Stir-Fried Beef and Broccoli | Wok Wednesdays

This Stir-Fried Beef and Broccoli is the final Wok Wednesdays recipe from the book, Stir Frying to the Sky's Edge, by Grace Young. It's an amazing book filled with over 100 recipes of Chinese stir-fried dishes from around the world, as well as stories about the people who taught Grace the recipes. 

This stir-fried beef and broccoli is so much more flavorful than any take-out version. Secret ingredients include fermented black beans, oyster sauce, and dark soy sauce.

Everyone in my house loved this dish. The beef is flank steak, which is seared in the wok after a brief marinade in minced ginger, soy sauce, rice wine, cornstarch, salt, pepper, and sesame oil, and then tossed in the wok with garlic and mashed fermented black beans. The broccoli is parboiled for just a minute to bring out its gorgeous green color. Once the beef is seared and the broccoli is par-cooked, everything is tossed together in a sauce of chicken broth, oyster sauce, dark soy sauce, and and Shao Hsing rice wine.

The recipe for the Beef and Broccoli can be found here.

Twice a month, rain or shine, the Wok Wednesday group has been making a new recipe from the amazing book for over four years. We gather together on our Facebook page and show off our finished dishes, inquire about ingredients and equipment, and cheer each other on. In fact, when I admired (probably more than once) one our member's serving dishes, he and his wife actually sent me two as a surprise (thank you so much Uncle Bob and Patti!). 

The best part? We do this under the watchful eye of Grace Young, the actual in real life author of the James Beard award winning book. These recipes are perfect, and perfectly written. I collect and love cookbooks. Unfortunately, it is rare to find one these days without errors. That is not the case with this book. You can trust every recipe. 

By the way, Grace just wrote a truly lovely story about how the Wok Wednesdays group got its start. It's worth a read. 

It's really difficult to pick my favorite recipes from the book. I decided to choose some recipes you might not think of when you think of stir-fries. These are three that I absolutely loved:

If I had to pick just one recipe, this stir-fried ginger tomato beef would probably be it. The recipe is Grace's take on a dish her mother used to prepare to get Grace and her brother to eat more rice. It actually includes canned tomatoes. Trust me. It's incredible. 

Another favorite dish from the book is this Lomo Saltado, a Chinese Peruvian stir-fry. Like many of the recipes in the book, it's a perfect example of how Chinese emigrants adapted local ingredients to their cooking style. 

Finally, these stir-fried balsamic and ginger glazed carrots are incredible. Who knew something as simple as carrots could have such a depth of flavor. 

Other lessons I've learned from this book (among many):

1. How to make popcorn in a wok. 
2. How to make the most delicious clam recipe ever (and how not to kill your clams). 
3. That I could cook a live lobster and live to tell about it. 
4. That there is this oh-em-gee delicious "meat candy" barbecue pork called char sui. 
5. That you can stir fry bagels!

I've also met an amazing blogging buddy, Cathy, of My Culinary Mission. She posts the best mise en place photos of the recipes. 

The Wok Wednesdays community is going to be switching to one of Grace's earlier books, The Breath of a Wok. Here is the recipe schedule. Please join us!