Panasia Blog

23-Mar-2011, 05:03 pm

How to Blanch Vegetables for Stir-Frying

One of the tricks of a restaurant quality stir-fry is to cook everything from start to finish in as short as possible time, preferably in about 3-4 minutes and blanching beforehand allows this to happen

Blanching vegetables properly and quickly gives better results than cooking in stages of meat first, then vegetables and then combining and adding sauces in a 3rd stage. This is not recommended as you lose freshness. The meat when put to one side sheds its juices and cools and you end up with a watery looking plate of cooked meat pieces that have lost their texture and plumpness.

If you don't cook in batches and don't blanch the vegetables you end up stir-frying the veges for far too long trying to get them tender and while this is happening other ingredients are getting overcooked and you end up with a soggy-fry.

Some people resist blanching as they prefer to retain vitamins and minerals from the vegetables but we will show you a quick way to blanch and not lose them.


The most common vegetables to blanch are

Carrot
Broccoli
Cauliflower

Green bean, courgette, celery as these are better kept raw some crunchiness.

Cutting

Cut broccoli and cauliflower into florets approximately 50mm - 70mm in length and 25mm wide across the top. Avoid cutting them too big as they become hard work to eat.  People don't have mouths like hippopotamus's and in our experience florets bigger than this get left on the side of the plate as customers tire of eating them whereas nice bite size florets get eaten.

Cut carrots into slices approximately 5-6mm thick and 25mm long. Cut them on the angle like pictured as they look nice and that shape goes well with almost any type of stir-fry. Try not to just cut them into rounds as they look like they belong in an English stew rather than an Asian stir-fry.

Blanching

Start blanching when everything else is prepared to stir-fry. If you have to prepare in advance then after blanching put veges in a container and into the fridge.

As mentioned above a method of blanching that retains vitamins and minerals is to incorporate the boiling water into the stir-fry. To do this take a medium sized pot and fill with a litre of water. Bring to boil and drop in the veges a few at a time until the boil almost slows to a stop and boil for approximately 1 1/2 to 2 minutes. Take a piece out at 1 and a half minutes and eat it. If its too hard leave for 30 seconds and test again, repeat every 30 seconds until just right. The vegetable should be slightly firmer than you would like as it will cook further in the wok. Remove with a strainer and place into a large bowl of cold or preferably iced water. If no ice is available run the tap slowly into the bowl for a minute so as to avoid the water getting warm from the hot veges. Leave the remaining water in the pot to boil until it reduces to about 1 cup and use this as your liquid stock for making the sauce. If you dont have any chicken stock on hand you can add a teaspoon of good quality chicken stock powder.

Happy stir-frying and if any questions don't hesitate to ask using the feedUback form.