Peanut Stir-Fry Sauce

This is the perfect creamy peanut sauce for stir-fries: a little sweet, a little spicy, and totally delicious! This easy recipe is inspired by Thai peanut sauce. It uses sriracha for a little bit of heat and soy sauce and rice vinegar for more flavor. But it's vegan, so there's no fish sauce. And there's also no coconut milk, so it's easy to make in small batches for stir-fries.

If you're using a natural peanut butter that needs to be refrigerated, you will likely need to heat the sauce a bit to get the peanut butter to blend with the other ingredients. However, if you're using traditional peanut butter and it blends easily for you, the sauce can be eaten without heating it.

This tasty peanut sauce is versatile and it can be used as a pasta sauce, dipping sauce with spring rolls, salad dressing, or stir-fry sauce. You can also toss it with your favorite vegan protein, like my crispy air-fryer tofu.

To stir-fry vegetables, choose vegetables that will hold up well and don't release a lot of moisture during cooking. Some vegetables that are great for stir-fries include red bell peppers, mushrooms, carrots, snow peas or sugar snap peas, broccoli florets, cabbage, green beans, water chestnuts, and baby corn. Cook your vegetables in a large carbon steel wok over medium-high heat for 2-8 minutes, or until they're just tender but still retaining most of their crispness.

Be sure to use an oil with a high smoke point, such as peanut oil, canola oil, vegetable (soybean) oil, and grapeseed oil. Avoid frying with extra-virgin olive oil or sesame oil, since these oils have low smoke points. This spicy peanut sauce can be added directly to your stir-fries at the end and warmed up over medium heat. For more detailed instructions, check out my tofu stir-fry or my peanut noodle stir-fry recipe.