Having written out my kimchi fried rice recipe last night, I thought I would follow up with a short list of essential stir-frying tips learned from many years of both excellent teachers and trial-and-error (which is sometimes the best teacher of all).
Equipment:
- Do not stir-fry in a nonstick pan. Stir-frying requires very high temperatures and nonstick coatings can emit toxic gases (particularly fatal to birds) at high temperatures.
- Stir-fry over gas or live flame. Period. If you have only an electric or induction cooktop at your disposal, and you still want to stirfry, go to an Asian market and buy yourself a portable butane burner and a passel of cans of butane. These are easy to use, safe, inexpensive, and deliver a reasonable number of BTUs for stir-frying. You may also want one of these even if you do have a gas stove, because many Western home gas ranges have a pretty anemic output even at full blast.
- If you use a wok, make sure it’s stable when you set it on the burner. Use a flat-bottomed wok, a good sturdy wok ring, or if you are lucky enough to find one, a cast-iron wok grate designed for Western-style stoves. It’s too dangerous to do otherwise. Don’t argue with me, you don’t like boiling oil burns any better than I do.
Prep:
- Do your prep first. All of it. Everything should be prepared before you heat the wok. Sauces should be mixed, garnishes readied, every ingredient chopped or whatevered, and set aside in individual bowls. 90% of the time you spend making a stir-fried dish will be prep time.
- Arrange your mise-en-place so that you can reach everything easily from where you stand at the wok. You won’t have time to go running around the kitchen to find things.
- Part of your prep is to have your serving bowls at the ready. You won’t have time to go finding them once you start cooking. Make sure they are in easy reach, clean, and ready to go.
Method:
- If you are afraid of using the highest heat your stovetop can put out, don’t bother stir-frying until you are comfortable with the idea.
- Use as much heat as you have at your disposal. Every so often you will cook something where you’ll want to bring the heat down, when stir-frying, but traditionally this is done by moving the wok off the heat slightly, not by using a cooler flame.
- Hot pan, then cold oil. Hot oil, then cold food. What this means: the pan should be heated until it starts to smoke before you add anything else including cooking oil. Once you add oil to a pan, it must get hot — not warm but hot — before you add the cold food. Doing it any other way will lower the temperature of pan and oil too much and you will not be able to stir-fry anything. Stir-frying requires keeping the pan at a consistently high heat.
- The pan should constantly talk to you. If at any time after you start cooking there is not some kind of sizzling noise coming from the pan, you have overfilled it or there is too much liquid in the pan. If either of these things is true you are no longer stir-frying. (Note: sometimes you don’t want to stir-fry, and that’s okay, but if you are supposed to be stir-frying, make sure that’s what you’re doing.)
- Some things must be precooked before being stir-fried. Stir-frying is a quick technique. But not everything cooks quickly, or can. Sometimes you will need to pre-cook things before you can stir-fry them. Vegetables may need to be blanched. Meats may need to be pre-cooked. Noodles always need to be pre-cooked and well drained. Things may also be stir-fried initially on their own, then removed from the pan, only to be added back into the stir-fry later on. Westerners often have this idea that stir-frying is invariably one-pot cooking and that stir-frying is the only cooking method that figures into any stir-fried dish. This isn’t necessarily true.
- Some things must be drained and/or dried before being stir-fried. Too much moisture in the wok results in a braise, not a stir-fry. (And again, braises are fine things. But they are not stir-fries.) With too much moisture, things won’t cook the way you want them to, and textures will be mushy. It is easier to add liquid than it is to take it out, so dry and drain things well, especially vegetables after washing.
- Do not expect to be able to clean as you go. You won’t have the time. You will finish stir-frying with a stack of dirty dishes from your mise-en-place, a dirty wok, a dirty wok spatula, and a hot meal that is ready to be eaten. This is as it should be. Go eat while the food is fresh and hot and good, then come back and clean up after.
