Stir-Fried Bok Choy with Seitan
Yield: serves 2-3 as part of an Asian style meal; easily scaled upward.
Prep time: 15 minutes; this is cutting vegetables and stir-frying. To make seitan, click here, or consult Mark Bittman’s excellent recipe in How To Cook Everything Vegetarian.
This recipe owes a great deal to a bok-choy stir-fry in Grace Young’s The Wisdom of The Chinese Kitchen
approximately 3 ounces/90 grams seitan
1 teaspoon cornstarch
roughly 12 ounces/350 grams bok choy or other Chinese leafy greens
1 thick slice ginger, about 1-in/4 cm across
2 garlic cloves, peeled and minced
1 scallion, trimmed and thinly sliced
1 tablespoon oyster sauce
2 tablespoons water
1 1/2 teaspoons regular soy sauce
two tablespoons rice wine or dry sherry, plus more for cooking, if needed
peanut or grapeseed oil, for stir-frying
You will need a wok or large frying pan to make this recipe. Serve with rice or rice noodles. I used a 14-inch (35 cm) wok. You will also need a few small bowls.
Slice the seitan into pieces small enough to be eaten with chopsticks or, in our case, forks, as we’re too clumsy to manage chopsticks. Don’t worry about slicing each piece of seitan perfectly evenly. Place the pieces in smallish bowl. Mix with the cornstarch.
Wash and trim the bok choy, then slice as for the seitan.
Mince the garlic, ginger, and scallion, and place them in a small dish or bowl.
In another small bowl, mix the oyster sauce, water, soy sauce, and rice wine, stirring with a fork to blend.
Place the wok or frying pan over high heat and allow to heat up. Add the peanut oil and turn heat down slightly. Tip in the garlic, ginger, and scallion, stir-frying for 30 seconds. If the wok seems too hot–sputtering and spitting madly instead of cooking–turn heat down a bit. If all is well, add the oyster sauce mixture, stirring constantly, then add the vegetables, letting them soften, stirring all the while. Add rice sticks, if using. Add more rice wine if wok seems dry. Now add the seitan, stirring to blend with bok choy. Cook for two to three minutes, until everything is cooked through and steaming hot.
Turn bok choy out on to platter or into a bowl. Serve immediately if possible. If not, place in low oven 20-30 minutes.
Serve with rice or noodles as part of an Asian meal.
Bok choy stir-fried with seitan may be refrigerated, well-wrapped, up to four days. Do not freeze.
Notes:
There are two kinds of commercial oyster sauce available: the cheap kind and the expensive kind. A quick scan of the expensive kind’s ingredient list explains its cost. Cheap oyster sauce says nothing about oysters. The expensive sauce lists oysters as the first ingredient, bottled into a luscious potion so thick it’s barely pourable. You get what you pay for.
As noted above, if you loathe seitan, don’t use it. Firm tofu, frozen tofu, pork, chicken, or beef are all fine here.