Choose from Four Options

• $15 for two dinner buffets ($27.98 value)
• $30 for four dinner buffets ($55.96 value)
• $9 for two lunch buffets valid from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. ($15.98 value)
• $18 for four lunch buffets ($31.96 value)

Stir-Fry: Even Faster Food

Dig into Groupon’s guide to stir-fry to learn more about this staple of Chinese cuisine.

One of the simplest cooking methods around, stir-frying is a traditional Chinese method of rapidly cooking food by stirring it in a wok or sauté pan over intense heat. After warming oil in the pan, the cook adds bite-sized pieces of meat or vegetables and tosses them with a spatula, frying them within minutes. Unlike many other methods, a stir-fry takes longer to prepare than to cook, and that speed helps retain the ingredients’ natural juices, leaving the vegetables crisp and the meat tender.

Although now part of our common lexicon, the term stir-fry is more an approximation than a literal translation. It comes from the book How to Cook and Eat in Chinese, originally published in 1945 and generally considered the first authentic attempt at adapting Chinese recipes for Western readers. Although a doctor named Buwei Yang Chao collected the recipes, she spoke no English, so her husband—a comparative-linguistics professor—took on the duty of writing the text. Among his other translations—both successful (potstickers) and now forgotten (wraplings)—Professor Chao chose stir-fry to stand in for the Chinese ch’ao. “Roughly speaking,” he wrote, “ch’ao may be defined as a big-fire-shallow-fat-continual-stirring-quick-frying of cut-up material with wet seasoning. So we shall call it stir-fry.”