BEEF & BROCCOLI IN GARLIC SAUCE

OUR FOREMOST CONCERN WHEN DEVELOPING a recipe for beef and broccoli in garlic sauce was the beef. Too often gray, soggy, and/or tough, the beef in this popular dish should be well browned and tender.

Our second area of concern was the broccoli. The florets should be bright green and crisp-tender. Most recipes steam or blanch florets in a separate pot to avoid overcooking. This seemed like a cumbersome step to us; we wanted to simplify the process without sacrificing quality.

Finally, the sauce can be problematic. Sometimes the garlic flavor is too harsh; other times it is too mild. We wanted to figure out how much garlic to add, when to add it, and what other ingredients would complement rather than overwhelm the sweet garlic flavor of the sauce.

Although some sources suggest cuts from the shoulder and round, flank steak is the most common choice for stir-frying. After some testing, we found flank steak to have the best combination of beefy flavor and tenderness. Round was dry and tough, and the shoulder was too chewy.

The biggest challenge when cooking flank steak is dealing with all the liquid that it sheds in the skillet. Our tests showed that ³/₄ pound of thin-sliced flank steak loses between ¹/₄ cup and 1/3 cup of its juices. The danger is that the beef will stew in these juices rather than sear. We found that the combination of using a hot pan and cooking in batches got the beef in and out of the skillet quickly and kept the meat from developing a stewed flavor.

The juices continue to leach out of the meat even after it comes out of the pan. We noticed that meat that had been delicious fresh from the skillet turned soggy several minutes later. Putting the beef in a strainer after stir-frying solved this problem, separating the juices from the meat. This juice can be added back to the pan along with the meat to give the dish a more beefy flavor.

The tried-and-true method of blanching the broccoli in a separate pot and then adding it to the stir-fry along with the sauce worked well for us, but we wanted to avoid the hassle of dirtying another pot. We tried stir-frying the broccoli, adding the sauce (but not the meat), and then covering the pan. This method was very imprecise. The broccoli tended to overcook and the sauce to overreduce.

We had better luck when we stir-fried the broccoli in the skillet after the beef had been cooked. (The skillet was empty at this point.) After a quick stir-fry, we added a little water, covered the pan, and then steamed the broccoli. We found that two minutes of covered cooking delivered perfectly cooked broccoli. When we piled the broccoli into a bowl, the residual heat caused the florets to soften further. To keep our broccoli crisp-tender, we found it best to spread the broccoli out on a plate covered with a clean towel, which absorbed excess moisture.

It always seems such as waste to throw out the broccoli stems, especially for a stir-fry. We found that stems would cook in the same time as florets if peeled and cut on the diagonal into 1-inch rounds about 1/8 inch thick.

Although beef and broccoli is an admirable combination, most tasters felt that the addition of another vegetable would make the dish more visually and texturally appealing. In the end, we liked red bell pepper for its crunch and color.

We now turned our attention to the sauce. Some recipes add the garlic directly to the sauce. Tasters felt that garlic added this way was too raw-tasting. We had better results stir-frying the garlic along with the scallions and ginger. Doubling the usual amount of garlic for a stir-fry (from 1 to 2 tablespoons) gave us the deep, rich garlic flavor we wanted.

Several other possible contributors to the sauce were rejected by our panel of tasters: sugar for making the stir-fry too sweet, vinegar and sherry for adding unwelcome harsh notes, and hot red pepper flakes for competing with the garlic flavor. One additional ingredient, however, proved to be key: oyster sauce, the flavor of which goes extremely well with beef and broccoli. Oyster sauce provides body and color, and the complexity of its flavor eliminates the need for most other sauce ingredients. Only chicken broth, soy sauce, and sesame oil were needed to turn oyster sauce into a complete stir-fry sauce.