The Sunday News
Carl’s Beef with Bulawayo
Preparation time (15 mins), Cook time (10 mins), Total time (25 mins)
Ingredients: Stir fries are really less about the quantity of ingredients but more of an understanding of the cooking times. The trick is to make sure that the vegetables you are going to use are crunchy and don’t break down into a mush.
For example, vegetables you shouldn’t be using in a stir fry include potato, butternut and pumpkin, but instead green beans, carrots, onions and peppers.
Potatoes
The next stage is preparation.
When you are cutting your ingredients make sure to make them similar sizes. So if you are making them long and stringy then you chop everything to the same thickness to make it easier to cook.
Let’s talk about cooking agents. We need to keep liquid. To aid the cooking process cooking oil is used for bringing necessary heat into your vegetables, soy sauce will provide great seasoning and Worcestershire sauce will give great flavour.
Do not be afraid to add other aromatics and spices into the mix, for example, garlic, ginger, chilli, coriander, are all going to enhance the stir fry.
Garlic
Just remember to have fun with the process and be patient with each ingredient as you add them in starting with the ingredient that takes the longest to cook to the one that cooks the quickest. For example, I would add carrots and green beans before peppers and onions. The next bit is your equipment.
You want to make sure you continue to be inventive and try a large enough pan to be able to accommodate many things especially that move around your ingredients. (Source: Chikafu by Joshua Carl Ncube)
