Korean-style beef and cabbage stir-fry

This uses a basic stir fry method, but includes shredded cabbage rather than noodles or bean sprouts.  It also includes leeks (which are absolutely brilliant in combination with many of the far-eastern flavour sets, especially when the recipe includes chilli).  It's incredibly tasty and relatively low fat.  Most of the ingredients are things you'll probably have anyway, but one ingredient - Szechuan Pepper - is a bit more unusual, and well worth finding.  Try the usual Asian cookery stores, and they'll sometimes have it in in a particularly cosmopolitan Tesco. You can leave the Szechuan pepper out, too, but the dish will lack a particular dimension. Rice wine may also be hard to come by; but you can substitute dry sherry for that, if you really can't find it.

Ingredients (for two servings)

The basic food ingredients are shown on the right.  These are:

• one leek
• one sirloin steak or similar.  I started making this with the steaks I found in the dead-food section at Tesco, and it's an excellent use of not very nice-to-look-at steak.
• one chilli - this should actually be 'some chilli'.  It all depends on how hot you want it.  The chilli has a fruity hotness, which is nice, but you'll have other ingredients to add heat as well.  I took all the seeds out of this chilli to reduce the heat from it.  You could also use three quarters of a teaspoon of chilli flakes, but be careful, because a jar of chilli flakes usually includes the hotter seeds.
• one bunch of spring onions - actually, the amount shown here is a rather large bunch. You could manage with smaller
• A few garlic cloves, but go for more than you'd think, rather than less.
• Fresh ginger - the amount shown is rather a large amount, being more than a 'thumbs worth' - you could go with less; about a thumb's worth is good.
• Corn oil.

As well, for a marinade, you'll need:

• Light soy sauce
• Chinese five spice powder
• Chinese rice wine or chinese cooking wine.  As stated above, you can substitute dry sherry, and (although I haven't done it) I reckon that a strong, cloudy cider might well do a good job here.
• Szechuan pepper
• cornflour
• 200 ml of a good, strong beef stock.  I dissolve one beef Oxo cube into 200 ml of hot water, and that's fine.  
• Pepper and salt

Preparation

You need to prep the beef and then let it marinade for at least half an hour.  I haven't tried marinading this overnight, but I expect that you could do that, if you wanted, in a fridge.

First, trim all the fat and sinews from the beef, and then cut it into very thin strips, about 1 - 2 mm thick, across the grain.

The first picture here shows the process of cutting the beef into thin strips.








This second picture shows how many strips of beef you can expect from one sirloin.











Put the beef into a bowl and add the ginger, grated (make sure you add all the ginger juice that comes out in the grating, as well), the finely chopped chilli, the garlic, grated, and a good shake (about a rounded teaspoon) of five-spice power.  You could add pepper and salt at this stage if you want, but be careful with the salt as the soy sauce and stock are potentially very salty.

Into a separate bowl, measure out two tablespoons of light soy sauce and one tablespoon of rice wine.  You also need to measure out one teaspoon of cornflour.

Measure out a few of the Szechuan peppers - about half a teaspoon - and put them into the pounded bit of a mortar and pestle.  The Szechuan pepper adds a numbing heat which is quite different to the heat from the chilli.  Grind them down roughly with the pounding bit of the mortar and pestle, and add those to the beef, ginger, garlic and chilli mixture. 

Add the liquid  to the beef-garlic-chilli-ginger bowl and mix well, so that every strip of beef is coated with the spices and ginger and garlic mix, then add the cornflour and mix some more so that that is well-distributed, as well.  The cornflour is there to thicken the sauce at the end of cooking; you don't have to put it in at this stage. You could add the cornflour to the mixture just before you fry the beef, but this way it seems to soak up all the juices in the marinade while the beef is marinading, and that's good.  I think.

 

Cover the bowl with clingfilm and set it aside while you prep the vegetables.

 

Chop the cabbage into fine shreds, about a centimeter in width. (I have also made this recipe using the tough outer leaves of a cabbage instead of the sweeter, inner part - and the irony, bitter taste of those outside leaves was very very acceptable).  I used about half - two thirds of the cabbage shown at the top.

Chop the leeks and the spring onions.






Place a wok over medium-high heat and add a splash of flavourless cooking oil (corn, or peanut).  When the oil is hot, add the beef strips.  You'll find that the cornflour and chilli-garlic-ginger mix has soaked up most of the liquid.  Don't throw any left-over liquid away.  Keep stirring and turning until all of the beef strips are browned.

Then, add the prepped vegetables with the vegetables that take the longest to cook being added first.  In this case, the order will be leeks, then cabbage, leaving the spring onions until the end (spring onions needing hardly any cooking at all).  Keep stirring and turning - the leeks will need a good five minutes more than the cabbage.  As the cabbage starts to wilt, add any juices left in the bowl as well as the 200 ml of beef stock to the pan.  Keep stirring and turning over the heat, as the beef stock thickens with the cornflour and the juices from the marinade.  This will take a couple of minutes. 

About a minute before the end, add the spring onions.

I like to put the rice on so that it starts simmering just before starting the wok part of this recipe, so that the rice and the stir-fry are finished at about the same time.  You could probably also serve this with noodles.  This is more than enough for two and could serve two and a half, at a pinch.  For seasoning, use dark soy sauce.

I've also cooked this recipe and added toasted almonds at the end, and although they were nice, they weren't really necessary.  For me, the surprise in this recipe is the cabbage - it goes perfectly with the other flavours and makes a really good base to carry the beef, chilli, garlic and ginger. If I was going to make this recipe for a vegetarian I think I'd marinate tofu in the mixture above, then fry the marinade without the tofu, adding the vegetables as above and then adding the tofu to heat through at the end (I'd also use vegetable stock).