tuftears | Cooking Experiment: Tangerine Beef

So, what exactly do you do with tangerine marmalade, you might ask?

Well, besides spreading it on toasted bread with peanut butter (I need to get a proper toaster), I figured that it would be perfect for making tangerine beef. But, when searching for recipes for tangerine beef, I found no recipes that called for marmalade! Which is understandable, it's kind of going the long way around, but still...

I looked at several tangerine beef recipes, and then... improvised! I think the results are very good.

I can't be too exact about the recipe, but roughly:

I started with 1 lb of flank steak.

I sliced the flank steak into bite-sized pieces. I cut the pieces much too thickly, unfortunately, so I'll have to cut them twice as thin next time. This led to the pieces needing to be cooked a little longer than would be optimal.

I then sprinkled about 1/2 to 1 teaspoon of powdered ginger, a dash of white pepper, a healthy sprinkling of crushed red pepper, and a tablespoon of low-sodium soy sauce, stirred, then added a heaping teaspoon of cornstarch, mixed to cover all the pieces evenly, and left it to marinade overnight.

The next day, I sliced up a carrot into thin julienne-style strips, an orange pepper into similar-sized strips. I prepared the green beans at around the same time too, snipping off the tips. Once the veggies were ready (and I had the green beans steaming in some chicken stock and garlic)...

I sautee'd the beef in a hot wok with a tablespoon of saffola oil. Once the beef had been seared on both sides, I swept the beef into a bowl and cooked the carrot and orange pepper strips.

Now I prepared the sauce. This would be half a cup of my homemade tangerine marmalade, but you could easily substitute the orange marmalade of your choice, plus a tablespoon of low-sodium soy sauce, and another healthy sprinkling of powdered ginger and crushed red peppers. I stirred this, then checked periodically on the veggies to see if they were tender enough.

Once the veggies were tender, I poured the sauce in, then turned the heat up and waited for it to start bubbling. After that, I stirred the veggies in, then put the beef back in.

Since I had ascertained the beef was not thoroughly cooked -- I had cut through a thicker section and noticed a suspiciously uncooked-looking middle -- I turned the heat down to a low level and put the cover on to let it steam through for a few more minutes, time I could use to microwave the leftover brown rice. (add a splash of water to leftover rice, heat for three minutes)

The result? Pretty nearly restaurant-quality tangerine beef. Yum!

It's not exactly the "crispy tangerine beef" you'd get at a restaurant. That involves deep-frying the beef and then mixing it up with the sauce of your choice. But flavor-wise, I'd say that the tangerine marmalade works great as the basis for tangerine sauce for beef or chicken.