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Spring weather has been slow to arrive this month. Yet I’ve been craving spring veggies like crazy. In the coming weeks, asparagus will start popping up in the farmers markets, so I thought I would post a stir-fry to get you in the mood for warmer temps ahead.
As I’ve mentioned before, lately I’ve been testing out sauces from Soy Vay, with whom I started a partnership in January. This month I decided to try out their recipe for a garlic beef and asparagus stir-fry using their Hoisin Garlic. Here are some discoveries from the Appetite for China test kitchen:
Doubling as a marinade, this is one workhorse of a sauce. I altered the original recipe a bit, marinating the beef in about 2 tablespoons of Hoisin Garlic to allow the flavors to seep into the meat before cooking. The result was incredibly tender beef; the sauce takes the place of my usual meat marinade of soy sauce, rice wine, and cornstarch.
It’s a little less concentrated than other hoisin sauces I’ve used, which makes it easier to stir in the pan. This is especially helpful for this recipe, because the flank steak cooks so quickly, and you don’t want to overcook the beef before the sauce gets evenly mixed.
The flavor is slightly sweeter, which balances out the savoriness from the soybeans. No need to add an extra bit of sugar to your sauce, which I often do.
It’s widely available. This is a huge plus. I often get emails from readers and students from my classes asking where to get good Asian ingredients when they can’t get to a Chinatown conveniently. (And most other American-made hoisin sauces I’ve tried are very lackluster.) The Hoisin Garlic sauce is available at Whole Foods and a ton of other big supermarkets.
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