Hong Kong-Style Beef with Udon Noodles

I tend to stir-fry over any other form of cooking, because I like those flavors and the dishes come together quickly.  I'm always on the lookout for new variations on my dishes, as well as simple recipes that make my stir-frying lifestyle a bit easier.   So when I randomly stumbled on this recipe from Wegmans, I hung onto it to make one day.  And a mere 6 years later, I finally checked it out.  I'm not sure why I waited so long - it's great, not terribly difficult, and makes a mountain of food.  Plus, I had never cooked with mushroom flavored soy sauce before, and any time I get to use a new ingredient is a good day.

You'll end up with about 4 servings, though I pass no judgment on how many people this will end up feeding :)

This dish tastes similar to what you would get from any of the mongolian BBQ restaurants scattered around the country, but it's probably more healthy since you know what went into it, and probably also about a third of the cost.  We went all out - NY strip instead of beef sirloin - but you could use the proposed cut of beef with great results.  Also, my friends suggested adding some mushrooms next time, which I would probably add (in small quantities to avoid screwing up the cooking process) along with the meat.

For this recipe, I only modified the sequencing of the cooking process, and also removed store-branded products from the list to replace them with actual names.  If you buy these ingredients from your average asian grocery store (and they are all commonly found there), you'll probably pay 25-50% of what you would pay at a standard American megamarket.  And that assumes they would even have some of this stuff, such as mushroom-flavored soy and frozen udon.  Don't bother being clever and substituting things like spaghetti or regular soy - it won't be the same experience.

Hong Kong-Style Beef with Udon Noodles

from Wegmans magazine

• 1 lb beef sirloin, sliced thinly across the grain
• 3 tbsp water
• 1 1/2 tbsp cornstarch
• 2 pkgs (6.98 oz each) frozen udon noodles, thawed
• 2 tbsp oyster sauce
• 1 tbsp mushroom flavored soy sauce
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 8 oz bean sprouts
• 1 bunch green onions, trimmed, cut in thin strips 2-2 1/2 inches long (about 1 cup)
• 2 tbsp vegetable oil
• 2 tbsp fresh ginger root, peeled, sliced thin
• 1/2 large onion, peeled, 1/4-inch slices (about 1 cup)

Place beef in small bowl.  Add water, 1 tbsp at a time, working it in with your hands until the water is absorbed into beef.  Sprinkle cornstarch over the beef and work in with your hands to coat all the pieces.  You're doing this so that you get a nice crispy coating to the meat; it is not 100% necessary, but an interesting variant I've seen before, notably in many of P.F. Chang's beef dishes (their mongolian beef in particular - I have a recipe if anyone wants it).

Loosen the noodles by hand and set them aside.

Mix oyster sauce, soy sauce, and sugar in a small bowl, and set aside.

Here's all of the prepped ingredients.  In retrospect, this recipe was slightly more involved than I expected

Blanch the sprouts and green onion in large pot of boiling salted water 5 seconds; drain and set aside.  Why?  Because you're going to put them in at the very end of the cooking, and you want to take the bite out of the green onions without overcooking them.  Is it a senseless waste of energy?  Maybe, but you always follow the recipe the first time.

The blanched sprouts and green onions, after shocking in ice water.

Heat your pan until it's as hot as it's going to get.  Once the pan is heated, drizzle the oil around the sides of stir-fry pan, then immediately add the beef, ginger, and onion slices.  Don't wait too long or you'll burn the oil - it's a temperature game (you want the pan rocket hot, the oil below 375 F so it won't oxidize and become toxic [and here's another, more scientific link from J. American Science], and the meat as hot as you can get it without burning the oil).  Now stir-fry for 3-4 min.  I did this in two batches, and you should too - don't crowd the pan!

Add the beef, but leave plenty of room so that you have enough heat to cook everything quickly.  Better to do 2 batches correctly than screw everything up at once

This is about as much as you should have in your pan.  Any more and you won't be stir-frying, you'll be steaming / boiling while the meat gets dried out.

This is half the batch.  Notice the brown color on there, from the Maillard reaction.

Add noodles; stir fry about 1 min.  Add sauce; stir fry 30 seconds, until heated through.  Try to fold rather than stirring, so you don't break up the noodles too much.  Add sprouts and green onions to pan.  Stir fry briefly to heat through and blend. Serve.

Toss the noodles together with the sauce and meat, and then add the sprouts and greens

The finished udon noodles, served with chinese broccoli

Steel-cut Oat Risotto with Chicken Peppers and Manchego

Have you had steel-cut oats yet?  If not, has someone been bugging you about it?  You should listen to that person, because they're awesome, and people say they're more healthy due to the minimal processing.  Steel-cut oats are more chewy than regular oatmeal, as they are more coarsely cut and served.  They therefore require extra cooking time, much more like a rice or barley.  So naturally, someone thought to use steel-cut oats to replace arborio or carnaroli rice in risotto, with amazing results.

Did you know that replacing you just 3 cups of gravy per day with steel-cut oats will lower your cholesterol?

For the record, a quick search online didn't conclusively prove that there are any nutritional differences between rolled oats and steel-cut oats, as both glycemic index and in nutritional value are almost identical, and I haven't seen anything on the degradation of vitamins caused by steaming and toasting the grains first.  And neither can I find any results showing that steel-cut oats are better for you than arborio rice, with the exception of 4x the dietary fiber and slightly fewer carbs per serving (27 g compared to 36 g in a 1/4 cup).  But let's go back to pretend-land where the health food industry is always right, and where we think that steel-cut oats are another of nature's new panaceas, and move on with this awesome recipe.

I followed this recipe to the letter, with the only exception of using breast meat chicken instead of dark, because that's what I had.  And I went with a 9 month aged Manchego cheese.  Manchego is a deliciously tart sheep's milk cheese with little holes in it, aged similarly to a Parmesan but not nearly as long.  The younger ones are more soft, so I went with a middle of the road aging to cut down on costs.  I think I struck the right balance.

A nice piece of 9 Manchego cheese, about to meet a painful end

Now, we're actually going to do some cooking here - this is risotto, not some slow cooker, easy-bake oven recipe where you barely do anything.  Risotto's not one of those "yes Mr. Telemarketer, I do have a few minutes to talk about my current long distance plan" kind of dishes - you need to be attentive.  In risotto, you add broth a little bit at a time while stirring constantly, helping loosen and dissolve the starches on the surface of the grains into a rich, velvety sauce.  It's the exact opposite of pasta, where you leave the stuff alone while boiling so you don't accidentally knock all of the starch into the boiling water and end up with something the consistency of wadded Wonder Bread afterwards.  Also, you're controlling the cooking amount by adding broth gradually, so you don't end up with an overly runny or dry risotto at the end.  Here, look at this:

This is a close-up wheat starch molecules from here, stained with iodine so you can see it better.  Picture these cells packed all around things like oats and rice, and essentially forming the entirety of pasta.  When exposed to water, these cells will swell and burst.  And when that happens, smaller particles in the starch (amylose) want to get out, party, and let it all hang out.

So now you've got these amylose bits swimming around, and they're long chains that unravel and get all caught up on each other, like a bunch of christmas light strands in a box despite your best efforts to the contrary.  They form a kind of web that makes for a rich, creamy texture that's, well, it's just great.  So do stir your risotto, and don't stir your pasta.  Shamelessly reproduced from here, by the way.

Steel-Cut Oat Risotto with Chicken, Red Peppers, and Manchego

Cooking Light, March 2005

Yield:  4 servings (serving size: 1 cup)

• 2 (14-ounce) cans fat-free, less-sodium chicken broth
• 2 teaspoons olive oil
• 3/4 cup finely chopped onion
• 1 large red bell pepper, chopped
• 1 1/4 cups steel-cut oats
• 1/2 cup dry white wine
• 1 cup chopped cooked dark meat chicken
• 1/2 cup (2 ounces) shredded Manchego cheese
• 1 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Gather and prepare all of your ingredients.  Bring broth to a simmer in a medium saucepan (do not boil). Keep warm.

The setup.

Here's what I took 'finely chopped' to mean.  Is that diced?  Maybe, but at least its uniform.

Heat oil in a medium sauté pan over medium heat.  Add the onion and bell pepper, and sauté for 5 minutes (don't brown).  Add the oats and cook 2 minutes, stirring constantly.  The goal is to coat the oats in the fat in the pan, and get them toasted slightly.  

Saute vegetables over medium heat, with the heated broth ready and in arm's reach

Toss the grains in the oil before deglazing.  Without supervision, this will burn like a marshmallow over an open fire.

Now to deglaze.  Stir in the white wine and cook for 2 minutes or until nearly absorbed, stirring constantly.  For me, this took about 20 seconds.

Look closely at what's going on here.  That liquid is boiling aggressively, yanking all of the little flavor bits off the pan while you stir.  And as the liquid evaporates, its flavor becomes more concentrated too.  This is deglazing.

Add the broth, 1/2 cup at a time, stirring until each portion of broth is absorbed before adding the next (about 20 minutes in total).  Keep stirring!  Towards the end this may stick, so be careful.

Here's what my risotto looked like when I felt it was done

How do you know when it's done?  Well, a little trick I learned in cooking class was this - taste your food!  Get a spoon, and put some in your mouth.  Does it feel like eating pebbles?  If not, then you might be onto something.  When you feel like it's done, turn off the heat and pull the pan to another burner.  Stir in the chicken, cheese, rosemary, and salt, and serve immediately.

Stir in the cheese, chicken, and rosemary off the heat

Serve with a nice piece of bread and a refreshing beverage