A Guide to 'Velveting'

The classic Chinese meat tenderizing technique with... no Chinese name?

• Click here to jump to the guide proper.

Today, I want to talk velveting – what it is, how to do it, and why I’m… actually not crazy about the terminology.

Let’s set the stage first. We talked before about what I call “The American Stir Fry” – this is a homestyle approach to stir fry that I’d often find in a lot of Western cooking blogs and the like. When my (Chris’s) mom used to make ‘stir fry’ when I was a kid, this is basically what she would do:

1. Fry some ingredients

2. Add a ‘stir fry sauce’

3. Simmer it down for a hot second

4. Thicken with a slurry

You can see the method in action in this old Buzzfeed Tasty recipe.

In the past, I used to get viscerally angry at “The American Stir Fry”. The seeming unwillingness for the English language food world to actually engage with the Chinese cooking tradition when trying to cook Chinese food felt… I dunno, let’s call it ‘frustrating’. Compared to my lived experience in China, it all felt like this cheap, slapdash bastardization. You know, the ol’ How Dare You Call This Kung Pao?

But the years have mellowed me out. And while it still might not be a proper Kung Pao, I’ve made my peace that the approach does make a lot of logistical sense to the average home Western cook. And yet, regardless of where you fall on the spectrum of that now-tired authenticity debate, there’s still something that’s impossible to deny:

Left: Exhibit A, an American Stir Fry; Right, Exhibit B, Black Pepper Beef from a Shunde Dai Pai Dong.

Exhibit A is different than Exhibit B. Visually, texturally. Even to someone whose only interaction with Chinese cuisines is what they get from their local takeout joint, the delta is obvious. At the very least? The meat in the Chinese stir fry is more tender.

And so, it seems, the western food world set out to explain that difference.

And in the end, they arrived at… “velveting”.

What Is Velveting?

So… here’s the thing. There’s no word in Chinese that neatly corresponds to the English term “velveting”. Like, go to the English language Wikipedia entry for Velveting and swap the page to Chinese, and - at least at the time of writing - it’ll erroneously link you to the Chinese page for slurry thickening.

This is a word that was invented by the English language food world – when and where exactly, perhaps someone more talented at researching than me could find. So what precisely velveting is seems to depend on who you ask:

Top row: Wikipedia, Better Homes & Gardens, Food and Wine; Bottom row: SeriousEats, Masterclass

• Wikipedia: Wikipedia ‘velvets’ by coating with cornstarch and egg white, then poaching in water or shallow frying in oil.

• Better Homes & Gardens: BH&G ‘velvets’ by soaking in a baking soda solution, then rinsing it off.

• Food and Wine: Food and Wine defines ‘velveting’ as mixing meat with starch, liquid, and oil. They also discuss soaking in a baking soda brine, but specify that it is done before ‘velveting’.

• SeriousEats: SeriousEats ‘velvets’ by coating in cornstarch, wine, and egg white, then shallow frying in oil. The article focuses on their homecooking hack of velveting by poaching in water instead of oil, which they dub “water-velveting”.

• MasterClass: MasterClass ‘velvets’ by either (a) sprinkling on baking soda, waiting 30 minutes, then washing it off, or (b) adding a slurry together with some “Asian” seasoning, waiting 30 minutes, and then… washing it off (??). To be frank, the linked article is complete garbage and I’d give a roughly 95% probability that it was AI generated.

Now, to be fair, I guess, to ChatGPT or Claude… Large Language Models are very much a classic case of GIGO. When there’s so much definitional looseness online, I don’t really blame it – or anyone, really – by getting a little confused. Human or AI, when it comes to people writing about Chinese food online in English… hallucinations seem to be par for the course.

That’s probably enough sass for today… so let’s try to be helpful. Here’s our definition for “velveting”:

Velveting refers to a set of Chinese techniques that’re used to tenderize meat to prepare for stir fries.

Now I don’t want to claim originality there, as The Woks of Life has a similar definition. But it’s in internalizing the plural there – techniques – that’s critically important.

I’ll get to my unhinged rant in just a second, but let’s get the meat of our post here out of the way at first – i.e. our actual velveting guide:

How to Velvet Meat in the Chinese Style

So again, while I’m not crazy about this word ‘velveting’… the idea of preparing meat for stir fries is something we talk about quite a bit on our channel. Proper prep before you stir fry matters much, much more than the BTUs of your stove, if you’re using a skillet or a wok, etc etc.

The following is what I’d consider the ‘classical’ or ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ case of velveting.

First, thinly slice your meat against the grain. For most applications, aim for ~3mm thick ‘sheets’ of meat. From there, if you like, you can slice those sheets again into small slivers (or even once again into a small dice). Alternatively, you could also cube the meat into a half centimeter dice.

Next, marinate the meat. Mix the meat in with the following ingredients, per ~200g:

• Salt, ¼ tsp

• Sugar, ½ tsp

• White -or- black pepper, ⅛ tsp

• Light soy sauce (生抽), ¼ tsp

• Dark soy sauce (老抽), ¼ tsp

• Shaoxing wine (料酒/绍酒), ½ tsp

• Egg white, ½ egg

• Cornstarch, 2 tsp

• Baking soda, ¼ tsp -or- Sodium Carbonate, 1/8 tsp -or- Kan Sui lye water, 1/8 tsp -or- Papain (Chinese Meat Tenderizer powder), 1/8 tsp

• Oil, to coat, ~1/2 tbsp

The above is applicable to Pork and Deboned Chicken.

For beef, also add in 2 tbsp of water and an optional 1 tsp of oyster sauce.

Shrimp, tofu, organ, and fish all have their own considerations during prep – you can check out our shrimp guide here and our (old) tofu guide here. Fish, organ, and bone-in poultry we’ll need to cover sometime in the future.

Finally, shallow fry the meat. I.e. “pass through oil”.

Get a wok with 1-2 cups of oil up to ~150C, or until the oil can lightly bubble around a pair of chopsticks. You could also use a pot or a skillet with ~1cm of oil (enough to submerge the ingredient).

Over a high flame, cook the ingredient until it visibly looks ‘done’, 30-45 seconds. Transfer to a spider or strainer to let the excess oil drip off before you add it to your stir fry.

The “Why” of velveting

Let’s take this one by one.

First - meat slicing against the grain will improve the final tenderness much in the same way it does a steak. I think many of you may be already familar with the concept, so explanation as to why I’ll lazily defer to Kenji for the curious.

Next, let’s take a look at that marinade.

The sugar, the pepper, the soy sauce, the Shaoxing wine, and that optional oyster sauce are all tossed in for flavor. These elements are very mix and match. In the southwest sometimes people reach for Baijiu in place of Shaoxing wine; in rural Guangdong it’s usually Mijiu rice wine; in Macau you might find white wine or Brandy. For a long time, we didn’t add pepper to our marinades (as Steph’s Dad usually doesn’t). In Yunnan, many marinades feature a sprinkle of Tsaoko and Star Anise powder. Definitely feel free to get creative with your flavors.

The dark soy sauce is added primarily to compensate for lower quality modern meat - i.e. meat that doesn’t get a ton of exercise. For the same reason veal’s a lot lighter in color than beef, a pig that’s been raised in a factory is going to produce much lighter meat than something that’s gotten fresh air in a proper farm:

No, that’s not beef - Pork (outdoor, in natural light) at a market in Qujing, Yunnan.

Dark soy sauce closes this gap. The quantity will depend on your meat quality. In Shunde, ⅛ tsp would generally be enough. In Bangkok, we often need to push it up to ½ tsp. Generally speaking, I consider pork quality in the west to be somewhere in between the two (thus our suggestion of ¼ tsp, but the final quantity is up to you).

Next, there’s salt. Pretty straightforward – tenderizes the meat much in the same way a dry brine would. The advantage of having super thin slices of meat is that the salt can do its thing pretty quick – no need to wait an hour or two like you would a chicken breast.

The cornstarch and egg white, meanwhile, help give the meat a bit of a soft ‘coating’. In Chinese language sources, it’s the softness of the coating is usually emphasized… but Shao Z over at Serious Eats makes the case that the coating can also provide a bit of a barrier to allow for more gentle cooking in a high heat environment. Also makes sense.

And of course, it’s that alkaline component that seems to get a lot of play on the English language internet. Whenever you see a YouTube video or TikTok advertising “the secret to a Chinese restaurant stir fry!”, odds are good that said secret is going to be… baking soda.

Now, I don’t mean to be too dour – adding alkalines to marinades is undeniably a cool trick to tenderize tough meat for stir fries. Baking soda is a common choice for sure, but two other alkalines are also used quite a bit in Chinese restaurants: Sodium Carbonate (碱面) and Kan Sui lye water (枧水). These are stronger alkalines that’re a bit more neutral in flavor, so can be a smart choice when you want to avoid that unpleasant baking soda aftertaste (Steph is quite sensitive to the taste of baking soda, so we often opt for Sodium Carbonate).

Further, there’s a third route that you can often see in a restaurant setting - papain, i.e. nenroufen (嫩肉粉). This is an ingredient that could sort of be thought of as the nuke in your ‘how-can-I-make-this-more-tender?’ arsenal. It’s an enzyme from the papaya plant and can sometimes work a little… too well? Be careful that you don’t marinate your meat too long in it, or else your meat could literally dissolve into little strings.

Finally, passing through oil cooks your meat evenly and (comparatively) more gently than stir frying it would. It’s also incredibly effective at expunging the excess moisture from the meat without crowding the wok – during stir-frying, a common issue is that the moisture from your ingredient can leech out, potentially causing steaming or simmering when you really wanted to fry the thing.

But what if I’m lazy, and don’t want to do the entire velveting process?

Good news? It’s super easy to take shortcuts here.

Why? Well… you don’t have to do everything in the above guide – in fact, for most Chinese stir fries, you don’t do everything:

• Most homecooks don’t pass through oil on the regular. Instead, they’ll pre stir-fry the ingredient in isolation and set it aside. If you want to split the difference and get something a little closer to that restaurant texture, you could also pre-stir-fry in a little extra oil (maybe… 5-6 tbsp instead of 2-3 tbsp). The excess oil you can then use for a different stir fry, or toss in an empty Tsingtao bottle for the trash.

• Further, you can also just… stir fry your ingredient direct, sans pre-fry. Yes, you have permission. For ideal results you might want a slightly more powerful stove (let’s say… ~14k BTU or above?), but ‘lowering your expectations’ is also a very valid route to go as well.

• Similarly, egg white is most common when passing through oil. If you were, say, stir frying direct… you might want to avoid a bunch of little bits of egg whites up in your final Kung Pao.

• The ‘tenderizing component’ – alkalines, enzymes, etc – is usually more of a restaurant approach. You add these ingredients in when other techniques don’t get you all the way there.

And so… this is why I’m not super crazy about this word “velveting”.

38 Year Old Man Yells at Clouds

Because like, all three of these are completely 100% valid options to prep your stir fry:

(you might want to cut back on the starch in the 2nd and 3rd cases, however)

And all three of them will net you more tender results than the aforementioned “American Stir Fry”. So… which of them are ‘velveting’? All of them? None of them?

And that’s not even getting into regional variations! For example, chefs up in the North seem to be quite particular about not adding salt to marinades. In the Muslim Northwest, often the alcohol is skipped. And, of course, there’s all of those flavor variations we discussed before…

It really drills down to a fundamental question, I think: what’s the purpose, even, of assigning a name to a cooking technique? Why do we say “make a béchamel”, and not… “fry equal parts flour and butter for a couple minutes, then add cold milk and cook to a spoon coating consistency”?

To me, the benefit is that it can give us a mental shortcut of sorts to communicate complex ideas. I can tell you that my Mac N Cheese is “a béchamel with cheddar, Velveeta or American, and a little hot sauce”. By using the word ‘béchamel’, a whole multitude of intermediate steps can be condensed. The communication – among cooks with some experience, at least – is more efficient.

But the downside to assigning a name to a cooking technique is that it can also be confusing and potentially intimidating to those that’re new to the sport. On Reddit, you can find a multitude of people that seem to struggle with their rouxs and their béchamels, but never (interestingly) sausage gravy.

Because really, ‘velveting meat’ involves three discrete techniques – cutting (改刀), marinating (腌制), and passing through oil (过油). One of the three steps is completely optional, and the remaining two have a staggering amount of variation within. So unlike “making a béchamel”, if I tell you that I’m “velveting the meat”, I’d then need to immediately follow up by explaining specifically how to I’m velveting the meat. And then frankly… what’s even the fucking point?

By flattening the universe of stir fry prep into one made up English word, it feels like we’ve got… all the cost, none of the benefit.

But maybe that just me, and I’m probably still a little too cranky. If it helps you get a handle on things, that’s all that matters.

Notes

On ‘water-velveting’ (a.k.a. ‘passing through water’). This is something that a lot of people have asked our opinion about - the aforementioned SeriousEats article by Shao Z is a good introduction. Basically, the idea is that because passing through oil at home is a pain, much the same result can be achieved by poaching in water instead.

Now, it should be stated that this is not an unknown technique or anything in Chinese cooking. Specifically for shrimp and seafood, this is not an uncommon move in high end Cantonese restaurants - however, in that case the technique often involves (1) passing through water, then (2) passing through oil, then (3) the final stir fry. This 1-2-3 approach helps retain moisture in (easily overcooked) seafood while creating a pleasingly crunchy texture. Further, throughout China, “passing through water” is used quite a bit for soups - from Sichuan’s smooth meat soup (滑肉汤) to Fujian’s thick beef soup (牛肉羹).

From what I can tell, the approach to pass through water to prep for stir-frying was first popularized in English by the late Barbara Tropp in her China Moon Cookbook (though it’s highly likely she got it from somewhere). Along the line, a number of food writers that we greatly respect have pushed the idea: Grace Young. Shao Z. Kenji.

These are some fantastically talented recipe writers.

We also can’t help but disagree with them.

Of course, I’m with them that poaching would undeniably be easier for most homecooks than shallow frying. But to us? Poached meat just behaves… different.

Let me show you what I mean. Here’s the excellent Kenji over on Babish’s Channel whipping up Pork and Cucumber using the water poaching technique:

And this is the equally fantastic Dongbei Meishijia making the same dish:

I think the difference in the final result is quite obvious.

Now, to be fair to Kenji, he was on an unfamiliar stove, in an unfamiliar kitchen. We’ve all been there. But here you can also see some of the potential trappings of this technique - you can easily bring too much water along for the ride, leading to what I call “The Stir Fry Death Spiral”. You can see him desperately trying to boil off some of the excess water, which… only leads to more water getting leeched out of the vegetable (and of course, the ingredient that you literally just boiled).

Again, to reiterate… we’ve all been there. This is not an indictment of Kenji - we’ve all had some moment where we were stir frying a little loose, and inadvertently hit The Doom Loop. And I’ve seen him execute the same move on his channel to tasty looking end results (especially with saucier stir fries). But what I’ve yet to see from the water-velveting boosters is why this technique is superior to what Dongbei Meishijia showed in the above video: is it really easier to bring a whole pot of water up to a boil than it is to just… pre-stir fry in a little extra oil? Or even just… pre-stir fry, period?

But that’s neither here nor there. This is a culinary opinion, not a moral judgement. If you like the technique, you should use it! And if you haven’t tried it, give it a whirl. We could just be overly fussy.

On the baking soda soak: There is, perhaps, one Chinese word that could potentially equate to ‘velveting’ - if we isolated the technique to what Buddha Lo was describing (and explicitly referred as… not-velveting) in the Food and Wine article above: i.e. soaking the meat in a baking soda brine, rinsing it off, and then continuing on your way.

This is a legit restaurant technique generally referred to as nenhua (嫩化) - literally, ‘tenderization’. In addition to baking soda, you could also use papain, or even ginger juice (as an aside, in Cantonese the rinsing process also has a name: beseoi, 啤水). Before researching for this video, it honestly never crossed my mind that people would actually want to try to replicate the process at home. And yet, when I think about takeout Chinese joints in the USA, it actually makes perfect sense - takeout style Chinese often reaches for thicker hunks of meat (‘big meat’ perhaps sells better in the USA?) and this technique can work wonders with large chunks of meat.

I’ve never done a baking soda soak. I don’t think you need to, really - but if that’s specifically what you’re in the market for, Woks of Life’s seems as fine of a starting point as any.