Unfortunately, once I met and shacked up with the OL and her munchkins, I had to quit cooking SF, since the kids didn't like chinese food at that young age. But I have about 15 years of experience cooking high-quality chinese grub, so I'm still here to offer my sage advice
to those that aspire to get better at it.First off, for those of you looking for that one missing ingredient in your food, it's either one of two things:
1. Experience - Not only is stirfrying not simple, it takes a long time (sometimes years) to really get it down so that you can do it almost automatically. Additionally, with experience you'll learn that stirfrying is not baking. That is, it's not chemistry...there are no exact amounts of anything required. All ingredient amounts in a SF cooking sauce are essentially recommendations. If you're using something like a low sodium soy sauce, or a really acidy sherry or vinegar for tanginess, or low cost store brands for some items that have less flavor than premium brands, you're going to need to taste and tweak your sauce to get that right flavor. Another good example of this is garlic. Many recipes simply call for 2 minced cloves of garlic. If you've got a monster head of garlic with giant cloves, you'll only want to use one. If you're working with small cloves, you may want to use four cloves...that type of thing.
Experience will also teach you, like others have mentioned, that things like broccoli and carrots take longer to cook than something like snow peas. If you just lump everything in all at once, you'll end up with some items that are overcooked and limp and others that are undercooked. You put the stuff that takes longer to cook in first, let it cook for a minute or two by itself, then add the other items. You'll end up with a much better final product this way.
Also, when Dins mentioned pushing the meat up to the sides while you add other items to the stirfry, those who said this can result in overcooked meat are correct. This is why for beef, you cook it until it browns on one side flip it until it's brown on the other and then push it to the sides. The inside is still uncooked or rare and will slowly cook with the rest of your SF. If you're using chicken, cook it until the outside is opaque and then push it to the sides.
2. Chinese five spice - You can find this in the International Foods section or in the spice section of any reasonably large supermarket. You wouldn't want to add it to spicy szechuan-type dishes, like Kung Pao chicken, but if you're trying a duck or pork dish, just a dash will add a lot of complexity to the flavor. Five spice is one of the primary ingredients in many Cantonese-style dishes. A dash also goes well with any dish that calls for hoisin sauce.
I've hosted and/or catered parties for 30 or more people on various occasions and at one time worked as a chef in a mediterannean restaurant. A lot of people have asked me over the years how I learned to cook and how I got to be so versatile(I'm quite good at cooking various types of food, from chinese to italian to mediterannean, etc). I attribute it to learning to cook chinese food in my teens and then doing so for a number of years.
Cooking chinese, once you move beyond following recipes step-by-step and graduate to the point where you can freelance, teaches you the importance of different cooking times for different items, the "correct" amount of a spice or condiment to add to tweak the flavor in a certain direction, the importance of presentation on the plate and various cooking techniques, including roasting, braising, steaming and frying.
The first Chinese dish I ever tried was Kung Pao Chicken from this cookbook. It's still my favorite version of the dish today.
The first time I attempted the dish(I think I was 14), I heated the oil up to blazing hot in the wok and then rather than spoon the cut up chicken into the wok, I just basically turned the bowl over and dumped it in. *SPLOOSH!* I jumped back from the deluge of oil that launched my way, but got nailed in the knee with about a teaspoon of it. Learn a lesson some? Left a nasty scar once it healed, but like the resourceful14 y/o I was, a few weeks later I just sanded it down with some fine grit sandpaper in woodshop. Crazy times!!
