Stir-fry watery

Fix it now

1. Turn the heat to maximum and stop stirring. Let the liquid boil off.
2. If there is a lot, tip the liquid into a bowl, finish cooking the solids over high heat, then reduce the liquid separately and pour it back as a sauce. Nothing is wasted.
3. Spread everything out — use a second pan if you have one. Surface area is what you need.
4. If it is not going to recover in time, commit to it: add a little stock and a cornflour slurry, and make it a braised dish with a glossy sauce. It will be good, just not a stir-fry.

Why it happened

• Too much in the pan. The dominant cause. A domestic hob cannot evaporate liquid from a full wok fast enough.
• Wet vegetables. Washed and not dried, or straight from a bag with condensation in it.
• Frozen or defrosted ingredients added without being dried, or worse, added frozen.
• Salt or sauce added too early. Salt draws water out at exactly the wrong moment, and sauce added early simply boils.
• Pan not hot enough, or not allowed to recover between batches.
• Vegetables with a lot of water — courgette, mushroom, pak choi, beansprouts, tomato. These need higher heat and more space than most.
• Meat that was not patted dry, or that has been water-injected, which many cheaper cuts are.

Preventing it

1. Cook in two or three batches and combine at the end. This is the whole answer and everything else is a refinement.
2. Wash vegetables well ahead and dry them thoroughly — a salad spinner is genuinely useful here.
3. Pat meat dry and consider coating it lightly in cornflour, which absorbs surface moisture and helps it brown.
4. Get the pan properly smoking before anything goes in, and let it recover fully between batches.
5. Add the sauce at the very end, poured down the hot side of the pan so it hits metal and reduces instantly.
6. Salt at the end, not the beginning.
7. Use a wide flat pan rather than a round-bottomed wok on a domestic hob — more of it touches the heat.

The wettest ingredients, and what to do about them

Mushrooms

Mostly water. Cook them alone first, in a very hot dry pan, until browned. Then set aside and add at the end.

Courgette and aubergine

Salt and drain for twenty minutes, then pat dry. Or cook separately at high heat.

Beansprouts and pak choi

Add in the last thirty seconds only. They collapse and flood the pan if given longer.

Tomatoes

Add at the very end, or use a small amount of paste instead.

Frozen prawns or fish

Defrost completely and pat very dry. They carry an extraordinary amount of water.

Marinated meat

Lift it out of the marinade and drain it. Tipping the marinade in with it guarantees a boil.

Common questions