I have a question about removing liquid from a dish

I have a question about removing liquid from a dish.

So I regularly make the following:
3 peppers
1 onion
chicken breast.

I chop up and cook the chicken in the pan, then when it's cooked, I throw in the chopped up vegetables, cover for like 10-15 on low heat, then pull the top off once everything is cooked.

At which point I have a pan full of liquid. I've never once found a way to get all that fucking liquid out. High heat burns everything, low heat just slowly but surely sucks all the liquid out of the vegables and bubbles it away until it's a mush.

Medium is somewhere in the middle but certainly doesn't leave me with a non-soupy thing with cooked but not mushy vegetables

What is the trick here? I just don't get it.

salt, you dipshit

Just dump some salt in the pan at that stage?

Your technique is the problem. Cooking peppers and onion for 10-15 min releases a lot of water. If you have the lid on the pan then all that water will be trapped inside. Thus, you have two problems:
1) you're overcooking watery vegetables
2) keeping the lid on is trapping that water in your dish.

The solution is a stir-fry. Use very high heat to cook hotter-but-faster. Keep the lid off to avoid trapping moisture. Stop the veggies from burning by constantly tossing them in the pan. Your dish should take a total of about 2-3 minutes to cook if you have the correct heat level. (cooking time only; not counting the time to cut & prep).

So cook the chicken first then stir fry in the vegetables at very high heat? Or do the chicken at high heat as well? Always worry that'll leave me with raw inside cooked/burnt outside.

This is a myth and will not work. Proof: do you know what has more salt than anywhere? The ocean. Do you know what has more water than anywhere? The ocean. Salt won't remove water.

All of it at high heat. How do you expect to brown the chicken if not at high heat?

The food won't burn if you keep it constantly moving. That's why it's called a "stir fry". You prevent the middle from being undercooked by the size of the pieces you cut the food into. Small pieces will cook through quickly.

not the person your replying to, but i would pull the chopped chicken out of the pan when its done or almost done. and cook your veg at high heat in what ever fat you like. when they are cooked to your liking add your chicken back to the pan to warm it back up or finish til well done.
or vise versa, cook your veg first and pull it and then cook the chicken and add your veg when chicken is done. either way will work

Alright I'll try this next time. Thanks bro. How high do you suggest I go? Hot as I can?

Salt can and does remove water, but not in this context. If you put salt on a veggie or on meat then osmosis will result in water being pulled out of the cells in the food into the exterior surface where the salt is. But that's of zero help for OP because it's no different than the problem s/he's already experiencing.

But it is very useful if you want to, say, remove some moisture from veggies before making a salad, or to dry out the outside layer of a steak to get a better sear. In that case you salt the raw food, let it sit for a while, then absorb that water using kitchen towels before proceeding with the recipe.

>Hot as I can?
Yes.

Watch some videos of chinese cooks doing stir-fries. I don't mean home cooks, I mean pros.

He is probably also overcooking the chicken
If OP just wants to have the same meal, after cooking the chicken, wrap it in foil and finish the veggies on high heat on the pan

They all use huge woks. And maybe lots of oil? I'm not sure. I'll check it out though thanks

Cook the vegetables in a separate pan and dont cover then. Just sautee them at a medium-high heat.

You can stirfry in any pan large enough to hold the food with some extra room for stirring. And yes, you need some oil to fry, but you really don't need that much since the ingredients won't have time to stick. It's as much for flavor as anything, which is why I use sesame oil for it.

The chicken takes longer to cook than the veggies. So ideally:

Chicken goes in the pan. After about a minute or so on high heat it should be browned on the surface but not fully cooked through. Then the veggies go in. The veggies will cook, and the chicken will finish cooking, during the next couple of minutes.

As long as OP doesn't overcrowd the pan that should work very easily.

>The chicken takes longer to cook than the veggies.
Depends on the vegetable. I throw carrots and broccoli in before chicken.

You shouldn't be covering it with a lid if you want the liquid to reduce. Leave the lid off, and do it on medium heat while you keep stirring the vegetables so it cooks evenly.

Or you could just add a little flour/cornstarch to thicken the liquid instead, and turn it into a sauce.

There shouldn't be much oil involved. Some, sure, but not an excessive amount.

The keys to watch are when they add what ingredients to the wok, and what the consistency of the dish looks like before proceeding to the next step. You can also get a feel for the heat levels involved by listening to the sounds the foods make as they go in.

Sesame oil is a poor choice for cooking with. It has a very low smoke point and it burns easily. It's used for dressings and finishing, not for actually cooking with.

Ideally you'd learn to toss the food in the pan like pic related. It looks hard but it's very easy to do, just practice a little with some dry beans in your pan. That provides much easier mixing of ingredients than trying to stir them with a spoon and less chance of burning.

Sure, but OP's recipe contains neither carrots nor broccoli. It's onions and peppers, both of which cook fast. And of course cooking time is affected by the size you cut the ingredients into. Smaller pieces cook faster.

>broccoli before chicken
now you know why its overcooked and all mushy.

My broccoli is very crunchy thank you. After chicken it only has enough time to get hot, and doesn't actually cook.

Pretty much this. Also might be worth sweating the veggies for a bit prior to cooking.

>Sesame oil is a poor choice for cooking with. It has a very low smoke point and it burns easily
Oh, will you FUCK OFF with this stupid ass meme. Yes, I'm triggered, thanks for the concern. Sesame, olive oil are perfectly fine to cook with, unless you're stupidly retarded. I honestly don't know how fucked one must be to manage to actually burn oil. Butter, maybe, if you're not careful, but even that is hard to manage as long as you've an opposable thumb (even one is enough) and an IQ thats higher than room temperature in fucking siberia in the middle of the winter (when central heating's fucked).
I've been cooking with both for years, and never had any problems whatsoever, and yes, the food I cook generally is good.

sorry, I forgot we were talking stir-fry and not pan dishes, disregard my earlier comment. (I still don't like broccoli, but that's not the point here)

Wow, you are mad.

Are you perhaps using refined sesame oil? That would be OK to cook with, but at least in the West that is very very hard to find. Most sesame oil is the roasted kind. You would instantly detect the burning smell if you put that in a hot pan.

As for olive oil, sure, most olive is perfectly fine for high heat cooking. Extra-virgin though? definitely not. Especially at stir-frying temps. You can easily google the smoke point of various oils.

>refined sesame oil
Do you mean the darker one, made from rosted seeds? If so, yes, it is a bit harder to come by around my parts, but even so, stir-fry is perfectly doable with the cold-pressed paler sesame oil. I don't use olive oil for stirfry, but just because the taste doesn't fit, but I do use it for most of my pasta sauces, when I need to fry onions or garlic.

Also, if you have any, peanut oil is really nice for curries and creamy "asian-style" noodle sauces, especially if you add some peanut butter/salted or toasted peanuts to it later on.
But the most versatile/neutral tasting oil is rapeseed (canola for the retards out there)

sorry for all the buts. here's one more.

>Do you mean the darker one, made from rosted seeds?

The darker one is roasted. It's bad for cooking.
The lighter one is refined. It's fine for cooking.

>>peanut oil
Yes, I buy that in 5-gallon jugs. It's my go-to for the deep fryer and also for very high heat use like stir fry or searing meat.

>>Canola
I know that's popular, but I personally don't like the taste of it. Canola oil is a special version of rapeseed oil. The name means "CANada Oil Low Acid". Rapeseed contains Eucric acid, and Canola is bred to have a lower than normal Eucric acid content. That stuff tastes awful. Canola might be "low acid" but it's sure as hell not "no acid". I avoid it as a manner of personal preference.