| Greg's beef with orange and broccoli |
| 陈皮牛 |
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This is based on a recipe from The Woks of Life, a site with interesting recipes that is only bearable with the aid of an ad blocker. I first tried it on 22 January 2022, and both of us found it excellent.
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 160 g | thin beef steak | 1 | ||
| 20 g | orange juice | 2 | ||
| 6 g | cornflour | 2 | ||
| 6 g | vegetable oil | 2 | ||
| 9 g | oyster sauce | 2 | ||
| 1 g | five spice powder | 2 | ||
| 80 g | orange juice | 3 | ||
| 6 g | sugar | 3 | ||
| 20 g | orange marmalade | 3 | ||
| 25 g | light soya sauce | 3 | ||
| 5 g | cornflour | 3 | ||
| 5 g | Shaoxing wine | 3 | ||
| 1 g | sesame oil | 3 | ||
| 6 g | ginger | 4 | ||
| 7 | whole dried red chili peppers if desired | 4 | ||
| 10 g | dried Mandarin orange peel | 4 | ||
| 1 | star anise, crushed | 4 | ||
| 5 g | garlic, crushed | 4 | ||
| 15 g | spring onion | 4 | ||
| 130 g | broccoli florets | 5 | ||
| salt | 5 | |||
| vegetable oil (plus 1/2 tablespoon) | 6 | |||
| wheat flour for coating beef | 6 | |||
If necessary, make the beef thinner. I use “sizzling steaks”, which are about 6 mm thick (see Notes), and with a meat hammer I can get it to about half that thickness.
Mix orange juice, cornflour, oil, oyster sauce and five spice powder. Mix well and marinate the meat in the mixture for an hour or more.
Dissolve the sugar in the orange juice. When dissolved, add marmalade, soya sauce, cornflour, wine and sesame oil. Reserve.
Prepare ginger, orange peel, star anise, spring onions and garlic. Chop the ginger into small pieces, cut the peel into small pieces (this to be confirmed next time), grind the star anise, cut the spring onions into slices about 3 cm long and peel the garlic ready for crushing.
Boil the broccoli in water for 45 seconds. Drain, salt lightly and reserve.
Roll the meat in flour and fry in a deep fryer until cooked. Allow to cool and cut into pieces about 5 to 8 cm in size. Place in the serving dish
On gentle heat, fry the ginger, star anise, orange peel and dried chili if used. Fry for about 60 seconds. Add spring onions and crushed garlic and fry for another 30 seconds.
Add the sauce marinade from step 3 and bring to the boil.
Warm beef and broccoli in microwave oven, pour sauce over it and serve.
These notes updated on 24 December 2023 and 25 February 2024.
I use what Woolworths call “sizzling steak” for this dish. That's beef about 6 mm in thickness, too much for this dish, so I hammer it with a Schnitzel hammer after cutting. This roughly doubles the area. The original recipe wants the meat cut to size before cooking, but that's fiddly, so next time I'll fry first and cut to size later. This should also give a more uniform size.
The original recipe wanted “baking soda” (Sodium bicarbonate) in the marinade. It seems that all their recipes do this, but I don't know that usage, so I left it out. Their quantities for the marinade were barely enough to moisten the meat, so I roughly doubled them, in the process omitting water and replacing with orange juice.
The recipe called for coating the meat in cornflour before frying. I now use wheat flour, and it seems at least as good.
The recipe wants salt and oil in the water for boiling the broccoli. Given the short cooking time, this makes no sense to me. Instead it lightly salt the broccoli after boiling. I also omitted the oil, though arguably it's worth trying. Either way it needs re-warming before serving.
The recipe states simply “star anise”, suggesting that an entire star should be fried. I have decided that it should be ground.
While my orange peel is undoubtedly Chinese, it seems different from the peel used in the original recipe. It's much smaller:
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The original recipe talks of pieces 1 to 1½ inches in size. This is less than half that on a side. But of course weights are the important thing.
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