Stir-fry is a great technique to master if you are a weekday cook like Kitty. It involves cutting up the meat into smaller pieces so it cooks faster while stir-frying in the pan. With the right marinate, the meat stays juicy and tender even though it’s not slow-cooked. This means great-tasting food served faster from the kitchen to the dinner table. A must for weekday cooking.
The key to marinating meat in Chinese cooking is corn starch, water, and oil. Usually you add all the other ingredients in the marinate first, mix well, then add corn starch and water to create a light paste to help coat the meat with the marinate both during marinating as well as cooking.
And sometimes, usually for minced meat, you add oil to the meat just before cooking. Kitty didn’t think is needed in this recipe because the pork tenderloin is sliced, not minced.
Kitty loves this recipe as it’s so versatile and accessible. You can buy all the ingredients in almost any grocery store; you can add any kind of green vege besides green onions (like cabbage, green chives, etc) to make this a one-pot-dinner-dish; and it goes well with rice, noodle, or even on a French baguette as an open sandwich.
List of ingredients for easy copy and pasting:
- About 200g of pork tenderloin (for the pre-packed pork tenderloin you get in the US, 1/3 of it is about 200g)
- 1 onion
- 2 green onion (optional)
- 1″ of fresh ginger root (optional)
- 2 Tbsp Chinese cooking rice wine (optional)
For marinating the pork tenderloin:
- 1/2 Tbsp light soya sauce
- 1/2 Tbsp dark soya sauce
- 1/2 Tbsp sugar
- 1/2 Tbsp corn starch
- Few drops of sesame oil (optional)
- Few sprinkle of white pepper (optional)