Recipe & Video: Eggplant and Chicken Miso Stir-fry

Looking for that perfect simple stir fry that goes great with a bowl of rice? Look no further. This delicious authentic Japanese food recipe can be whipped up from scratch and will have the whole dinner table asking for seconds. You will soon have a steaming pan of eggplant and chicken miso stir fry ready to feed the entire family.

The Five Styles of Stir Frying

All stir fries are not created equal. In fact, in Asian countries, there are many different techniques that must be mastered in order to get the perfect stir fry for a particular set of ingredients. Our recipe here calls for a moist stir fry. However, those of you trying to really master the art of Japanese cooking should also play around with other options. Here we will briefly cover the five most basic styles of stir frying currently used in Japanese food culture:

Simple Stir Frying

A simple stir fry is when you cook a single ingredient, like beef for example, in spices and oil to create a basic sauce. This lets you control the temperature and cooking time of a single ingredient. Professional chefs often simple stir fry various ingredients separately before combining them for a finished dish.

Dry Stir Frying

When dry stir frying you use the moisture released by the ingredients to cook them in instead of creating a sauce. Oil is sometimes used, as well as water as stock, to give them something to cook in at the beginning.

Moist Stir Frying

Moist stir frying involves adding an already made sauce to the ingredients while they are in the pan. This is often done at the end of the stir frying process. By doing so gives the ingredients something to simmer in as they finish the cooking process.

Flash Frying

Also known as extreme heat stir frying, flash frying involves pre-heating oil to somewhere between 400 and 450 degrees. Then the ingredients are placed in the hot oil where they are instantly seared. This technique works best with thinly sliced meats and vegetables.

Scramble Stir Frying

This traditional Japanese stir fry technique involves using a little egg batter and cream to create a fluffy base in the pan. After this base is partly cooked, the other ingredients are added to it. The end result is a lightly battered finish that helps to add substance and flavor to basic vegetable and meat stir fries.

Cooking Tips:

• Be sure to cook eggplant thoroughly. This miso stir fry recipe uses water (moisture) coming out from eggplant as well as seasoning ingredients to stir fry, so this step is very important. Improperly cooked eggplant is hard and unsavory and can ruin the whole dish
• You can make a vegetarian version by not using chicken. Tofu can be substituted instead, check out our guide to cooking tofu the right way to make sure you get the right flavor and consistency.

Print

Eggplant and Chicken Miso Stir-fry

Course Appetizer, Side Dish

Cuisine Japanese

Ingredients

• 1 Boneless Skinless Chicken Thigh
• 1 tsp Soy Sauce
• 1 tsp Sake
• 1 Eggplant
• 1 Green Peppers
• Sesame Oil, for cooking

Seasoning

• 2 Tbsp Miso
• 2 Tbsp Mirin
• ½ Tbsp Soy sauce
• 1 Tbsp Sugar

Instructions

1. Remove any excess fat from the chicken, and cut into small pieces.
2. Rub the soy sauce and sake all over the chicken pieces.
3. Remove the stem from the eggplant, and cut it vertically in half. Then cut it into small pieces.
4. Cut the green pepper in half and remove the seeds. Then cut it into small pieces.
5. Mix the ingredients for the seasoning together in a small bowl.
6. Pour sesame oil in a pan, place eggplants, put the lid on, and heat over medium heat. Let it cook for about 5 minutes.
7. Once the eggplants are tender, add chicken and stir-fry on medium-high heat for about 2 minutes.
8. Add green peppers and keeping cooking until chickens begin to brown.
9. Pour in the seasoning mixture and stir-fry until any excess liquid is gone.