Each restaurant does things just a little differently, especially when it comes to the captivating brown sauce that coats those sizzling stir-fried veggies. The best Chinese takeout veggies all have two qualities that are the same across the board: the expertly-browned veggies have a bit of crunch to them, and the delightfully salty and umami-packed sauce that coats them doesn’t make the vegetables soggy at all.
Once you learn this chef-approved method to ensure a successful stir fry, the trick is to strip down the sauce to just a handful of ingredients. That way, it can easily be used as a springboard to create a more complex coating for your veggies when you have the time. Brian Griffith, executive chef at Nashville's hottest new Chinese-American restaurant, Choy, lays it out for us: "Oyster sauce, garlic, mushroom stock, and ginger."
Oyster sauce combines savory with sweet, along with that other magical flavor that really doesn't taste like oysters at all; it's more of a caramelized earthiness that comes from cooking down oyster extracts with salt and sugar until it all thickens. This is what gives your Chinese takeout veggies that rich, brown color too.
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