07.08.08

A Wok Cooking Cheat-Sheet for Western Cooks

Posted in cooking, food, how to, kitchen learning at 5:22 pm by Hanne Blank

Tonight I am going to be giving a wok lesson to my friend and wonderful houseguest, A.  She is a brilliant and inventive cook in her own right, experienced and adventurous and technically adept, the kind of person who, walking through a fish market with you, will point to some particularly nice-looking whole fish and comment that she’s always wanted to make “that dish where you make a whole steamed salmon and replace the scales with scales made of cucumber.”

This makes her both a perfect person to whom to give a wok cooking lesson, and a very daunting person to whom to give a wok cooking lesson… because you know she’ll actually be trying to use the information you impart, which means you’d better get it right and present it in a way that is useful.

Thus I am writing down a few notes, so that hopefully the salient things I wish to impart to her about using the wok will be at the forefront of my mind in an hour or so when we meet up in the kitchen.  On the theory that these notes might be useful to some of you (or that those of you more experienced and knowledgeable than I might have things to add or clarifications to make).

Notes On The Wok Itself

• The wok is concave for a reason.  It concentrates heat and makes it easy to keep food moving.  One may stir-fry in a flat-bottomed pan, and indeed some people prefer to, but it is considerably more difficult because the food simply does not move around in the vessel as gracefully or easily.
• Woks have three basic zones when in use.  The very bottom of the wok, the portions where the flame actually kisses the metal, is hottest and is where you do 90% of your cooking.  The next  2-3 inches up the sides of the wok are hot, but not as much so as the bottom center.  They are a good place to let tougher foods, or larger pieces of foods, sit for a bit if they need longer cooking times. Finally the upper edges of the wok are the coolest part of the wok.  They are a good place for things to rest if you don’t really want them to cook too much more but you do want them to stay hot, for instance, while you prepare a sauce in the bottom of the pan.  Pay attention to these three zones of the wok while you cook and you can take good advantage of the temperature differentials. (I am particularly fond of finishing/thickening sauces in the bottom of the wok while the cooked solids stay hot on the wok walls, ready to be combined back into the sauce as soon as the sauce is ready.)
• Because the bottom center is where the heat is best, you want to pay attention to how much food is in the wok at any given time so that there is only so much food in the wok as will effectively be cookable in this bottom center portion of the wok.  The right volume of food can be tricky to gauge, at first, with vegetables whose volumes reduce greatly during cooking, particularly mushrooms and leafy greens.
• Try not to use soap on your wok.  A very stiff-bristled brush plus boiling water will get most things off of an even moderately well seasoned wok.  After using your wok, clean it, then put it back on the heat to dry it.  After the water has cooked off the surface, rub the wok all over (inside and out) with a few drops of vegetable oil (not nut or olive oil, the smoke points are too low) using a paper towel, then heat it until it just smokes, then turn off the heat and let it cool.
• To season a new wok, first wash the hell out of it with dish soap and very hot water to get rid of machine oil.  Then roughly chop a large bunch of chives and stir-fry them in ample hot vegetable oil or lard until they are very well cooked.  Discard the chives, and wipe the wok clean with a paper towel, wiping off all but the faintest trace of oil, but making sure that you wipe that sheen of oil over the entire wok, inside and out.
• Try not to let a wok sit for a lengthy period with liquids in it, and particularly not acidic liquids.  As with cast iron pans, this can harm the season on the pan and may lead to rusting.  If you do end up cooking highly acid liquids in your wok or letting it sit for a while with liquid in it, be sure that when you clean it, you dry it and oil it as above to protect the metal and restore the season.

Preparing Ingredients for Wok Cooking

• Prepare all ingredients and all sauces prior to beginning wok cooking.  Wok cooking goes quickly.  You don’t have time to wash and pare and chop and marinate and such while you are cooking.  (No, really.  I mean it.)  Mise en place is not just a good idea, it’s the law.
• Ingredients, when chopped, should be of pieces of roughly the same size so that the cooking time for any given piece is approximately the same.
• Irregularly shaped pieces of chopped ingredients are often easier to stir-fry than uniform slices, as uniform slices often stick together along their cut sides.
• Strategize your mise en place according to cooking times.   For instance, bok choy stems take longer to cook than the leaves, so if you cut the bok choy so that you have chunks of stem and pieces of leaf, put the leaves in the bottom of the bowl of uncooked bok choy, and the stem chunks on top, so that you can easily add the stems first so they can have extra cooking time.  And so on.
• Place ingredients near the wok in the order in which they are to be cooked, if at all possible.  Mushrooms take longer to cook than spinach leaves, for example, so if you are using them both in one dish, put the mushrooms closer to the wok because you’ll be adding them to the wok first.
• A cup or bowl containing broth or water, and a second cup/bowl containing a thin paste of cold water and either cornstarch or potato starch are invaluable, both for adding liquid to dishes that require it for optimal cooking and for creating or thickening sauces.

Wok Cooking Method Tips

• Always add cold or room temperature oil to a hot (just at the point of smoking) wok.  Don’t add oil or food to a cold wok — it will spatter and it will stick.  Heat the wok and then pour the oil in a circle around the walls of the wok about halfway up.
• Bring the oil up to heat before adding the food.  How to tell how hot your oil is?  Simple, stick an unvarnished bamboo chopstick tip in it.  You can gauge the hotness of the oil by how rapidly bubbles form around the tip of the chopstick.  The more bubbles, and the faster they appear, the hotter the oil.  Alternately you can drop in a single small piece of minced ginger (not garlic, garlic burns too easily) or green onion and gauge from the intensity and rapidity of the bubbles that form around that.
• Aromatics are almost always added to the oil first, before any other food.  In Chinese cooking this most often means ginger and/or garlic.  Add the aromatics and stir them around in the oil briskly.  Many cookbooks will tell you to cook the aromatics just until the scent blooms; I feel that this is a little conservative and prefer to cook the aromatics a few seconds more, until they begin to color.  If you are not yet adept with the wok, stick with the scent cue, but eventually I encourage you to experiment with the color cue to see which you prefer.  I find that the flavors develop more with the additional few seconds of heat.
• The stirring is just as crucial as the frying when you are stir-frying.  Particularly when you have just added food to a wok, keep it moving in order to coat all the pieces as evenly as possible with the hot oil that will cook them.  This is particularly crucial with things that soak up oil like mushrooms and eggplant, but is nearly as important with other ingredients, because the hot oil starts the cooking process and you want the individual pieces of food to all be cooked as simultaneously as possible.
• Stir-frying, dry-frying, and deep-fat frying in woks are all optimally done at very high temperature, the hotter the better without burning oil or food.  This can be difficult to achieve on Western stoves, which lack the BTUs or the burner shape to optimally heat most woks.  Two things that help keep the heat high are to be unafraid of getting the belly of the wok into the actual flame (don’t worry, it won’t hurt it) and to keep the amounts of food in the wok on the small side.  Cooking in multiple smaller batches, if necessary, helps a lot, particularly with deep-fat frying.
• Do not be afraid to let residual heat finish cooking a dish for you.  Particularly with delicate leafy vegetables, fish, and shellfish, all of which suffer badly with overcooking, it is almost always wisest to cook them until they are almost, but not quite, done, trusting that the carryover heat from that hot hot wok will finish the job for you as you put the food into a serving dish and get it to the table.  It will.  Thickened sauces, or particularly oily ones (some Chinese dishes are sauced solely with the highly-flavored oils/fats generated by their cooking process) will trap more heat, and keep it on the surface of foods, than more watery pan juices, whether they are rendered by the heat (like the liquid that renders from most vegetables when they are cooked) or added, like soy sauce, vinegar, etc.  It is worth bearing in mind when considering how effective the residual heat will be and how much further it will likely cook the food.

Those are the basics.  Some of it I learned by trial and error, some by reading, some by talking to Chinese cooks.  I am really not that much more than a toddler in the grand scheme of Chinese cookery, given the intense, involved, detailed realm of expertise and knowledge that is the gastronomy of China, so there is quite a lot that I freely admit I really don’t know (yet!).  But I do know that armed with the above information, a wok, and a bit of willingness to experiment, you can learn to cook pretty darned creditable, if not necessarily fancy, Chinese dishes at home.

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