We’ve got a jar of yakitori marinade lying around wanting too be used, so we’re doing a beef teriyaki stir fry with it. Except we’re not using it to marinade, nor doing it on skewers…

I was watching America’s Test Kitchen this morning and they showed how to ‘velvet’ meat so keep it nice and moist when stir frying. So I’m going to try that, and use the marinade as a sauce to cook it in.

The velveting starts by soaking  the chopped up beef in a mixture of 1/2 cup water and 1 tsp bicarb of soda (baking soda) for about 15 minutes. Then the beef is drained and rinsed under the tap. It’s then dried on paper towels before being tossed in a mixture of 2 tsp of rice vinegar and 2 tsp of cornflour (cornstarch).

With the beef prepped, and all the veg mise en place it’s just a matter of stir frying everything up, adding the sauce (marinade with some chilli flakes and red wine vinegar) and noodles at the end.

The yakitori marinade worked really well as a sauce, especially with the heat from the chilli flakes. The beef was good, which given I was using cheap frying steak probably means the velveting did its job!