Thank you Wildgrain for sponsoring. Visit https://wildgrain.com/thatdudecancook and use code “THATDUDECANCOOK” at checkout to receive $30 off your first box PLUS free Croissants for life!
Premium Aged Soy Sauce – https://amzn.to/3ovtFXm
⬇️ Get my Cookbook ⬇️
Master in the Making E-Book- https://www.thatdudecancook.com/
Subscribe to My New Gaming Channel- https://www.youtube.com/@ThatDudeCanGame
Beef Marinade:
1 lb (0.5 kg) flank or flap steak, sliced ¼-inch thin against the grain
2 tsp soy sauce
1 tbsp Shaoxing wine (or dry sherry)
2 tsp oyster sauce
1 tsp baking soda (optional, for tenderizing)
1 tbsp cornstarch
2 tsp vegetable or peanut oil
2–3 tbsp water (helps keep the beef juicy)
For the Stir-Fry:
3–4 cups broccoli florets or broccolini, cut bite-size
1/4 white onion, thinly sliced (optional)
3–4 garlic cloves, finely minced or grated
1 tbsp fresh ginger, finely minced or grated
2 tbsp neutral high smoke point oil (peanut, canola, etc.) for wok sear
1 tbsp Shaoxing wine (or dry sherry)
1/2 tsp sesame oil (to finish)
Stir-Fry Sauce:
1 tbsp oyster sauce
3-4 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp water
2 tsp white vinegar
2 tsp sugar (brown or white)
1/2 tsp white pepper
1 tsp sesame oil
1-3 tsp cornstarch mixed with 1 tbsp water (to thicken)
Kitchen Products I own and love:
Typhur Sync Gold Dual Wireless Thermometer- https://bit.ly/4aYmf2w
Or Amazon- https://amzn.to/4hB6SQ4
(10% off discount code: SONNYALL)
GrillBlazer Torch (Use Code Thatdudecancook) to save 10%- https://grillblazer.com/
Premium Aged Soy Sauce – https://amzn.to/3ovtFXm
My Mortar and Pestle- https://amzn.to/3XfXBTp
Benriner Mandoline Slicer- https://amzn.to/3b07K3u
Microplane- https://amzn.to/3B8pGnp
My Portable Gas Cooker- https://amzn.to/4dGcbek
OXO 3-in-1 Adjustable Potato Ricer- https://amzn.to/3QNVLbi
Food Storage Containers with Lids- https://amzn.to/476tkeM
Rubbermaid Commercial High Heat Resistant Silicone Spatula- https://amzn.to/3FKzfde
3 Pack Stainless Steel Whisk- https://amzn.to/3SqHbrx
Slow ‘N Sear® Deluxe Kettle Grill- https://amzn.to/3PXAOdt
My Zojirushi Rice Cooker- https://amzn.to/3aZLqXT
Vitamix Blender- https://amzn.to/3opQNmo
Cuisinart Food Processor- https://amzn.to/3Oy61jz
KitchenAid Stand Mixer- https://amzn.to/3zqIJYE
MY MERCH STORE- https://thatdudecancook.teemill.com
FOLLOW ME:
Snapchat- https://t.snapchat.com/G6ZR4TRR
Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/thatdude_cancook/
TikTok- https://www.tiktok.com/@thatdudecancook?lang=en
Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/Thatdudecancook/
DISCLAIMER: This video and description contain affiliate links, meaning we’ll receive a small commission if you click on one of the product links.
What’s up, dude? Have you ever wondered why the beef at Chinese restaurants is so soft, silky, and tender? There’s actually just one simple trick behind it, and you can probably do it right now with the ingredients you have in your pantry. Today, I’ll show you exactly how to master that technique and make beef and broccoli at home that doesn’t just compete with your local takeout, it might just be better. Now, let’s go. For starters, when it comes to what cut of beef to actually choose for beef and broccoli, the most common one you’re going to see is flank steak. And there’s some very good reasons for that. I’ll explain in a minute. But if you can’t find flank steak, you could use flap steak, you could use flat iron, you could use topped sirloin, you could use skirt steak because the tenderizing method we’re going to use for this beef sort of equalizes all those textures. So I don’t think it matters as much as people think it does. This piece of flank steak that I have is a little bit wide. So what I’m going to do is on a bias just start making these slices like so. If you feel comfortable doing it, you could slice towards you the Japanese way, but for most people this is probably going to make more sense. And I’m going about a/4 in thick or so. Couple slices on this other side. If you want to get really clean slices, too, you could sort of freeze this for 20 minutes or so, which makes it easier, but you don’t need to. And so, what I’ll do now is just slice this whole thing in half. And then just continue with my slices like this. Just have a more manageable bite here. And of course, all flank steaks are a little different, but the reason people use it for this is because it generally has like a line of fat running through the middle. This one doesn’t really have it. You see it a little bit, but it just makes it great for these thin slices that you then cook. Like I use this for beef stroenoff. It’s the perfect cut. There you go. Here you can see that line of fat coming through real nice. And that’s all she wrote. And on another note, you always want to slice against the grain. You can see it really easily on a flank steak. So this is a good demonstration. The muscle fibers are all running this way. So you want to slice against them this way, right? That’s just going to make for a more tender bite. When you put it in your mouth, it’ll just break apart easier. And so there’s really no reason not to do that. Next, we have this sort of dualpurpose marinade that’s going to tenderize it at the same time. Starting with two teaspoons of soy sauce. And by the way, this is the brand I love for a lot of Chinese cooking. It’ll make other soy sauce taste like garbage. Link in description. Followed by 2 tsp of oyster sauce. 1 tbsp shaosing wine. I know a lot of you probably won’t be able to find this, so you can just use dry cherry wine. That works as a good substitute or just leave it out. One teaspoon of baking soda. And this is what really tenderizes that beef. Something about the pH. I just know it works. 2 tsps of neutral oil. I just use peanut oil. about 2 and 1/2 tablespoons of water. This actually gets absorbed by the beef and is really an important part. You’ll see a lot of recipes that wash or rinse the beef. I don’t do that, but you could do that if you want. 1 tbsp of cornstarch, our thickening agent. And that is it, my friends. We’re just going to start by giving this a really good mix. It’s a process called velveting the meat. And you can do it with any kind of meat. You could do this with chicken, you could do this with pork. Sometimes you’ll see different flavorings, egg whites added. And generally, this meat will be double cooked, meaning it’ll be poached once in water or oil and then cooked in a walk to finish to serve to you. Once you got a nice mixy mixy, we’re just going to pop some saran wrap on this cling film if you’re from the UK. Pop it in the fridge for about 30 minutes. Next, we’ll just prep up our vegetables and aromatics for the stir fry. And I like to use a little spoon here to peel ginger. Any kind of blunt object will do. Does a really great job of just taking away the outer layer of skin, whereas if you use a peeler, you’re just going to waste more ginger. Great trick if you didn’t know it already. And then all I’m going to do is just make these nice big plank like slices. This is really just to flavor the dish. I’m not planning on eating this later on. Something like that is fine. Next, we’ll do some garlic. And what I’m going to do with this is just smash like so. And then I’ll just peel and just take off that little top. And then I’ll just leave these sort of whole crushed like this. And a couple carrots here. I’m just going for a standard circle about a/4 in. Half a yellow onion here. And I’m just going to do a really big dice on this. Just like that. And of course our broccoli here. And I’ll start from this end. Just take a little bit off. And then we want sort of big pieces here. So I’ll chop that one up in a sec. But what I’ll do is just run my knife through right under those fuettes. This is all good stuff. And then look, it sort of did the work for me. I might just break a few of these pieces in half. But honestly, right there, those pieces are looking pretty good. This was like a smaller broccoli, so if you have a bigger one, you might need to cut it a little more. But that’s perfect. And then with these root pieces here, I’ll just slice them up a little bit. There’s nothing wrong with that. If for some reason it’s old and woody, you might want to peel it down. But I don’t think I need to. This next piece has a thicker stem. So, what I like to do is just take off some of these little bottom fuettes like so to sort of reveal that stem. And then what I can do is just take a peeler and just run around real quick. And now that that’s peeled, I can just cut the bottom into these little rings. I love broccoli stems. I don’t know why people would ever throw these away. Pieces like that I can just half. And then what I do is I just keep cutting up this and it just keeps releasing those perfect pieces of broccoli. And by the way, if you do want to split a big piece in half, don’t cut through the whole thing. Just cut through the stem and then just pull it in half like this. Otherwise, you just lose a lot of those tiny little I don’t know what they are. Little whatever this stuff is on top. Next step to blanch our broccoli. I’m going to season up the water just a little bit just to permeate that broccoli. Just go ahead and drop that broccoli in. Make sure to submerge it. And how long you do it is really up to you. If you want that broccoli to have a really good bite to it and be like a little bit crunchy, then maybe just do like 90 seconds to 2 minutes. If you want it on the softer side, you could go 3 minutes, 4 minutes. If you have no teeth, do it for like, I don’t know, 8 minutes. But do remember, this is going to get cooked again. So, I try to edge on that shorter side. So, I’ll do about 2 minutes or so. There we go. Just 2 minutes. And I’m getting mine straight into ice water because I want to stop the cooking process and then lock in the color. This is just that culinary technique known as blanching. The broccoli is just barely cooked through. It’s still pretty hard, but again, it’s going to cook another time. So, for me, that’s good. About 3 minutes in the ice water. And then we’re just going to strain that off. And then just leave that in the strainer to drain off any excess water. And I’ve recently come to the understanding that pretty much every dish that you serve with regular rice is almost always better with sushi rice. There’s definitely exceptions to this, like biryani and what have you. But having said that, I just love sweet, sticky, delicious sushi rice where you can feel every grain in your mouth. So, that’s what I decided to make to go with this dish. It’s a little bit of an in-depth process, so I’ll put a link to the video where I show you exactly how to make it at the end of this one. But, if you don’t want to make sushi rice, just use whatever rice you’ve got. Now, before moving on, let me introduce the sponsor of today’s video, Wild Grain. And they are the first subscription service that delivers baked from frozen sourdough breads, artisinal pastries, and fresh pastas. And I love that they do this by partnering with small bakers and pasta makers across the country, which enables Wild Grain to bring you the best flavors from local businesses right to your door. And really, one of the best parts for me is the fact that all their products go straight from freezer into your oven and they’re ready in under 25 minutes. Every order is fully customizable, and they’re always adding new seasonal items for you to choose when building your next box. And Wild Grain even offers plant-based and gluten-free options if that is your diet of choice. And personally, I absolutely love fall. This is my favorite season and one of my favorite times to be using Wild Grain service because they are currently offering a seasonal lineup from apple cider donuts to pumpkin cinnamon biscuits. All will make your house smell like pure fall magic. And my personal box had sourdough harvest bread, pumpkin cinnamon biscuits, maple Belgium waffles, apple cider donuts, and slow fermented olive oil chabata, butternut squash and cheese raviolis, and some really awesome butter croissants. And in the spirit of fall, I recently baked up some of the apple cider donuts and the pumpkin cinnamon biscuits. And both were absolutely delicious and great to make in a pinch. Check out Wild Grain and their seasonal products by clicking the link down in the description and use code that you can cook to save $30 off your first box. Plus, you’ll get free croissants for life. Thank you, Wild Grain, for sponsoring this video. Now, back to the recipe. Now, before we start cooking here, the last thing we need to do is just build this sauce. It’s really simple. We’re going to use a lot of the same ingredients as before for the marinade. Starting with four tablespoons of the same soy sauce we used to make the marinade. About a tablespoon and a half of oyster sauce. 2 tespoons white sugar. Half teaspoon white pepper. A little bit more of that shiao singing wine. 2 tsps of plain old white vinegar. And about a tablespoon of water. And that’s really all there is to it, my friends. Just give it a good mix. Set aside. And we’re ready to cook. And I’m also taking two to three teaspoons of cornstarch and just adding a little water to make this slurry. Take the tiniest whisk of all time and give it a mix. You may not need this, but it’s good to have it on hand if you need to thicken up your sauce. You want it to coat everything nicely without being watery or anything like that. And if you don’t have a walk, you can definitely use just a big sauté pan for this. And I’m just going to start by adding a bit of peanut oil. And what we’re going to do now is fry the beef once, right? We’re going to do this twice. If you try to do it all in one go, you’re just not going to get the heat you need or the color on the beef. It’ll end up just a steamy, sloppy mess. And once you see some smoke coming off of that pan, we’ll go ahead and drop in our beef. And I’m not doing it all. I’m actually going to do a couple batches. I’ll just do half and then the other half. Otherwise, I’ll lose my sear. I always put a little more oil over the top and the sides like so. And essentially what we’re doing now is just par cooking this beef with a little bit of color over the course of about 90 seconds. You just need to get a little bit of color on it, but you still want to see some pink at this stage in the process because it’s going to get cooked again. And after that 90 seconds was up, I put it on a sheet pan lined with a wire rack and spread it out so it wouldn’t keep cooking because if you stack this all up in a bowl, it’s going to steam to death and you don’t want that. And once all your beef is seared off and on the cooling rack, just fire up your walk again, and we can finish the dish. Now, back into our walk with just a little oil. And I’ll start by adding our carrots and onions. And we’re going to start by cooking these for about 90 seconds, at which point I’ll add some green onions. And that’s mostly from the bottom part here. Most important part about this walk cooking is keeping the heat extremely high, which is hard to do at home. 30 seconds on the green onions. Now I’m adding those aromatics. Touch more oil if you feel like it needs it. And I’m doing those aromatics last cuz I just don’t want the garlic to burn. And you can toss a little if you want, but you really don’t want to lose that heat, right? So keeping it over the burner and just using one of these little tools, I think, is a better idea. Okay, about a minute with the aromatics. So I’m going to add my broccoli and just continue to cook. And something I personally like to do when I’m cooking with a walk at home is if I feel like I’ve lost my heat, I’ll just get everything out. Like if you really want to walk cook at home, you you got to do like individual portions, right? In in Chinese restaurants, they have those walk burners. They’re like hundreds of thousands of BTUs. They’re like 10 times more powerful than your stove. So they can do that amount in one go. But on a home burner, it’s almost next to impossible. A little bit more oil. And I could really tell by the sound that I lost my heat. Now listen. Much better. About 2 minutes with the broccoli. Beef goes back in. Give it a good toss. And now straight in with our sauce as well as a little bit of sesame oil. Heat remains high. And now we get this nice saucy coating coming up. This is when the dish really comes together. And what you want to do is peek the bottom. I don’t really see much juice there. Just a little bit. That’s good. So again, with that cornstarch, I might not even need to add it, right? You don’t have to. I’m actually going to do just a smidge. Just a smidge. What we don’t want is like a pool of sauce. Right. Smidge more. And there we are, my friends. Happy days. There’s basically no liquid in the bottom. Just a tiny bit. Everything’s nicely coated. Let’s serve it up with some of our incredible sushi rice here. And that’s all she wrote, my friends. Beef and broccoli done. All right, Marcus. Here we go. Beef and broccoli. I’m going straight for a piece of beef. Beef first. [Music] [Applause] [Music] That is like a Chinese restaurant. Wo. Dang. If you’ve never tried this velveting thing, try it because you’re like, “Wow, beef is so much more tender with the sushi rice.” Here we go. Gosh, chopsticks can be frustrating. Not for me. Try it with a sushi rice, dude. That’s a big ass chopsticks. For me, it’s normal size. Beef’s crazy tender. The broccoli’s awesome. It catches all the sauce and then explodes. That’s true. because the little tops hold the sauce. Might be the best way to eat broccoli, honestly. I love how much they they’re like sponges of awesome. I honestly didn’t think I was going to enjoy the broccoli as much, but damn, dude. The You’re right. The broccoli is is fantastic. And make it with whatever kind of rice you like. I’ve just found that I almost enjoy everything more with sushi rice. I don’t know. I just like that sticky, slightly vinegary, slightly salty, sweet sushi rice. It’s just good. Like, what can I say? Make it. Thanks for watching today, my friend. And if you are a fan of written recipes, check out my Master in the Making ebook that will be linked down in the description. You’ll also find a link to my gaming channel down there. If you’re into gaming at all, definitely subscribe. And if you want another great takeout recipe, check out this orange chicken. It is honestly seriously good. Otherwise, I will see you next time. You know, I love you and I’m [Music]
37 Comments
Way to be months behind, bro.
Hmmmm. I didn’t see him take out the Ginger slices. I wonder just how much flavor that put into the dish.
Is this recipe in your E-book?
The knives all crooked on the magnet behind him when he was starting the sauce was killing me.
Beef and Broccoli was the first "fancy" meal I ever learned to cook. It's now a staple in the house that I do about twice a month. Im always looking for ways to improve it, and theres definitely some tips on here im going to try out!
Mmmmmm🤤
Actually, the baking soda technique works better as a pre treatment stage. For 8 oz of beef, mix 1 tsp bakingsoda in with 1 tbsp of water, pour it over the beef and vigorously mix it into the beef until all the water is absorbed into the meat, and let it sit for 30 mins. Rinse it off well, pat the meat dry and proceed to marinate. Other than that, great recipe.
The little pieces of the florets are miniature flower buds. If you let your broccoli flower in the garden, you get lots of small beautiful yellow blooms, that bees love. ❤
I don't see the link to the gaming channel! Can anybody share it?
Great original way of softening the meat. Nice job.
Thanks!
I need to make this
I can never find meat that looks this good.
Premium soy sauce is clutch! ditch the Kikkoman. Thanks!
Glad you are cooking some Chinese recipes. Because those restaurants have become TOO EXPENSIVE now. So, we are trying to learn how to cook these type of Chinese recipes at home. Thanks.
did you pick out the ginger before serving?
A tip, wash the meat
No onions or carrots in my beef and broccoli…
It's not beef, broccoli, onion and carrots 😂
Love this Dude also shout out to that fridge …unintentionally advertising its prowess
“Have you ever wondered why the beef is soft silky and tender?” … no… velveting has been covered by so so so many food content creators. Ggs. Next vid.
Yikes! I’m over 60 years old and I’ve never seen the spoon trick! Every day is a day in school,… Thank you for being a great culinary teacher!
No teeth lol
Don’t leave out the wine – it’s widely available online or at your Asian grocer if you live close enough to one
I'm sure it to be much better than take out . Right on .
No carrots.
"Florets" was your struggle word @4:55
Not enough sauce
11:50 for me it's normal size 😅😂
Call me weird (go ahead, I don't mind), but I actually prefer the flavor of broccoli stem to broccoli florets. It's sweeter, and just as nutritious.
Do you deliver?
what wok is that?
Another great vid. Love you and your content!
Question: why bother peeling your ginger at all? Even more so when I'm grating it, I don't know why we should
I also love broccoli for the sponginess of the bushes. Add them to a soup or sauce and they burst with flavor when you chew. Quite delightful.
Good stuff. I bought an outdoor wok burner. Commercial BTU level. Total game changer in avoiding grey, steamed beef.
That’s so fun. What a fun little… thing
You should watch the Chinese Cooking Demystified video on "velveting". You didn't go overboard explaining it here, so I don't think you did anything wrong, but the term is…somewhat loaded and not ideal if you want to be as accurate as possible.
I can never find Shaoxing wine where I live so I just use Mirin and omit the sugar.