In Cantonese cooking the dish is often won before the wok gets hot. The marinade is where the meat finds its character, and getting it right is why a home stir-fry can taste like a place that has been open thirty years rather than somewhere that threw things in a pan. Our premium chicken sauce started as the marinade we used ourselves, then we bottled it once people kept asking what we did to the chicken.

A good marinade does two jobs at once: it tenderises and it seasons. Ours is built on fermentation the way we have done it since 1946, so natural enzymes soften the meat while the flavour works inward. In the UK, where chicken varies batch to batch and the water content shifts with the supermarket, that consistency is the difference between a dry dinner and a juicy one.

Mass-produced jars lean on thickeners and chemical shortcuts to fake the same effect in a day. We lean on time. The depth in our sauce comes from months in the Yuen Long tanks, which is why a little goes further than a heavy hand of salt and pepper. It is the easy route to a result that tastes considered rather than assembled.

For a busy household in Britain, having a reliable marinade means one less thing to get wrong at six o'clock. Stock the pantry with it and you are cooking from nearly eighty years of method, not a new label with a clever name. Try it on chicken first and see how much the prep was holding you back, then move on to pork and beef the same way.

A note on amounts: a tablespoon per 400 grams of meat is plenty for most cuts, and tougher pieces can sit longer without turning salty. The sauce already carries salt and aromatics, so you rarely need more than a pinch of sugar. Keep it simple and let the marinade do the talking.