welcome to hot thai kitchen so today i am going to teach you probably the most useful recipe that
i will ever teach you and that is what i like to call the universal stir-fry sauce this is a sauce
that you can use to stir-fry literally everything i mean everything vegetables meat noodles you
can make fried rice with this you can stir-fry pieces of cardboard and it'll be delicious and
so i learned this technique from working in thai restaurants where most of them will actually have
some version of this as their base stir-fry sauce they will mix in advance and then that goes into
just about all of their dishes and then of course with each dish they'll modify it by adding you
know one more ingredient here one more ingredient there to modify it a little bit but the base is
the same and it's going to save you so much time because when you're really in a rush you can't
just use it as is you don't have to add anything to it and it's like it's good on everything so
without further ado let's get started all right super easy the base of the sauce is going to be
oyster sauce now the exact ratio can vary depending on whatever you want to do but i
like to make oyster sauce the biggest part of this base sauce okay so i've got some oyster sauce here
if you're vegetarian what you want to use is something called vegetarian stir-fry sauce so
if you go to a bigger asian market you're going to see something like that has a very similar
consistency to oyster sauce and that's made to be an oyster sauce substitute okay now to this i'm
going to add some soy sauce and i'm using thai soy sauce but you know what this you can use
whatever kind of soy sauce that you have for this what i'm also going to add surprise is fish sauce
now fish sauce is a smaller proportion because you don't want things to taste you know
too fishy here but you can definitely put more if you want you can stop here but i like to add
golden mountain sauce it's another type of soy sauce has a little bit more intense flavor you
could use maggie seasoning instead i'm just going to add a little bit here you can just substitute
more soy sauce if you want you don't have to do golden mountain sauce and by the way i want to
mention that golden mountain is a brand there are seasoned thai seasoning sauces that come in
other brands as well so another brand that i'm using right now at home is the healthy boy
brand which is the brand that i use for my soy sauce so this is my soy sauce bottle they also
make a version of gold mountain sauce i guess the generic name for that would be a seasoning sauce
which is green okay so if you can't find golden mountain maybe another brand exists so there we go
so that is my base stir-fry sauce you can put this in like a i don't know like a squeeze bottle like
this keep it in the fridge it'll last literally forever because this is just super salty stuff
now i want to show you a couple ways to modify it as an option you can also add black soy sauce or
dark soy sauce if you tend to like your stir fries a little bit darker in color maybe you're richer
has a little bit more of that sort of molasses flavor you can add the thai black soy sauce or
just um chinese dark soy sauce keeping in mind the chinese dark soy sauce is saltier i would just
add maybe one teaspoon of this two at the most otherwise all your stir fries are going to be dark
and this you can scale up as much as you want like back in the restaurant they would literally use
six bottles of oyster sauce in every batch and like a whole bottle of fish sauce so you can knit
last forever so that's your base sauce when you go to actually cook it there are a couple things
you can add to kind of a jazz is that jazz it up so things taste you know different each time
one thing you can add to jazz it up thai chili paste so thai chili paste has a really sort of
rich sweet intense a little bit smoky flavor and a little shrimpy there's dried shrimp in there
and it adds a very different flavor to your stir fry i will link to some recipes where i use thai
chili paste in a stir fry below so you can add that just like around a tablespoon or something
in each wok the other thing you can add is or fermented soybean paste so this is sort
of like our version of miso sometimes when we stir fry vegetables we like to add this
in it and it's quite salty so i would do maybe half the tile and then half of stir-fry sauce
when you go to cook it okay so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to do a demo of how you might
be able to use this in like a simple weeknight stir fry and we'll talk about how much to use
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okay so here's a little stir fry demo of how you might want to use this sauce so tip number one
is if you're going to have some sort of meat like chicken or pork or whatever i would still season
it separately and you'd want to do this not right now as you're about to cook but first thing before
you prep other things and that is just just like a couple of glugs per like that's one chicken breast
and i just need like a teaspoon or two just so that the meat itself is seasoned all the way
through and when you slice things small it really doesn't take that long it doesn't need to marinate
for like an hour or anything because if you just put in unseasoned chicken all the flavor will be
in the sauce this way everybody gets seasoning love you can think of this as stir fry 101 sort
of the principles of basic stir frying what do you put in first what do you put in second
so i'm going to turn it on and just sort of medium heat for now add in a little bit of oil okay so
aromatics always go in first if you've got onions that you want to cook down too soft you might
want to add the onions before even the garlic because garlic burns a lot faster than onion
i'm going to get this sauteing until the garlic just start to turn golden not too dark because
it can get a bit bitter i need my sauce spoon where's my sauce spoon i'll just use this one
okay so the garlic is starting to turn a little bit golden i'm going to go in with my protein now
now if you've seen my show you know that i like to cook my protein separately
so that i can really control how well the protein is cooked but for a simple weeknight stir fry
i can just throw it in not a big deal but if you want to be a little bit more precise
you would cook the protein first take it out and then throw it back in once everything is
done and a tip with chicken breasts also if you don't want to cut them super super
thin because they will overcook so fast and with chicken breasts we all know can dry up so quickly
so when you cut chicken breasts you want them to have a bit of thickness to them so they can
retain juiciness so the chicken is the outside is done inside's not done yet but that's okay
i'm gonna go in with all my hard vegetables okay give this a quick toss and now is where
the sauce will come in how much sauce you want to use this is roughly going to be one tablespoon per
serving so if you're cooking for one person use one tablespoon you're kicking cooking for two this
looks like about two people i'm going to use two tablespoons that's obviously a very rough estimate
depends on the exact amount but that's a good start and then you want to taste and adjust and
then with sugar you want to do about a quarter teaspoon per person depending on the ingredient
you may want to up it to a half teaspoon per person or the flavor that you're going for
and then i'm going to turn up my heat if you want to add extra dark soy sauce or anything like that
you can add it at this time in fact that's what i'm going to do so this black soy sauce
is not super dark so i can add a bit more if you're using the healthy boy brand
it's really dark so you have to be a little bit mindful of how much you add and then at this point
you're just getting your chicken cooked you're getting your vegetables to the doneness that
you like it's totally going to vary from recipe to recipe from thing to things
okay i mean that's pretty much it oh my pepper can't forget about the pepper
okay i'm gonna turn this off and then throw in my tomato
and toss that in and i don't cook the tomatoes really because just residual heat in the wok
is enough to soften them through i don't want them to be mushy but you can if you want to get
them really soft in which case they'll sort of like mush and become a part of the sauce which
is also delicious in its own way this is a great thing about stir-fry is you get to decide what you
want to do with it okay since this was a rough estimate kind of cook cooking you always always
always want to taste it and i'm just looking for my tasting fork which i don't think i have one i
cannot stress enough how important it is that you taste your cooking and i i'm so surprised
the number of people who don't like they'll cook something and then they'll taste it for the first
time when it's on the table it's like what are you gonna do with it then you know it's too late
oh it's perfect yeah this ratio of one tablespoon proportion works for me every time
how easy is that this looks like childhood memories to me this is very much similar to
the sorts of things that we would have on our dinner table don't have to think too
much about it throw in whatever vegetables and some meat in there and you're laughing
looks like it needs some greenery doesn't it so
got some garlic chives i'm gonna just put that on top and toss it in a little bit
there we go now it looks like presentable all right let's try this i mean this type of stir-fry
you definitely want to have with rice let's see i want some baby corn some chicken cabbage let's
just start with that no that's a piece of garlic even better ah the smell of childhood
simple but comforting flavors i mean if you want to know what a typical thai household
eats on like a tuesday wednesday night they eat something like this a really simple stir fry
with a mixture of those sauces and again you can add chilies to make spicy you can
add thai basil you can add holy basil you can add thai chili paste like we talk about the
with this base the possibilities are endless and if you love the stir fries at your local
thai restaurant i am willing to bet they are using some sort of this combination of sauces in there
as well so the recipe as always will be on hot thaikitchen.com and when you make it i definitely
want to see what you do with the base sauce you can tag me on facebook twitter and instagram
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thank you as always for watching and i will see you next time for your next delicious thai meal