Not Your Typical Take-Out Dish: Ocean Broccoli Beef

There are some dishes that you can walk into any Chinese restaurant in America and expect to see on the menu.

Beef with Broccoli is one of them.

An innocuous, if uninspired dish, beef with broccoli isn’t necessarily bad, but neither is it necessarily good. In its better formulations, it is a rather harmless stir fry of tender beef slices and lightly browned broccoli florets seasoned with onions, garlic and ginger and enhanced by a savory brown sauce.

In its less entrancing incarnations, it is a flavorless dish of greasy beef and overcooked broccoli doused in a gloppy umber goo that has no recognizable flavor other than being vaguely sweet and somewhat brown.

The truth is, I don’t really like Beef with Broccoli, even when it is not bad; I prefer the Cantonese dish it was based on, Beef With Gai Lan. And the reason I don’t really like Beef with Broccoli isn’t even that I am being snobby and preferring an actual Cantonese recipe to the adapted Chinese-American version; it is more that once I have eaten Ocean Broccoli Beef, I don’t ever want plain old Beef With Broccoli ever again.

Ocean Broccoli Beef? What is that, I am certain you are asking.

Ocean Broccoli Beef is the first and best version I have ever had of Beef with Broccoli and is the standard to which I hold ever other version of the dish. And I always find other versions seriously lacking, because Ocean Broccoli Beef was outstanding.

It was sweet. It was sour. It was tingly-spicy. It was garlicky, gingery and oh-so-good.

It was addictive.

It was a signature dish of the China Garden Restaurant in Huntington, West Virginia, back in the day, and it was so good that when it was on the lunch special menu, for a week, office workers would line up OUT THE DOOR to wait for a table so they could eat their plate of it with rice, an egg roll and some soup. I am serious. Out the door, waiting for a table. Sometimes out the door and around the freaking corner.

In the rain.

I mean it. (I told you that stuff was addictive!)

Ocean Broccoli Beef was a powerfully amazingly delicious dish, and I have finally, after years of playing around with it, figured out how Chef Huy made it.

His Beef with Broccoli was different because the sauce was different. Vastly different, in fact, from the typical Chinese-American brown sauce. This was no thickened soy sauce with chicken broth sort of sauce–it was sour, it was sweet, it was spicy, it was tingly, and it had a touch of—something that gave it the undefinable scent of the sea to it.

Hence the name, “Ocean Broccoli Beef.”

It isn’t just oyster sauce–oyster sauce being the traditional main flavoring for Beef with Gai Lan. No. It isn’t just that. There is sugar involved, and chile garlic paste and vinegar, and, well, other stuff.

A few years back, I was thinking about it, remembering all those times I had carried plate after plate after plate of Ocean Broccoli Beef (Number 4 on the rotating lunch special menu), and all of the customers who offered to pay me untold sums of money to find out how to make the sauce. I always turned them down–even if I could have figured out how to make it, I would never have sold the secret to Huy’s special dish.

Now that Huy has retired, however, and the restaurant is long closed (its been gone for over ten years now), I don’t feel guilty about sharing my version of his truly amazing dish.

I figured out a while ago that what made it so special was that it was a variation of the classic Sichuan “Fish-Fragrant Sauce,” which on American Chinese restaurant menus is called “Garlic Sauce” because no one wants to think that they are eating sauce that smells like fish.

The variation is simple–there is a bit more sugar in it, and a little bit of high quality oyster sauce. I prefer the Amoy brand that has some dried scallops in it; this sauce is redolent with the aroma of the ocean which is essential to this dish.

Anyway, here is the dish that launched a thousand lunch specials back in the day in Huntington, and energized office workers to stand in the rain for half their lunch hour, just so they could get a taste of Huy’s amazing, sweet, sour, hot, salty and oceanic sauce.

Ocean Broccoli Beef
Ingredients:

1 pound top round beef, thinly sliced on the bias into pieces 1″ wide by 2 1/2″ long
1 tablespoon Shao Hsing wine or dry sherry
1 teaspoon oyster sauce
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1 tbsp. freshly ground black pepper
4 tbsp. black rice vinegar
2 tbsp. dark soy sauce
1 tbsp. Shao Hsing wine
2 1/2 tbsp. sugar
3 tsp. chili garlic paste
1 tablespoon oyster sauce
1/4 tsp. sesame oil
2 teaspoons cornstarch
3 tablespoons peanut oil
1 medium onion, thinly sliced (about one cup)
3 tablespoons minced fresh ginger
1 head garlic, peeled and minced
1 tablespoon dark soy sauce
1 pound broccoli florets
1/2 cup baby carrots, thinly sliced on the bias
1 tablespoon Shao Hsing wine or dry sherry

Method:

Toss the beef with the wine, oyster sauce and cornstarch and allow to marinate for at least twenty minutes, but no more than an hour.

Mix together the next nine ingredients–from the black pepper to the cornstarch–in a cup, stirring to remove all the lumps from the cornstarch. Set aside.

Preheat wok over high heat until a thin ribbon of smoke spirals up from the metal. Add peanut oil and allow to heat for thirty seconds. Add onion, and cook, stirring, until it turns light golden brown. Add ginger, and keep cooking for another minute. Add meat, and spread out in a single layer in the wok. Allow to cook undisturbed for a minute or two, or until the beef browns on the bottom, and then stir and fry until most of the pink is gone from the beef.

Sprinkle the garlic and soy sauce over the beef and keep stir frying for another thirty seconds. Add broccoli florets and baby carrots and sprinkle the wine over, and stir fry until the meat shows no red, the broccoli is deep green and tender-crisp and the carrots are tender-crisp–about a minute and a half to two minutes.

Add the sauce ingredients to the wok, and cook, stirring, until it turns into a dark brown, fragrant glaze.

Remove wok from heat and scrape contents into a heated serving bowl or platter. Serve with steamed rice.

Update On Dad

This is just a quick post to update folks on what is happening with my family.

Dad’s triple bypass surgery is on Monday. Zak, Morganna, Kat and I will be going to Charleston on Sunday–I will have been taking my antibiotics for a full week, so any chance that my sinus infection would be a problem for him will be diminished. We’ll stay until he is out of ICU and into a recovery room, and then we will go from there. (Morganna is probably going to be coming back to stay home, so she isn’t out of school for a whole long time, but I am not sure when we are coming home.)

So, next week, don’t expect any posts.

Until then, however, I am going to write a few posts because it gives me something to do and keeps me occupied and from worrying too much.

Thanks for all of the good vibes and supportive comments, everyone. Y’all are wonderful people, and I really appreciate your words at this time.

Family Health Issue Alert

I just found out today that my Dad will have to have a triple bypass surgery either Friday or Monday, so I probably will not be posting much, if at all, until things settle down.

Thank you all for your patience–and thanks to everyone, including the folks of Athens who voted in The Best of Athens–for the good vibes on being a part of the Best Ethnic Restaurant in Athens.

Love and peace to you all.

I Must Brag Now, and Do The Happy Barbara Dance!

Why is that, you may ask?

Huh, why, why, why?

Well, I will tell you why.

Because Restaurant Salaam, where I have been working for the past few months, was just named “Best Ethnic Restaurant” in the Dining section of the Athens News Best of Athens reader poll. We also took second place in “Best Vegetarian Cuisine,” third place in “Best Uniquely Athens Restaurant,” Honorable Mention in “Best Family Restaurant.”

Considering that we have only been open for a couple of years now and we are off the beaten track (our front doorway is down an alley–and then you step down from there into a really cozy, beautifully decorated underground space which has been turned into an intimate dining room), this is all great news. We have only been a full-service restaurant for a year–before that, Salaam was a hookah bar known as Shishah Cafe, which mainly had flavored tobaccos smoked from hookahs, and a few sandwiches and salads and mezes to snack on.

But then, a smoking ban went through for all restaurants, (which Hilarie, the owner of Shishah/Salaam voted for–as did I), and so Salaam was born.

And I am very, very glad it was born, because it is the best job I have ever had, hands down. I have so much fun working there it is hard to express it. The staff is great, the atmosphere is friendly and upbeat and everyone brings a “can-do” attitude to their work that is amazing. I love everything about it. (Except, I would like a bigger kitchen. Someday. I have faith.)

Which brings me to the next honor.

In the Places category, we placed second in “Best Place To Work,” right behind Ohio University. (OU has better job benefits, it is true, but we have a hell of a lot more fun at Salaam.)

And in the People category, Hilarie Burhans, one of the owners of Salaam and the other chef at the reins of our wee kitchen, tied for first place as “Coolest Person in Athens County.” I think it is because not only is she a really cool lady, but also because she plays a mean clawhammer banjo, sings beautifully, owns the best ethnic restaurant in Athens, cooks like an angel, and used to live in a cave in the desert. (That cave bit is why she got my vote. That is too cool.)

Both Hil and I got our pictures in the paper, though I think hers is better than mine. But then, she’s smiling in hers, and I am talking in mine, so there we have it. If I yammered less and smiled more, maybe I would look better in pictures.

But this is just too terrific, because I feel very strongly that everyone at Salaam: the cooks, the servers, the prep cooks (which includes Morganna), the bellydancers, the chefs, the owners–we all work very hard in order to make this little restaurant a very special place that offers the best possible food in a unique atmosphere that is evocative of an exotic time and place that exists in everyone’s imagination. And I am so proud to be part of it.

So, there you have it. This is why I am floating around on a cloud right now, and am doing the Happy Barbara Dance, though I am doing it perched on the couch while I recuperate from the most evil sinus infection that came out of the blue like quick death from above early Sunday morning. I basically woke up with a headache and neckache so bad that I was worried I had meningitis. The only thing that gave me comfort was that when I could stand to blow my nose–even though it felt like my eyes would pop out if I tried to, was that the evidence in the kleenex pointed toward a sinus infection, and not a swollen brain and spinal cord.

It was the worst pain in my life. The migraines and sinus infections of my youth were nothing compared to this. And labor pains–shoot–I never used any anesthesia for either of my babies, and I was fine. Yeah, it hurt. So what?

Not this. This made me cry. Except that if I cried, it made it worse, so I just cussed.

A lot.

So, I went to Urgent Care, it being a Sunday, and the doctor treated it aggressively, noting that as fast as it came up, and the evidence that it was in every sinus cavity in my head and was too close to my brain for her or my comfort, that a heavy shot of steroids and another of antibiotics was necessary. And then, she wrote scrips for more steroids and more antibiotics to be taken orally for the next week.

So I went home, went to bed and slept for like–oh, four or five hours and woke up and the pain was gone.

Prednisone is my friend. I have never taken a steroid before, but it helped. Amazingly so. But, I have to say that the little pills of it–no matter how fast I swallow them, they dissolve in my mouth, which tastes godawful terrible, horrible and monstrously icky.

But I don’t care, because it is killing the evil which does not sleep in my nose.

So, I am having to restrict my dancing to the couch, but believe me, I am bouncing up and down merrily, and every now and then, I have a jovial giggle or two, out of sheer, bubbling joy.

Extra Bonus Weekend Cat Blogging: What Are The Felines Up To These Days?

You know, I spend so much time keeping everyone updated on how Kat is growing and developing, I feel like my four-footed babies are getting short shrift.

So, here is an update on the antics of some of our feline friends, as they bring a smile to our days.

First up, we have Grimalkin, fondly known as Grimble, laying on her favorite perch, the back of the sofa.

Here, she not only looks dignified, but she manages to show off her Mona Lisa smile to her best advantage, turning her head just so like a seasoned professional model posing for the camera.

Grimble is asleep next to me right now, curled up in a purring ball of stripy, warm fur against my thigh.

Tatterdemalion wants everyone to know how pretty she is.

See how pretty she is?

Look at her plume tail, and at her puffs of perfectly groomed thundercloud fur.

And, look, look! See how bright her eyes are, and how poised she is, and how very graceful.

Watch her flirt, mincing back and forth, reaching out to be petted, then pulling away as if the proffered hand might soil her luxurious, oh-so-silky fur.

Isn’t she pretty?

Isn’t she the prettiest?

Well, isn’t she?

Yep, that’s Tatter. That’s just how she is.

And here is the cuddle-bug, the maternal love-cat, Dandelion.

We had put all of Kat’s stuffed animals on the love seat in order to clean the floor, and as I was putting away her books, Dandelion jumped up and settled herself among the pile of critters.

By the time I noticed her, she had gotten comfy, but hadn’t quite fallen to sleep.

At this moment, Dandelion is on the couch behind my head, watching what I write over my shoulder, purring her deep, resonant purr.

She has the most amazing, golden, throaty purr, like Eartha Kitt’s singing voice, and her fur is short with an amazing velvet nap to it.

I think that Eartha would have been a great name for her, now that I think on it.

Three days ago, I woke up and came downstairs to be confronted by the sight of Schmoo, our largest cat, curled up with Kat’s little baby doll, SweetPea, with one paw draped over her.

This was just too much. I know I giggled for hours over the sight.

And even though I took several photographs, all the while snickering, Schmoo was unconcerned.

He was perfectly happy, cuddled up with his little baby doll.

After I took the pictures, he settled back down and went back to sleep, cheek to cheek with SweetPea.

Finally, we come to young Cordelia, known by Delia by everyone but Kat who calls her Deeya.

Here, she had been sitting on the couch, washing her belly. When I said hello to her, she perked up her head and sat upright, forgetting her bath entirely. She sat like that for several minutes–once again, allowing Zak plenty of time to snap a couple of pictures before she realized that she was being immortalized in an embarrassing pose, and that she should sit more normally.

That’s it for this week’s Weekend Cat Blogging.

Stay tuned for next weekend’s entry which will focus on our other three cats: Gummitch, Ozy and Jack and their continuing adventures.