Early Look: "Stir Fry Sauce" and the Western Weeknight Stir Fry

I’ve always loved the dishes that sit awkwardly in between cultures: the well-done Cantonese steaks, the Canadian Hawaiian Pizzas, the Japanese boxed curries.

They give a rare honest prism into how the world views actually eachother’s food… but above all, they’re fun. They break the mould. After all, if you want a maximally delicious pizza dough, you probably would want to find an experienced Italian chef. But they never would have been able to even begin to conceptualize topping the thing with pineapple chunks.

And so I’ve always been intrigued by what I’ll call “The Western Weeknight Stir Fry”. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, it’s something along the lines of these recipes… but there are many, many, more out there.

While some of these may make the purist’s eye twitch a bit, they’re so ubiquitous that they’re obviously useful to homecooks in the west. Nobody should be snobs about this – these stir fries give us a lens into how Chinese food is thought about and enjoyed in the west.

There's a number of common themes, but chief among them, I think, is that these stir fries are extremely saucy. And to that end, they'll often whip up 'stir fry sauce', complete with all their seasonings, soy sauce (sometimes too much soy sauce), and so on and so forth.

So today... we wanted to challenge ourselves – we wanted to try our hand at making a culturally informed ‘western weeknight stir fry’, albeit using a bit of Chinese technique. And to that end, we’ve got three stir fry flavors here: a western supermarket-friendly Cantonese flavor stir-fry, a Sichuan-inspired stir-fry, and (in the written post out tomorrow) a Central Thai-inspired stir fry :)

Hope you enjoy this one, it was pretty fun to test. Because who doesn't enjoy absurdly saucy stir fries?