Mongolian Beef. A quick and easy recipe.
Mongolian Beef. A quick and easy recipe. People love this dish for its balance of sweet and salty flavours and this recipe has just a little extra zing.
Here's another Chinese take-out recipe that you can easily make at home. Mongolian Beef is one of the most popular dishes on many Chinese food restaurants in North America.
As with many dishes we associate with Chinese food in this part of the world, it has almost nothing to do with authentic Chinese cuisine and is purely a North American invention.
Nonetheless people enjoy this dish for the delicate balance of sweet and salty which only the best restaurants get right. I've tried many recipes before and to my taste they fall on either the too sweet or too salty side of the fence.
For my money, this is the best one I've tried yet.
Customize your own version of Mongolian Beef.
Still, tastes vary and you may be more inclined to the sweet or salty side of the scale with a recipe like this one.
My suggestion is to first try this Mongolian Beef recipe as written. You can then adjust the brown sugar to add more sweetness or the soy sauce to add more saltiness the next time you make it.
The recipe is also very adaptable to any vegetables that you have on hand that you'd like to add to it. Steamed carrots, broccoli, snow peas or cauliflower would all be great as well.
We always have to have the water chestnuts at our place though. My daughter Olivia insists on them!
While many recipes you may find for Mongolian Beef do not add any spicy element, I actually do prefer it with a little bit of a kick. However, if this is not to your taste, the recipe works perfectly well without the added chili paste or flakes.
Make it as a stirfry too.
If you want to avoid the frying method, this recipe works well as a stir fry too. See the note in the recipe for those instructions.
If this is your type of recipe be sure to check our our versions of General Tso's Chicken and Chinese Take Out Style Orange Chicken...and if you're a noodle fan, be sure to try our take-out copycat version of Singapore Noodles too.
TIP:
Since I use an electric stovetop I prefer flat bottomed wok
for this recipe. I find it to be much more stable and easy to use on the stovetop. I also like one that has a lid which is great for steaming the vegetables in a stir fry to speed up the cooking time.
Originally published April 2016.
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Mongolian Beef - a quick and easy recipe.
Mongolian Beef - a quick and easy recipe. People love this dish for its balance of sweet and salty flavours and this recipe has just a little extra zing.
Ingredients
- 1 ½ pounds beef steak( flank steak, rib eye steak or striploin steak are all good choices)
- ⅓ cup corn starch, maybe a little more.
- About 1 cup vegetable oil for frying
- 1 cup sliced water chestnuts, about 1 can rinsed
- 1 cup chopped bell peppers
For the sauce
- 2 tablespoon vegetable oil
- 3 cloves minced garlic
- ¾ cup water
- 2 tablespoon grated fresh ginger root
- ¼ cup low sodium soy sauce
- ½ cup hoisin sauce
- ¼ cup brown sugar
- 3 tablespoon rice wine vinegar
- 2 teaspoon crushed chili paste or chili flakes to taste, optional
Instructions
- Try not to use beef straight from the fridge or you will cool down the oil too much when frying. I like to take it out to sit at room temperature for at least a half hour.
- Cut the beef steak, across the grain, into ¼ inch thick strips.
- dredge both sides of the beef strips with corn starch and let them sit for 10 minutes, so that the corn starch adheres to the meat. (You can start putting the sauce together while the beef sits.)
- Heat the oil in a hot wok to 375 degrees. Fry the steak in about 3 batches, so that it cooks very quickly. It only takes about a minute or so to flash fry the beef.
- Pour off the oil from the wok completely.
- Add the beef back to the wok along immediately with the vegetables and sauce and simmer for only a few minutes before serving over steamed rice or your favourite noodles.
To prepare the sauce
- I like to make the sauce quickly in a large sauté pan so that it reduces and thickens more quickly.
- In a small bowl, or large measuring cup, stir together all of the ingredients for the sauce, except the garlic and vegetable oil.
- Heat the 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil over medium heat and lightly sauté the garlic for only a minute, so that it softens but does not brown.
- Add the combined ingredients to the pan all at one and simmer for 5 minutes or so until the sauce begins to thicken. Turn off the heat and set aside until the beef is cooked.
Notes
The corn starch flash frying does help to evenly coat the beef in the glistening sauce but if you want to avoid the fried version of this recipe try making it as a stir fry instead.
Prepare the sauce first, so that it is properly reduced and thickened.
Add 3 tablespoon vegetable oil to a hot wok and quickly stir fry the beef before immediately adding the vegetables and sauce and simmering for an additional few minutes to heat the vegetables through.
The critical thing is not to overcook the beef. The wok should be as hot as possible and the beef need only be quickly stir fried for a minute or so until it loses the pink colour to be fully cooked. the extra few minutes of simmering will guarantee that it is anyway.
The nutritional information provided is automatically calculated by third party software and is meant as a guideline only. Exact accuracy is not guaranteed. For recipes where all ingredients may not be used entirely, such as those with coatings on meats, or with sauces or dressings for example, calorie & nutritional values per serving will likely be somewhat lower than indicated.
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Rock Recipes a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. Our product recommendations are almost exclusively for those we currently use or have used in the past.
Nutrition Information
Yield
6Serving Size
servingAmount Per Serving Calories 426Saturated Fat 10gCholesterol 69mgSodium 793mgCarbohydrates 34gFiber 2gSugar 17gProtein 24g
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HI, you might edit the ingredients list for cornstarch and the oil. Question re canned water chestnuts - cooking for only one I always have water chestnuts left over - have you ever frozen them? And if so, successfully? I like the easiness of this recipe, thanks for posting.
Never frozen them but don't see why not.
Would like to do this in a slow cooker, any changes to be made and time suggested.
thanks,
@Anne Ashford-Hall, it’s a stir fry recipe that needs to be cooked quickly, not simmered for hours.
This was absolutely amazing!! I used a sauce by PF Chang’s in substitute for the hoisin and I didn’t have the ginger root, but it still turned out awesome. This was my first time ever making Chinese food- as it’s always scared me to attempt it. Thank you for being there every step of the way. I learned so much about cooking as well 🙂
Delicious recipe,Easy to cook.A staple in my dinner recipe.Thanks for sharing it.
If using the stir fry method, do I need cornstarch to thicken the sauce?
Hi, I'm wondering about the measurement of the vegetable oil in the "ingredients" part of the recipe. Is that 1 cup of vegetable oil? I am going to make this using venison.
Best Chinese I’ve ever made. I used eye fillet but any good steak would be great. I’ll use it again several times
How do you get soft tender meat? using any other meat than Tenderloin! The meat is so tough in these other cuts, especially Flank Steak. We love Chinese Cooking but cooking the meat never is tender. There must be something more to this to ensure tender beef...especially frying so hot for only a 1 minute!?? Please take the time to answer so I can cook this and be proud. Thank you Regards, Audrey
I made this for dinner tonight with no omissions on the recipe & was surprised at how much we liked it. The only thing I did different is that I added more vegetables to the recipe & the sauce covered them all. I will be making this recipe again I used the whole can of water chestnuts. Love the crunch. Only cooking for 2 so leftovers for another dinner this wk
Absolutely love this dish. The flavour of this sauce is delicious. One of my go to recipes when entertaining