Ingredients

• 250g beef (this was "muscle" aka stew beef becouse cheap, you can use better cuts but i don't think it's really worth tbh)
• 1 egg
• vegetable oil for frying
• enough flour to coat the beef

Sauce

• 7 tablespoons of dark soy sauce
• 4 tablespoons of sugar
• 1 tablespoon of garlic powder
• 1 tablespoon of ground black pepper
• 1 tablespoon of chili flakes (powder works too)
• 1 tablespoon of balsamic vinegar
• 3 tablespoons of ketchup
• 1 tablespoon of olive oil
• 1 beef stock cube (should be around 10g i think, if it says without monosodium glutammate/msg it's not the cube you want)

Recipe

1. Cut the beef in small, thin strips (if you're using a better cut of meat you can make them bigger, otherwise as thin as you can manage pretty much)

2. Toss the egg into the beef and knead them togheter until all the meat is well coated in egg mixture

3. Put the flour and the meat into a box/bag and shake hard

4. Fry the beef on medium heat until it's mostly white/golden (shouldn't take more than 4-5 minutes)

5. Take the beef out of the oil and let it rest over a grill or something that allows the oil to drip away for at least couple minutes

6. Fry the beef again, this time on high heat, until it's dark brown (if you're using a good cut you can do golden brown if you want, but if you're using a cheap cut like me it really needs to be dark brown or you're going to end up with beef chewing gum)

7. Mix the sauce ingredients into a pan and reduce it on high heat until it starts to get somewhat sticky

8. Throw the meat into the pan and stir vigorously until the beef is completely coated in the sauce, if you're using a nonstick pan it should end almost clean at this point

9. Serve, i suppose.

(Spring onions and sesame seeds could and probably should be involved in this at some stage but i'm not too fond of them)

This is the end result of an amateur's quest at reaching something similiar to the classic asian recipe without involving ingredients that will attract the attention of family members scared of spices or that will end up sitting in your cupboard for months after being used once, i think it's good, if you do end up trying something like this let me know what you think.

You don't really mean 8 Tablespoons of sugar, right? Looks great!

No i typed it twice lol, thanks for the heads up.

Is there an alternative to the beef cube? There's a hell of a lot of salt in them I'd rather avoid. (Note, avoid, not eliminate).

Well, it's only 5x your daily salt intake. Who needs valves, anyway

You can just skip it or use liquid (though i'm not sure if it actually has less salt) or homemade beef stock, i think it adds to the recipe but it's not a key ingredient so to speak, that said i'm fairly certain that there's more salt in 7 tablespoons of soy sauce than there is in the whole cube by a considerable margin so if that's your concern i think i'd rather keep the cube and use low salt soy sauce instead.

Definitely use low salt soy sauce if salt is a concern regardless of what you do with the cube.

Also if you're cutting the salt i'd sub the sugar with mild or bitter honey, maybe something like chestnut honey.

You must live a sad, flavourless life.

I'd suggest making some rice as a side dish and not eating the whole 3 servings by yourself but at the end of the day it's a dish based on chinese restaurant takeout food, i feel like it wouldn't be true to the spirit of the recipe if it didn't make a passing attempt to kill you lol .

Plenty of flavor outside of copious amounts of salt, sugar, and ketchup

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