Beef with Assorted Vegetables

Recipe from Lawrence C.C. Chu

Nothing could be simpler than combining a variety of blanched vegetables with sautéed beef. I serve it often at home, as well as at Chef Chu's.

Yields:

8-10 servings

Time Required:

• 10 mins. cooking time

Ingredients:

• 4-5 dried black mushrooms
• 1 lb. (0.45 kg) flank steak, trimmed

Marinade

• 1 tsp.¹ (5 mL) light or regular soy sauce
• 2 Tbsp. (30 mL) water
• 1 egg white
• 2 tsp. (5.4 g) corn starch (US/Canada), aka cornflour (UK/other)²
• 1 Tbsp. (15 mL) vegetable oil
• 3 or 4 stalks broccoli, trimmed
• 1 stalk bok choy, diagonally sliced ¼" (6 mm) -thick
• Chicken broth or water

Vegetables

• ¼ cup (35 g) sliced water chestnuts
• ¼ cup (33 g) sliced bamboo shoots
• 12 snow peas, ends snipped
• 12 canned baby corn, split in half lengthwise
• 8-12 canned straw mushrooms

Sauce

• 3 Tbsp. (45 mL) soy sauce
• 1 Tbsp. (15 mL) dry sherry
• ¼ tsp. (1 g) sugar
• Pinch white pepper³

• Vegetable oil, for blanching

• 1 green onion (white part), minced⁴
• ¼ tsp. (0.5 g) minced fresh ginger⁴
• Cornstarch paste
• 1 tsp. (5 mL) vegetable oil

Preparation:

Soak mushrooms in warm water for 20 mins.; drain, remove stems, and cut in half.

Cut flank steak against the grain into ⅛ by 1-by 1 ½" (25 x 25 x 13 mm) slices. Combine with MARINADE ingredients in the order listed; mix well and let stand for 10 mins.

Separate broccoli florets, and then diagonally slice stalks ⅛" (3 mm) thick.

To water-blanch, cook broccoli and bok choy in boiling broth (or water) for 1 min.; add remaining VEGETABLES, and blanch for 30 secs. Remove, drain, and set aside.

Combine SAUCE ingredients thoroughly; set aside.

To oil-blanch, set wok over high heat for about 1 min. Add 2 cups (475 mL) oil and heat to 300°F (150°C).

Add beef, stirring to separate; blanch until redness is gone. Remove and drain.

To stir-fry, remove all but 3 Tbsp. (45 mL) oil from wok. Stir in green onion and ginger; cook until fragrant. Return beef and vegetables, stirring for about 30 secs. Add sauce, mix thoroughly, and thicken with 1 Tbsp. cornstarch paste. Stir in 1 tsp. (5 mL) oil, and serve immediately.

Author's Notes

You'll enrich the flavour of your vegetables if you blanch them in chicken broth, rather than water.

Use this recipe as a guideline, substituting any assortment of vegetables you have on hand.

Cornstarch paste is a thin paste made from equal parts of cold water and corn starch. It's essential in many Chinese dishes (but be careful not to over-thicken). Stir just before using. Store covered in the refrigerator for 1-2 days.

¹ Quarts, pints, cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, and fl. oz. are as defined in US Customary Units, not to be confused with differing British imperial, "legal", "coffee", Commonwealth of Nations, Canadian, Latin American, Japanese, Russian, or Dutch definitions — further proof that everyone needs the metric system.

² "Corn starch" is powdered starch processed from the New World grain maize (from Spanish, orig. from Nahuatl), which grain the USA/Canada call "corn", unlike the rest of the English-speaking world, which reserves "corn" to mean cereal grains generically. This starch product, needed here in its customary role as a thickening agent, is called "corn starch" in the US/Canada, but "cornflour" in the UK and most other anglophone lands — not to be confused with whole maize grain: That product — not a thickening agent — is called "polenta", "corn meal", or "corn flour" in the US/Canada, depending on how finely milled, and called "maize flour" in the UK and most other places. Australians should beware that their "cornflour" is starch extracted from wheat kernel, sometimes more-helpfully labelled as "wheaten cornflour". As if that weren't confusing enough, the maize-based thickener may be labelled (in Australia) either as "corn flour" or as "corn starch", so beware. Further, the maize flour product, there, is labelled as "cornmeal".

Note that whole-maize grain is traditionally, in Meso-American cultures of origin, wisely soaked in alkaline solution ("nixtamalised") to increase bioavailability and thereby prevent niacin deficiency (pellagra), among other important benefits, yielding "masa" (lit. dough) aka "masa de maíz" (lit. maize dough), also available in dried & ground form as "masa harina" (lit. dough flour) aka "harina de maíz" (lit. maize flour), and in its unground form, hominy. As further complication, Americans distinguish "corn flour", meaning prepared from maize endosperm only, from "maize flour" for use of whole maize — the former, neutral-flavoured; the latter, much more nutritious.

Origin of the naming mess: Originally, North America shared with Mother England the language's original meaning of "corn" to mean cereal grains generically (from Old English "corn" meaning single seed of any cereal plant, orig. from Proto-Germanic "kurnam" meaning small seed). The colonists got the gift of maize from native peoples, therefore at first calling it "Indian corn". Later, in the USA and Canada, "Indian corn" got worn down to just "corn", while the original meaning of "corn" was lost, locally. "Maize" is thus now the least-ambiguous term in international contexts, though many Americans either don't know that word or reserve it for variants from Latin-American (and Spanish) cooking.

³ White pepper is the same Piper nigrum berry seed as is sold as black pepper, except left to fully ripen, fermented in water, and the black outer coat removed. Accordingly, it has a milder flavour and lighter colour. Otherwise, one is a natural substitute for the other.

⁴ Minced, never crushed. Put that garlic press away. Crushing these vegetables breaks all of the constituent cellulose-rich cells' walls and has unfortunate consequences to the food's tastes, particularly in the case of garlic, the crushed paste of which easily becomes bitter, lacking flavour nuance, and sometimes picking up a metallic aftertaste.

So, think of this as your motivation to get a nice, really sharp 8" (20 cm) chef's knife for mincing (producing ¹⁄₁₆" = 1.5 mm cuts), and a good cutting board.

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Taken from: Lawrence C.C. Chu's classic cookbook Chef Chu's Distinctive Cuisine Of China, p. 139. published 1980 by Harper and Row, which can be checked out in scanned format at Internet Archive. Thank you! (Chu's the chef / restaurateur of beloved local restaurant Chef Chu's, in Los Altos, California.)

Collected and re-published at http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/recipes/beef-with-assorted-vegetables.html by Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> on Sep. 30, 2026. Individual recipes are free from copyright. Share and enjoy!

(If I have any copyright title in my own very minor contributions to this page — not my intention — they were created in 2026 by Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> and licensed for use under CC0. I have thereby waived all copyright, compilation copyright, and related or neighbouring rights to this work. This work is published from: United States of America.)