Ching He Huang (or just ‘Ching’ to UK TV audiences) is a Taiwan-born cook, author and TV personality who was raised in South Africa and the UK from the age of 11, and used food as a connection back to her Taiwanese heritage. In the UK, she made her name though her seven best-selling cook books, and numerous TV appearances, including a regular slot on the BBC’s Saturday Kitchen.
In her BBC2 show Chinese Cooking Made Easy, Ching cooked garlic chilli beef with pak choy al fresco in a nocturnal market setting. That is the recipe given here. It is a firm favourite of one of my closest friends.
Garlic chilli beef with mushroom pak choy
Ingredients
- 8 cloves garlic, peeled and squashed with flat of a knife
- 3–4 green chillies, sliced, seeds and all
- 2 tbsp dark soy sauce
- 2 tsp chilli paste
- 2 tsp brown sugar
- 500g beef steak, tenderised, trimmed of fat and sinew, and sliced into 0.5cm strips
- 300g shiitake mushrooms, roughly chopped
- 2 heads of pak choy, roughly chopped, separate stem chunks from the leaves
- 2 tbsp groundnut oil
- Splash of rice wine
- Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
Instructions
Combine the first 5 ingredients in a bowl. Add the beef and leave to marinate for as long as you like. 5 mins is enough, but a day in the fridge would be great.
Heat the oil in a wok or frying pan until smoking hot. Add the marinated beef and any left over marinade. Cook until the beef is caramelised.
Add the pak choy stems, cook for a minute and add the wine, before adding the leaves and mushrooms. Cook for another minute or so, season and serve.
Notes
This recipe was written from watching Ching make the dish and dead reckoning the quantities by making it a couple of times. This is not as Ching wrote it.
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