Beef with peppers

I did it with beans the other Day, now i'm gonna do it with beef.

This has become my new favorite cooking method — stir fry in a pan on my outdoor grill. This has so many advantages over doing it inside. Certainly you could make this dish inside but either you'll need to use a lower temperature which won't get you the same flavor, or you'll need an excellent ventilation system, which you may have. You don't have to marinate the beef in advance, but if you can it tastes even better. I'll squeeze the juice of one lime and then throw in a roughly equal quantity of soy sauce. A good base for any marinate is one part strong acid, one part umami salty sauce like soy or Worcestershire or fish sauce, and then 2-3 parts other stuff. I'm throwing in a couple tablespoons molasses, but you could use any form of sugar.

I cannot stop using Korean fermented chili paste, gochujang. But you don't have to. It's pretty spicy. You could replace it with a big squeeze of tomato paste or ketchup. To build on my citrus theme I'm gonna squeeze in an orange, a very weak acid. It basically functions like water in this context and I' gonna add some more water, enough to get me about a cup total of liquid. This is my marinade and my sauce. Without the water, the sauce will be too strong once cooked.

Meh, let's do a squeeze of mustard. This is kind of an East-West barbecue sauce, after all. I've got a bunch of green onions, trim off the roots, slice everything into thin rounds. I'll throw the whiter half of those in with my sauce and I'll reserve the greener half for later. This is viscous enough and cold enough that I can just add some cornstarch directly to it rather than mixing up a slurry first. We won't have any lumps in the end. A teaspoon or two, depending on how thick you like your sauce. Oh, and I want some ginger but I don't have any so, dried ginger – like the kind you use in gingerbread individuals.

I'm sorry, but this tastes virtually identical to fresh ginger in a cooked sauce and it's a whole lot more convenient. OK, meat. This is about 500g, a little over a pound of skirt steak, easily one of my top three cuts of beef. But you could use all kinds of things. Skirt comes in a long strip that I'm cutting up into shorter sections and now I can stack and slice them against the grain — perpendicular to the very obvious meat fibers. If you don't cut skirt steak against the grain, it's almost inedibly chewy. I would go kinda thick on these slices, maybe half a centimeter. Any thinner and the beef will probably be overcooked and chewy by the time the sauce is done.

Alright, everybody in the water. As little as an hour or two would make a difference but I'm putting this in the fridge overnight. Next morning I'll grab my widest cast iron pan and rub it down with a little oil.

A very thin layer.

This isn't necessary, but I might as well do it, because next it goes into my gas grill that I'll get going on maximum heat. The oil will burn off out here and I'll have a fresh seasoning coat when I cook. Cover to retain the heat. Next step is I'll get like two cups of jasmine rice going, 250-300g.

And today I'm boiling it pasta-style in a big pot with tons of excess water. This is an unfairly maligned method. It's nice because you don't have to measure a thing, you don't have to wash the rice — the free starch just goes into the water that we'll drain off later, and the texture comes out real nice. You'll see. Here's a couple handfuls of small sweet peppers — I've got some banana peppers, some other things. I'll just cut them in half then pull out the seeds. You could use hot peppers instead, but I would not use bell peppers. Bell peppers are too thick — they would not be done in time.

I'll drizzle those with some olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper and toss. After the rice has been going like 15 minutes I can just fish out a few grains and taste for doneness. When they're almost perfect I can just drain this into a colander. It'll look like rice soup at first, but let it drain, let it steam off and you'll have super fluffy rice, every time, without having to know the perfect water ratio for this particular rice. It just takes what it needs. I'm gonna embellish this today with the juice of a lime and then the onion greens we retained. They'll get cooked in the residual heat. Last bit of prep — a plate with some paper towels on it.

Take the marinated beef out, squeeze as much marinate out as I can and then dry the beef on the towels. I want to save as much of this liquid as I can for my sauce, but I need it off the surface of my beef for now. If the beef is really wet it won't brown. Squeeze it as dry as you can then toss that towel. To further enhance browning I'll drizzle some oil on this meat and toss. It doesn't need any seasoning — the salt from the soy sauce and the gochujang is enough. Push that to one side and I'll throw my peppers on the other side. Grab a handful of cilantro maybe.

Doesn't matter if it touches the meat — it's all gonna get cooked. Now I have one plate and one jug of sauce to carry outside. If that film of oil you rubbed on the pan is still smoking, that means it's not enough yet. It should have totally burned off. That's another reason I like doing that last-minute seasoning — it functions like a thermometer.

This pan has been getting rocket hot

For 20 minutes, so the meat is gonna smoke when it goes on, and that's good.

That also why I like doing this outside.

Once I've pushed the meat into an even thin layer for maximum browning I'll dump my peppers onto the bars.

With this method I can grill while I stir-fry. When everything is in place, I'll close the lid to retain heat, because gas grills really don't get that hot, usually. Literally a minute or two later, I'll flip my peppers, though honestly you could cook them all the way on one side if you want to. A bunch of water is coming out of the beef and onions so no more browning is possible. That's totally fine, because the insane dry heat we got up front was enough to get us that flavor they call wok hei in Cantonese — that smokey flavor you get inside an extremely hot wok, generally in a restaurant kitchen with excellent ventilation. We've got that here. One side of each piece is dark brown, but overall the beef is still undercooked, which is how you want it when the sauce goes in. I'll just stir to deglaze all the good flavor.

Then I'll close the grill again to retain heat. In one further minute the sauce should have thickened, the beef should be cooked through and the peppers tender. If those things have not yet quite happened, they will by the time you stir in the cilantro, lift all the peppers into the pan and then you get this thing inside. Dear lord, use very thick, totally dry mitts, or you will get burned. The sauce over-reduced just during the trip inside. I'll water it down slightly. I'll do the bowl trick with the rice because I'm feeling fancy. Get them smokey grilled peppers and that beef.

Whether you want to make my sauce or not, try doing stir fries outside on the grill, if you have a grill and an outside. If you've had good Chinese food, you'll recognize that delicious wok hei flavor immediately and it's really hard to achieve that inside without making a ton of smoke, so don't. Don't do it inside. If there's no reason to do things the hard way, then don't do them the hard way.