How to Make Restaurant-Style Beef and Broccoli Stir Fry — Vicky Pham

What You Will Need

To recreate this restaurant-style beef and broccoli, you’ll need the following ingredients:

For the beef marinade:

Beef — You have a lot of options. You can use New York strip steak, sirloin steak, flank steak, ribeye, or tenderloin.

Since we using a restaurant hack to tenderize the beef, you can also use economical cuts of beef.

This includes leaner and therefore tougher cuts of beef, such as eye round, bottom round, top round, and any roast cuts.

Regular or light soy sauce — Light soy sauce, also known as all-purpose soy sauce, is the main flavoring agent that provides a salty umami flavor to the dish. If you have a bottle of soy sauce that isn’t labeled light nor all-purpose, you have light soy sauce. You can use it for this recipe.

We are lightly marinating the beef with light soy sauce. We will add a lot more to the sauce.

Baking soda — Baking soda is our secret ingredient to tenderize the beef. In Asian restaurants, the technique to tenderize meat with baking soda is called velveting.

Water — Helps to activate the baking soda and spreads it evenly on the beef.

Corn starch — Corn starch helps to absorb any excess moisture to prevent frying grease when deep-frying.

It also creates a crust that will absorb the delicious sauce.

If you don’t have corn starch, substitute with tapioca starch or potato starch.

Egg — I’m using one whole chicken egg. The egg binds the starch to the beef.

For the sauce:

Water — The base of the sauce.

Regular or light soy sauce — Light soy sauce is the main flavoring agent for the sauce.

Oyster sauce — Oyster sauce is another popular flavoring agent that adds a different level of salty umami to the dish.

Sugar — I’m using granulated cane sugar to balance out the salty flavors of soy sauce and oyster sauce.

Dark soy sauce — Dark soy sauce is mainly used to darken the sauce.

For the stir-fry:

Garlic — You can’t make a savory dish without an aromatic. For this recipe, we are using fresh garlic.

Vegetable oil — Vegetable oil is used to deep fry the beef and a little is used to fry the garlic to bring out its aroma.

Broccoli florets — Fresh broccoli complements the tender beef.

You can also replace some broccoli with some thinly sliced carrots for a more colorful dish.

If you’re not a fan of broccoli, you can substitute it with other vegetables like snap peas, bell peppers, or bok choy.

For the slurry:

A slurry is a mixture of corn starch and water. This is used to thicken the sauce.