that easy weekday supper dish bowl of rice maybe a vegetable as well and you've got something really delicious and it just smells gorgeous with the freshness of the mint and the ginger and the garlic and the chili and look at those colours too a little taste of Yunnan in your kitchen okay well the most important part of course is the tasting let's see if it's up to scratch so smells good close up too and so cutting the beef sort of across the grain really helps and cutting it thinly really helps to keep the slices tender and then that lovely hint of mint and a bit of heat from the chili and yeah so this Yunnan dish is from my new book five tastes magic of flavor in a Chinese kitchen it's out now and it's all full of lots of sort of easy and I hope really delicious home recipes anyway it's been lovely being a guest cook on the school of wok channel and don't forget to like comment and subscribe