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1. Toss meat, seafood, or tofu with soy sauce and sherry in medium bowl; set aside. Combine all sauce ingredients in a second small bowl. Divide vegetables into two or three batches according to ingredient list.

2. Heat 12 or 14-inch nonstick skillet over high heat, 4 minutes (pan should be so hot, you can hold your outstretched hand 1 inch above its surface for no more than 3 seconds); add 1 tablespoon oil (add 2 tbsps for tofu or fish) and rotate pan so that bottom is evenly coated. Let oil heat until it just starts to shimmer and smoke. Check heat with hand. Drain meat, seafood, or tofu, then add to pan and stir-fry until seared and about three-quarter cooked (about 20 seconds for fish, 60 seconds for meat, 2 minutes for tofu, 2 1/2 to 3 minutes for chicken). Spoon cooked meat or seafood into serving dish. Cover and keep warm.

3. Let pan come back up to temperature, 1 or 2 minutes. When hot, drizzle in 2 teaspoons of oil, and when oil just starts to smoke, add vegetables from first category. Stir-fry until vegetables are just tender-crisp, about 2 minutes. Leaving first batch in pan, repeat with remaining vegetables, cooking each set of vegetables until tender-crisp, or for fourth category, wilted. Add about a teaspoon of oil for each new batch (amount of oil will depend on skillet you are using nonstick pans require about a teaspoon; other pans may require 2 teaspoons). Clear center of pan and add garlic, ginger, and scallions. Drizzle with 1/2 teaspoon of oil. Mash into pan with back of a spatula. Cook for 10 seconds. Remove pan from heat and stir garlic/ginger mixture into vegetables for 20 seconds.

4. Return pan to heat and add cooked meat, seafood, or tofu. Stir in sauce and stir-fry to coat all ingredients, about 1 minute. Serve immediately with rice.

Serves 4

Notes

The secret to good stir-frying is lots of heat, so preheating the pan is crucial. During cooking, there should be lots of smoke, lots of steam, and lots of sizzle. Otherwise, you are braising the food and it will not develop the proper texture or flavor. To give you as much surface area as possible, you should use a large (twelve to fourteen-inch) nonstick skillet. This recipe can be halved to serve two (if you halve the recipe, the cooking times will decrease) but it cannot be increased, as a home stovetop has insufficient heat to cook greater quantities of vegetables. You can use an equal amound of beef, seafood or tofu, keeping in mind they all need to be cut into small, even-sized pieces. The vegetables are grouped in batches, listed in the approximate order in which they should be added to the pan.

Why this recipe works:
To perfect our stir-fry recipe so that the food was browned and caramelized rather than pale and bland, we used a large nonstick skillet, 12 to 14 inches in diameter, rather than a wok, since the flat surface browned food better on a conventional stovetop than did the sloped surface of the wok. Even with a skillet, we didnt have enough heat to quickly sear and cook either large amounts or large pieces of food. For that reason, we cut the vegetables in our stir-fry recipe into smaller pieces so they cooked quickly and cooked relatively small amounts of food at one time.

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