Welcome to issue #008 of our Cookbook Chronicles! Each week, I share lessons and wisdom from our cookbook development, preserving my dad’s 50 years of experience as a Chinese chef.
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Running a restaurant boils down to efficiency, which is why my dad used to spend hours in the morning prepping for the day’s lunch and dinner services.
If you ever get the opportunity to be a fly on the wall in a Chinese kitchen, you might notice they keep gallon tubs of sauces on hand. With a gigantic rounded spatula (their tool of choice), every time a stir-fry order comes in, they’ll quickly dip into the gallon tub and splash some ready-made stir fry sauce into the wok.
This sauce is called “Brown Sauce” or “Black Sauce”, and it’s the foundation of many different types of stir fries.
For home cooks, we don’t need to prep gallons of it at a time, but if you cook Chinese food regularly, you can save a lot of time by prepping a few portions of this brown sauce, refrigerating it, and pulling from the stockpile whenever you need to cook Chinese food.
Here’s the sauce:
1 tbsp dark soy sauce
3 tbsp light soy sauce
1 tbsp oyster sauce
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp chicken bouillon
1/4 cup boiling water
Watch the video for the full explanation, and visit our blog for a unit-converting, scalable serving size calculator:
https://madewithlau.com/recipes/stir-fry-sauce
I hope you enjoy the sauce!
With love,
Randy & the Lau family
P.S. - If you want to dive deeper, this clip is a portion of a longer module in our Mini Masterclass series on “The Elements of Flavor: Savory”, which you can preview here: https://www.madewithlau.com/club/courses/4
If you’re interested in truly understanding how to cook Cantonese food, go to madewithlau.com/club to get access to all 21 Mini Masterclasses or preview every single lesson for free.
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