The beef is fried to death! Tender strips of beef served in a thick sautéed sauce with honey and black pepper are one of my favorite dishes at the local Chinese restaurant. This might be the quickest stir-fry recipe you’ll make all year – 1 minute to cook the beef, 1 minute to make the sauce. you have finished!
Beef Stir Fry with Honey Pepper Sauce
Chinese Beef with Honey Black Pepper Sauce is one of my favorite things to order at a Chinese restaurant. Never take it out. It must be in a restaurant because I love the way it’s served – sizzling in a cast iron skillet.
I won’t recreate the sizzle at home – wish I could! If you have a cast iron skillet or small saucepan so you can take it straight from the stove to the table, you’ll get the sizzle. I’m so jealous.
But I managed to recreate the delicious sauce for this stir-fry! Sweet, salty and subtly spicy, it really tastes like what you would get in a restaurant.
Check it out! Who can resist? ?
What you need
I simply agreed to you without exaggerating! That’s all you need:
- Beef – Stir-Fry Rules: If you treat it like a steak, it’s great for a stir-fry! Use decent to good sirloin, flank, New York steak/sirloin/sirloin (same thing!), boneless rib eye/Scotch tenderloin. It doesn’t have to be a premium dry-aged steak! To use slow-cut beef, tenderize it Chinese style (“veal velvet”) before serving;
- Honey and black pepper – the two main flavors of the sauce!
Oyster sauce – complex and the secret weapon of Chinese/Asian cooking. Proceed to Hoisin; - Chinese Wine aka Shaoxing Wine – the secret ingredient to 99% of Chinese cooking. Read more here, paired with mirin, dry sherry or sake. For non-alcoholic subs, use chicken stock/broth (see recipe notes);
- Soy Sauce – Everyday, regular soy sauce. or light soy.
Do not use dark soy – too thick! - Garlic and Onions – because there wouldn’t be much food in this kitchen without these two!
How to make it
As with all stir-fries, once you start cooking it moves pretty quickly, so make sure you have everything ready to throw in the pan before you start!
In this dish, the beef is cooked before taking it out, to control the cooking time of the beef. We then simmered the sauce in the pan until it was syrupy and poured the beef back.
Intense flavoured stir fry sauce!
My stir-fry recipes tend to err on the side of lots of sauce because a stir-fry isn’t a stir-fry if you can’t eat the rice drenched in the sauce. Nobody wants to have a bowl of plain rice left over after a stir-fry! !
However, the special fried beef is one of the exceptions. This Honey Pepper Stir Fry Sauce is incredibly rich in flavor because it is a concentrated syrupy sauce rather than being thickened with cornmeal/cornstarch as usual.
So you don’t want a ton of sauce. But the taste of rice is enough!
Another difference from most of my stir-fry recipes – this beef stir-fry is light on the veggies, whereas most stir-fries are a kaleidoscope of colors with little protein and lots of veggies!
So serve it with a fresh side dish – like a crisp Asian salad, this Chinese lettuce with a creamy sesame dressing or a leafy Asian salad with sesame seeds.
You can also add vegetables to the stir-fry – thinly sliced carrots and similarly shaped vegetables are ideal.
