Stirfry Quotes

“For my first home-cooked meal in Tokyo, I took an assortment of beautiful Japanese ingredients and did what came naturally: I made Chinese food. I stir-fried some beautifully marbled kurobuta (Berkshire breed) pork with bok choy, ginger, and leeks, sauced it with soy sauce, mirin, and vinegar, and served it over rice, sprinkled with shichimi tōgarashi seven-spice mixture. This seemed like a reasonable act of Japanese-Chinese fusion. I made some quick-pickled cucumbers on the side. This was before we discovered that anything you do to a Japanese cucumber diminishes it. I should have known this; once I interviewed a Japanese-American farmer who grows more than a hundred Asian vegetables in Washington state. Naturally, I asked him about his personal favorite. Cucumber, he said.
"How do you prepare it?" I asked.
"Slice and eat."
The whole meal was about the same as something I'd make at home, but I cooked it in Japan. It was like the SpongeBob SquarePants episode where SpongeBob has to work the night shift at the Krusty Krab, and he keeps saying things like, "I'm chopping lettuce... at night!" I was slicing cucumbers... in Tokyo!”
― Matthew Amster-Burton, Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo

“Ah! Green asparagus, my favorite! "
"I stir-fried it with crab meat. I quickly stir-fried the green asparagus and mixed the crab guts with dashi and put that in there as well...
... and finally seasoned it with salt and pepper and thickened the sauce slightly with starch."
"I love its fresh spring vegetable-like flavor!"
"I stir-fried it in a very mild soy oil...
... and I didn't use any Chinese broth made from chicken bones and Chinese ham. I used dashi taken from katsuobushi and konbu.”
― Tetsu Kariya, Vegetables

“For one, the lomo saltado was so delicious I thought I might forget my own name. It was beef tenderloin stir-fried so that the sugars in the marinade caramelized on the outside, making it crispy and chewy and as tender as the name in the middle, on a big blue platter piled high with roasted tomatoes, various salsas and chiles, and crispy fries. The idea was to wrap pieces of beef and the toppings in the scallion pancakes that came along with it. What resulted were flavor bombs, savory and spicy and fatty and crispy, all accentuated by the sweet, tangy pop of tomato. Flakes of scallion pancakes drifted from my lips down to my plate as my teeth crunched through each bite.
"I can't even handle how good this is," I said, then swallowed because I couldn't wait to say it.
The other two dishes we'd ordered were pretty great, too----a whole branzino marinated and charred so that we picked it clean off its spindly bones and ate it with greens and roasted peppers; a half chicken roasted with aji amarillo chile paste and served over shiitake mushrooms and a lime crema---but the lomo saltado was the true star of the table. I could already picture how it was going to look on my page. The golden-brown fries glistening with oil. The beef shaded from light pink in the center to deep brown on the edges. The ruby red tomatoes nestled among them. And the scallion pancakes serving as a lacy backdrop.”
― Amanda Elliot, Best Served Hot

“ While the bird is boiling, it's time to brown the skin...
...extracting all of the fatty oils from it.
Then, in all of that light and delicately rich chicken oil...
...I'll stir-fry some uncooked jasmine rice with garlic and ginger! ”
― Yūto Tsukuda, 食戟のソーマ 17 [Shokugeki no Souma 17]