A Beef Stir Fry to die for! Tender strips of beef with a sticky honey black pepper stir fry sauce, this is one of my favourite dishes at my local Chinese restaurant. This may well be the fastest stir fry recipe you make all year – 1 minute to cook the beef, 1 minute to make the sauce. And you’re DONE!
Beef Stir Fry with Honey Pepper Sauce
Chinese Beef with Honey Black Pepper Sauce is one of my favourite dishes that I order at Chinese restaurants. Never take out. It has to be at a restaurant because I love the theatrics of how it’s served – sizzling in a cast iron dish.
I don’t recreate the sizzle at home – I wish I could! If you have a cast iron dish or a small skillet so you can take it straight from the stove to the table, then you’ll get the sizzle. And I’m jealous.
But I have managed to recreate the glorious sauce for this stir fry! Sweet, salty and with a subtle peppery heat, this really does taste like what you get at restaurants. Look at it! Who could resist that??
What you need
I promised you simple, and I exaggerate not! Here’s all you need:
- Beef – rule of thumb for stir fries: if you’d serve it as steak, it’s ideal for stir fries! Use a decent-to-good tenderloin, flank, New York strip / Porterhouse / Sirloin (same thing!), boneless ribeye/scotch fillet. It doesn’t need to be a high end dry aged steak! To use a budget slow cooking cut of beef, tenderise it the Chinese way before using (“velveting beef”);
- Honey and black pepper – the two dominant flavours in the sauce!
- Oyster sauce – loaded with complex flavours, a secret weapon in Chinese/Asian cooking. Sub with Hoisin;
- Chinese wine aka Shoaxing wine – the secret ingredient in 99% of Chinese cooking. Read more about it here, sub with Mirin, dry sherry or cooking sake. For a non alcoholic sub, use chicken broth/stock (see recipe notes);
- Soy sauce – everyday, ordinary all purpose soy sauce. Or light soy. Don’t use dark soy – too strong!
- Garlic and onion – because not much food happens in this kitchen without these two!
How to make it
As with all stir fries, once you start cooking it moves super fast so be sure to have everything ready to toss into the wok before you start cooking!
In this recipe, we cook the beef first, then take it out – this is to control the cook time of the beef. Then we simmer the sauce in the pan until it becomes syrupy, then toss the beef back in.
Intense flavoured stir fry sauce!
My stir fry recipes tend to err on the side of generous amounts of sauce, because a stir fry isn’t a stir fry if you don’t get to eat sauce soaked rice. Nobody wants to be left with a bowl of plain rice after eating the stir fry!!
However, this is particular Beef Stir Fry is one of the exceptions. The flavour of this honey pepper stir fry sauce is quite intense, being a concentrated syrupy sauce as opposed to being thickened with cornflour/cornstarch like they usually are.
So you don’t want nor need loads of sauce. But there’s enough to carry plenty of flavour through the rice!
And another difference to most of my stir fry recipes – this Beef Stir Fry is light on the veg, whereas most stir fries are a kaleidoscope of colour of a small amount of protein with lots of veggies!
So serve this with a fresh side – like a crunchy Asian Slaw or a leafy Asian Side Salad with Sesame Dressing.
You could also sneak some veggies into the stir fry – some julienned carrots and similar shaped vegetables would be ideal.
Enjoy! – Nagi x
PS For a healthy low carb option try Cauliflower Rice – 77% fewer calories and 87% less carbs than rice.
Watch how to make it
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Beef Stir Fry with Honey and Black Pepper Sauce
Ingredients
Sauce
- 2 1/2 tbsp soy sauce (Note 1)
- 3 tbsp honey
- 1 1/2 tbsp Oyster sauce (sub Hoisin)
- 1 1/2 tbsp Chinese cooking wine , Mirin or dry sherry (Note 2)
- 2 tbsp water
- 1 tsp coarsely crushed black pepper (or 1/2 tsp normal ground black pepper)
Stir Fry
- 2 tbsp peanut oil (or vegetable or canola oil)
- 1 garlic clove , finely minced
- 1/2 onion , peeled and sliced
- 500g/1 lb thinly sliced tenderloin, flank, sirloin/Porterhouse/strip, or any other cut of steak suitable for stir frying (Notes 3)
Instructions
- Mix the Sauce ingredients in a bowl.
- Heat the oil in a wok or large heavy based skillet over high heat until it is smoking.
- Add the onion and garlic and cook for 1 minute or until the onion becomes translucent. Keep it moving so the garlic doesn't burn.
- Add the beef and stir fry for 1 minute until just cooked to your liking, then remove into bowl.
- Turn the heat down to medium high, pour in Sauce - it will start simmering very quickly! Let it cook for 1 minute or so until it becomes syrupy - the bubbles will be larger and caramel colour.
- Add the beef and onion back into the wok, along with any juices pooled on the plate. Toss in the sauce until just warmed through - 1 minute at most. Don't overcook the beef - that would be tragic!
- Serve immediately with rice - or for a low carb, low cal option, try Cauliflower Rice!
Recipe Notes:
Nutrition Information:
Originally published July 2015. Updated November 2019 with new photos, new video and the most important thing – Life of Dozer section added!!!
Life of Dozer
It’s Melbourne Cup tomorrow, the race that stops the nation! ??? We’re heading out to a lunch and Dozer’s coming. So here he is being fitted for his Race Day outfit! ? Turns out his hat is a little small…. need to find a bigger one!
Yum! What else can I say really. The flavour is devine.
Thanks so much Jenelle!! N x
We loved this, added a julienned carrot and capsicum plus a little extra garlic. Served over brown rice.
Makes a small amount of good meat go a lot further. Thank you!
Perfect Fleur! N xx
Hi Nagi from England! Had a spare steak and wanted to do something different with it.
Made this together with your vegetable stir fry. Both absolutely delicious, quick and easy! Always look forward to getting your emails and your updates and new recipes. Keep it up!
Soooooo good and so quick and easy to make. Absolutely love it. I added a yellow pepper with the onion too for a bit of veg. Delicious like everything else I’ve tried from your website. You rock!
Yum! Sounds great Becky!! N x
May I know original chinese name for this dish, naturaly in english transcription. It must be kind of niu rou. Right ??
Hi Peter, I’m not sure what the correct translation is but this is different to niu rou – N x
I would give this recipe 6 stars if I could! Before cooking it, I thought, how good could it be with so few ingredients? Well, it was fabulous. I had 1/2 lb of tri tip left after using the rest for a steak dinner the night before. so I used what i had left. Just to make sure that the meat would be tender, I mixed 2 tsp soy sauce and 1/2 tsp of baking soda together an squished it into the meat and waited 30 min. The other thing that i did was to add a nice hand full of baby spinach to the last 1 min of cooking, to sneak in more vegies, since I’m not a big vegetable eater. Husband loved it, i loved it. Will be making this at least once a week. Maybe add some par-cooked matchstick carrots to it next time when i cook the onion. Can’t wait until next week rolls around! Thank you so much for sharing this recipe.
Great flavour but no surprise. Every recipe from this site I’ve cooked has been good! Had to cook for a little bit longer as the beef cooled my pan. Maybe I’ll try it in batches next time so it fries rather than stews.
Hi Clayton, yes better to fry in batches to prevent it stewing! I’m so glad you loved it – N x
My husband and I just cooked this stir fry – so quick, so flavoursome, so delicious! We added about 2 cups of frozen stir fry veggies, and used brown rice so doubled the sauce. Enough for dinner and for us both for lunch tomorrow. Amazing recipe, thank you!
Perfect Mikela!
Another really good recipe. We really enjoyed this. I cooked brown rice in chicken stock in my pressure cooker and I added mushrooms.
Adding the mushrooms caused the sauce to become to watery, so next time, I will cook the mushrooms separately and drain them before I add them back to the sauce. I will probably also go either 150% or 200% with the pepper. It was very tasty, but I could have used more pepper.
Well done. We will definitely make this again.
Yet another amazing recipe! After being stuck in a rut of same old same old cooking I’ve tried new recipes from you numerous times over the last fortnight, every single one has been brilliant! My husband exclaimed “omg! Another favourite, cook this again” tonight when having your Salisbury steaks.
I’m also pleased to say that Christmas is consisting of all your recipes.
I love reading your posts that go along with the recipes, it makes everything so clear and easy to follow. Thank you for all your work 🙂 it’s made this one happy (and very full) household.
Whoops! I posted on the wrong recipe … although this stir fry is tomorrow nights dinner lol
Hi Nagi, I’m cooking this tomorrow night. How much chicken stock do I need to use to replace the wine and water? Thank you for including a non-alcoholic alternative.
Hi Shirin, you’re subbing both the water and cooking wine with stock which equals 3 1/3 tbls in total – N x
Hey could we slow cook this instead?