6 Best And 5 Worst Vegetables To Stir Fry

Stir fry is a quick and easy way to add some Asian flavor to your weeknight dinners. This dish traditionally involves cooking vegetables and a protein like chicken breast or beef over very high heat in a wok, which makes the ingredients cook up fast and crispy. While there are many ingredients involved in stir fry — the sauce, the meat, the oil, and the garnish, broadly speaking — the most important one is the vegetables. Even if you add meat to your stir fry, it is almost always the vegetables that stand out the most. But which ones should you use?

There are thousands of recipes out there for stir fry with dozens of different vegetable choices. Basically, you can use whatever vegetables you like ... but you should be aware that some work much better than others. The best stay crisp and give your stir fry a nice crunch, while the worst turn mushy over the high heat and make everything soggy and mildly gross. Most stir fry experts recommend choosing just two vegetables to cook with so that you can better coordinate their cooking time, but it can be difficult to pick them when you haven't cooked this dish before. Luckily, we're here to help. Here's a list of the vegetables you absolutely should use in stir fries — and those that you absolutely should leave out.

With the exception of zucchini (which can actually make a lovely addition to your stir fry), squash is one ingredient that should be kept far away from your wok. This is because squash contains a lot of water and as it cooks, that water seeps out and into the dish, making everything soggy. Squash is also not usually a quick-cooking vegetable. It's best for dishes that involve baking or roasting, so that it can become soft and flavorful over time in the oven — which is basically opposite from how stir fries are made.

There is a potential exception to this rule, however: You can deep fry squash in oil with a tempura coating. This keeps the moisture inside the veggie while helping the outside cook up crispy and crunchy. Notably, though, this can't really be added to a stir fry, unless you toss it in at the end — otherwise it will get burnt or become mushy anyway. But it's always an option if you want to create your own kind of dish, or you're feeling especially daring.

The potato is one of the most useful, versatile vegetables there is. You can use spuds in anything from soups to French fries to mashed potatoes to roasts. But there is one thing you shouldn't do with them: stir fry.

While it's technically possible to use potatoes in your stir fry, the reality is complicated. Potatoes have a tendency to get burned on the outside before they get cooked on the inside. This is because the starch they contain caramelizes quickly, leaving the outside brown and the inside raw. Since the whole idea behind stir fry is to cook things over a high heat very quickly, potatoes just don't work.

They might (emphasis on might) work, however, if you do a bit of extra prep work. Soaking your potatoes for a few hours can help to remove that starch on their surface — but your work isn't finished there. Next, you have to par-cook them, which means boiling them in salty water for five minutes so they start to soften. Finally, you have to let them dry completely on a paper towel. Then, and only then, can you attempt to pan fry them in a bit of oil.

Tomatoes, like potatoes, are an extremely versatile and well-loved vegetable. But — just like with potatoes — using them in stir fry is inadvisable. There are two main reasons why tomatoes should not see the inside of the wok. The first is that they're just too watery. Stir fries are known for their crisp vegetables. This is something that is almost impossible to achieve with tomatoes, which not only get soggy on their own when they cook, but also release water, making everything else soggy as well.

The second reason is a science-based one. Tomatoes should not be used in a cast iron pan like a wok because their acidity creates a chemical reaction with the pan that strips away the cast iron's seasoning, resulting in food that doesn't cook evenly (in this instance and in any future dish you try to prepare in it). It also just really tastes bad. While it might be okay to cook tomatoes in a cast iron pan for a couple of minutes, the longer they're there, the more their acidity eats away at the pan and the more the tomatoes themselves take on a strong, metallic taste that will completely ruin your stir fry.

Even though kale is part of the cruciferous vegetable family alongside broccoli and cauliflower (and is a fantastic source of vitamins A, C, and K to boot), it does not work well in stir fry. It can be very bitter, which means that it doesn't play well with many other ingredients. It can also be tough if you don't cut off the larger, thicker stems, and the leaves themselves can get soggy, over-saturated, and just plain icky if they're cooked too long, or in a dish that has a lot of added moisture.

Not cooking kale long enough also comes with its own set of gastrointestinal issues, which is extra problematic for a quick-cooking dish like stir fry. Raw or under-cooked kale can be difficult for the digestive system to process and can cause abdominal issues like gas and bloating. Even if you cook it thoroughly enough, a stir fry still isn't a good way to eat kale, because the process takes away its nutrients, proteins, and antioxidant properties.

First, a bit of disambiguation. For this section, we are talking about pickled cucumbers, which most people refer to simply as "pickles," "gherkins," etc., not about other vegetables that have been pickled. The latter can go quite well in a stir fry, if properly drained first. But the former will give you some odd, off-puttingly tangy results.

Pickles, whether they are sweet, dill, or bread and butter, have a very strong taste thanks to their fermentation process in brine with various herbs, spices, and seeds. If you add them to a stir fry, that taste will quickly cover up any other flavor you have going with a heavy layer of vinegar. Pickles can also change consistency when they're heated, and may turn out burnt or mushy if you try to fry them in a pan with other vegetables. These types of pickles are best left for sandwiches, potato salads, or even pasta salads, where they can add a bit of zing without taking over the whole dish.