Beef Stir Fry with Honey and Black Pepper Sauce

1. Soy Sauce -Use ordinary all purpose soy sauce or light soy sauce. Do not use dark soy sauce - flavour too intense.

2. Chinese cooking wine is an essential ingredient for making a truly "restaurant standard" Chinese stir fries. Click here to read more about it.

Substitute with Mirin, cooking sake or dry sherry.

Non alcoholic substitute - sub both the cooking wine AND water with low sodium chicken broth/stock, reduce soy sauce to 2 tbsp.

3. Beef -As with all stir fries, this cooks very quickly so you need to use a decent cut of beef for it. Rule of thumb: if you'd serve it as a steak, you can stir fry it. Rump, flank, sirloin/strip/Porterhouse (same thing), t-bone and scotch fillet/boneless rib eye are excellent for this recipe.

Slow cooking cuts, like chuck, are not suitable unless you tenderise it (seeHow to tenderise beef the Chinese restaurant way)

Slice the beef against the grain. When you look at the beef, you will notice that the fibres are mostly going in one direction. Place the beef in front of you so the fibres are going left to right. Then cut through the fibres i.e. cut perpendicular to the direction of the fibres (see here for illustrative image). Cutting it this way makes the beef more tender!

Otherproteins -terrific with pork, chicken and turkey (finely sliced).

4. Nutrition per serving, excluding rice.