Secret to tenderizing beef cantonese-style

My mom loves cantonese restaurants that serve stir-fry with beef that's really soft and chewy. Anyone know the secret? I asked a friend's mom and she said a little baking soda or papaya powder will do the trick. Any suggestions?

I was told by a friend who used to own a Chinese carryout place that he used papaya powder to tenderize the meat. I forget the exact name of the enzyme present, but it does the trick. Only problem is that you can quickly turn a piece of meat into a mushy goo.

Flip

The meat tenderizing enzyme in papaya is papain, and virtually every off-the-shelf meat tenderizer product you can buy in a grocery store uses it.

A lot of frozen pre-cut shrinkwrapped steaks are in a marinade or solution that involves papain, as well.

Thanks for the replies! Does anyone know where I can buy some papaya powder? Whole Foods? Chinatown?

i believe cornstarch is even more common...

Will cornstarch tenderize meat?

Cornstrach won't tenderize meat. However, as TonyC mentions, for stir fried beef, the thin slices of beef are typically marinated in a mixture that contains cornstarch. In my experience, this leaves a thin coat on the meat which, when stir fried rapidly in a very hot wok, leads to very tender and succulent morsels of meat. No tenderizer required.
I would use a piece of (green) papaya in a marinade for tenderizing meats destined for the grill.

Cornstarch won't tenderize meat, but another option for tenderizing is bromelain, which is in fresh pineapples. A marinade of thinly-sliced meat with pineapple will produce very tender meat - in fact, it's easy to overdo it, leading to mushy meat. Note that canned or cooked pineapple inactivates the bromelain, so if you want to use this technique, the pineapple has to be fresh.

nr706 wrote:Cornstarch won't tenderize meat, but another option for tenderizing is bromelain, which is in fresh pineapples. A marinade of thinly-sliced meat with pineapple will produce very tender meat - in fact, it's easy to overdo it, leading to mushy meat. .

Last year, I cooked sliced ham with fresh pineapple as I had plenty of both. The ham turned to total mush.

I don't know the science behind it, but yeah, cornstarch has also always worked for me when I'm making a Chinese dish. Also keeps cut up chicken moist and tender when stir frying.

nr706 wrote:Cornstarch won't tenderize meat, but another option for tenderizing is bromelain, which is in fresh pineapples. A marinade of thinly-sliced meat with pineapple will produce very tender meat - in fact, it's easy to overdo it, leading to mushy meat. Note that canned or cooked pineapple inactivates the bromelain, so if you want to use this technique, the pineapple has to be fresh.

The presence of bromelain in fresh pineapple is also the reason you must used canned pineapple in jello molds. (It took my mother years to find this out.

AGuylian wrote:My mom loves cantonese restaurants that serve stir-fry with beef that's really soft and chewy. Anyone know the secret?

AGuylian,

The 'secret' I'm aware of for tenderizing meats in stir-fry is called Velveting. One lightly marinates meat sliced for stir-fry in a mix of cornstarch and egg white, sometimes with the addition of a little oil or white pepper. Just prior to adding to a stir fry you immerse the meat for a few seconds in gently, if even that, simmering oil.

This gives the meat a tender, soft, 'velvety' texture that is retained even after the heat of stir-frying.

Enjoy,
Gary

This is a great discussion. What cut of meat are you using for the stir-fry?
I've been experimenting with the cheaper cuts, and have fallen in love with the eye of the round for all sorts of dishes. But I haven't had much success with a stir-fry.

I did take a class on stir-frying but the instructor used the tenderloin. Needless to say, it was delicious and it didn't need to be tenderized. Personally, I think the instructor cheated, it really doesn't take much skill to turn out a good tasting tenderloin.

I think it takes a lot of skill to turn out a good tasting tenderloin, just not a nicely textured one

But I'm just a filet hater.

Papaya works especially well to tenderize tough shellfish, such as squid, octopus and conch.

Papaya tastes ok, and it's papaya season, or nearly so, no? I'd rather use the fresh stuff than some powder that might have MSG, even if it does not say so. No offense to not-the-West governments, but food labeling laws vary.

Some time I am going to have to document my kid's Hello Kitty!(R) piggy bank/former container for Hello Kitty!(R) Fruit Jells.

The most prominent feature of the packaging is a sticker that enthusiastically proclaims "Now without Kanjack!" Thank goodness, they dropped the kanjack.

The piggy bank shaped like the character little girls love also bears some of the smallest print I have seen outside the microfiche room of my college library. Something about the fact that "Hello Kitty!(R) Fruit Jells are not for children. Hello Kitty!(R) Fruit Jells will not melt and may cause choking."

Of course, Hello Kitty!(R) Fruit Jells are a fetish item, for adults only. That's why they are placed on the lowest shelf at DiHo, with the candy cigarettes and other adult novelty snacks. I knew that. What is Taiwan coming to when the government forces candy companies to add minuscule text to the trade dress, marring an otherwise elegant product.

-in an effort to counter fear of MSG(as evidenced in a few scattered posts on LTH lately), here's a great article:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/foodmont ... 68,00.html

Funny that this should come up. Cook's Illustrated had a feature on hot and sour soup in their most recent issue.

The writer had a curious discovery - everytime they came to a roadblock in the recipe, somehow, corn starch was the solution.

thicken the soup? corn starch
tenderize the meat? corn starch
restart your car battery? corn starch

There is a section titled: The Mysterious Powers of Cornstarch

Most cooks keep a box of cornstarch on hand for a single purpose: thickening. So did we - until we noticed that cornstarch was working its magic in other ways as well. Predictably, adding cornstarch (3 tablespoons) to our soup thickened it. What was surprising, however, were the two other uses we found for cornstarch. Adding just 1 teaspoon of cornstarch to the pork marinade of soy sauce and sesame oil caused the marinade to cling to and coat the meat during cooking, creating a protective sheath that slowed the ineveitable rise in temperature that separates moist, tender pork from dry, chalky pork jerky. And adding just 1/2 teaspoon of cornstarch ot the egg that's drizzled into the soup at the end of cooking seemed to have a tenderizing effect. Cornstarch stabilizes liquid proteins when they're heated, staving off excessive shrinkage and contraction. So this last bit of cornstarch helped the eggs cook up lighter and softer.

It seems that it helps the marinade to cling to meat. THe cornstarch layer seems to help prevent moisture loss. Additionally, if it can help to avoid the protein coagulation it can prevent meat from becoming too chewy.

So, in conclusion, cornstarch your way to more obedient children, better cognitive function and a lower tax bracket.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I do have to comment that we usually use cornstarch to tenderize the meat but it just doesn't taste the same as how the cantonese restaurants prepare it. Anyone tried eating stir-fry at a korean-chinese restaurant? They primarily use cornstarch to tenderize the meat but the texture doesn't match other chinese restaurants. Oh well, we'll try everyone's suggestions and report our results.

Slice the beef thinly against the grain.

Bill/SFNM