Thick'n'orange stir-fry sauce

September 11, 2013

I've got in a bit of a sick-work-travel rut for a few weeks and not had a lot of enthusiasm for cooking. (I did make some killer granola though, even if it did take 3 hours with a broken oven.) I needed vegetables, lots of them, and while baking them would have been comforting, I didn't want to return to that oven.

So I tried this stir-fry sauce recipe, which I bookmarked from In The Mood For Noodles two MoFos ago. It's prepared in its own separate saucepan, which seems like a hassle, but actually it's really easy to put together and I've jarred the leftovers for stirring through more vegetables.

The sauce is an arrowroot-thickened mix of orange juice and tamari with onion crescents and mandarin chunks. In the original recipe most ingredients just get chucked in at once, but I gave the onions some extra frying time to brown up and soften. Two tablespoons seemed like a lot of ginger, but I'd be inclined to ramp it up even further in future.

Thick'n'orange stir-fry sauce
(found at In The Mood For Noodles,
where it's credited to Vegan Table)

1 tablespoon sunflower oil
1 red onion, cut into crescents
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 cups orange juice
1/4 cup tamari
1/2 teaspoon chilli flakes
2 tablespoons ginger, minced
2 tablespoons arrowroot dissolved into 2 tablespoons water
1 mandarin, peeled and pith removed, each segment quartered

In a medium-large saucepan, heat the oil and add the onion. Let the onion brown but not burn, stirring it occasionally and allowing it to cook for 3-5 minutes. Add the garlic, orange juice, tamari and chilli flakes and allow it all to simmer for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the ginger and pour in the arrowroot mixture and cook for a couple more minutes until thickened. Take the sauce off the heat and stir in the mandarin pieces. Pour the sauce over stir-fried vegetables.