02.10.07
My New Boyfriend and Stoplight Chicken
I have a new wok. It is my new boyfriend. My Belovedary bought it for me when he was in San Francisco a few weeks ago, knowing that my old wok — a long-suffering, slow, old, overly-heavy monster I bought when I was in college — was making me crankier and crankier the better I got at Chinese cookery.
It is indeed difficult to cook good stir-fry in the wrong pan. Seriously. I can turn out a highly creditable stir-fried dish in a good cast-iron skillet and have done so many times, but to tell you the truth they just don’t get hot enough. The metal is too heavy and the cooking surface, because it is flat, radiates a lot of heat straight up. Woks are (duh) hottest in the center, since that’s what’s right over the fire, and good woks are quite thin, so that you don’t lose too much heat to the metal. Also, with a wok, you never have the unpleasant experience of chasing the food all over the skillet with a spatula, trying to get it to flip, or to pick it up to take it out of the pan. The curvature of the wok means that this isn’t a problem. Woks also are less likely to spatter you with hot oil, even when you are deep-frying. Bonus: you can deep-fry in a wok with far less trepidation than you might with a straightsided pan, because with a wok, you fill only the bottom of the wok with hot oil (about 1-2 cups, as opposed to a quart or more for a lot of conventional Western deep-fat frying vessels) and there is still plenty of wok space left over for the oil to bubble up over the food without any worry that oil might escape the pan. Did I mention that you can conveniently push mostly-cooked food up to the sides of the pan while you finish the sauce that remains in the bottom center, then incorporate the solids right back in? Yeah. Try that in a frying pan. Pretty sweet.
I will note for the record that I stopped subscribing to Cooks Illustrated after one of their writers — I think it may have been Christopher Kimball himself — asserted that a large frying pan was a better vessel for stir-frying food in than a wok was. I remember reading that and thinking it was patently insane. Even with my old crappy too-heavy wok I thought it was insane, and I had had plenty of experience with cooking Chinese food in a Western frying pan by that point when I got fed up with my dissatisfying wok to know full well that really, a Western frying pan was not really any better than a bad wok, and was a whole lot more frustrating to work with in some ways to boot. Now that I have a better wok, I can state wholeheartedly that I am still right and CI is still wrong wrong wrong like a wrong thing that is wrong.
Here’s the thing about woks and Chinese cookery: the cuisine and the vessel used to cook it evolved in response to one another. There really isn’t another cooking vessel (except perhaps the Indian karhai/kadai, which is, as you’ll notice if you click, rather like a wok) that does the same job in the same way. So if you’re going to go in for Chinese cookery in any kind of earnest, do not walk, run (or click) straight to The Wok Shop, in beautiful San Francisco’s Chinatown. They will be happy to help you figure out what kind of wok will work best with your cooker and heat source, how many people you will be cooking for, etc. Fabulous customer service, too. And they’ll ship anywhere… my Belovedary bought my wok (and a new steamer, and a handful of other things) while he was there and simply had them shipped home.
Anyhow. My new wok has been making me very happy, and I have been doing lots and lots of cooking in it since it arrived last week. Including developing my first Chinese recipe! It was originally a happy accident of combining leftovers… a sort of “hey, that might taste good if I added some of this, and put some chicken in it, and what if I did that?” thing that turned out so tasty that I thought I should develop it into an actual recipe.
And so I have, and I present it to you thus:
Stoplight Chicken
I called this Stoplight Chicken because of the green watercress, red chiles, and yellow ginger.
4 chicken thighs, boned and skinned, cut into thin strips
1 Tablespoon dry sherry
1 Tablespoon regular soy sauce
1 teaspoon cornstarch
5 cloves garlic, crushed or minced
2 Tablespoons minced fresh ginger
1 pound watercress or spinach, thoroughly cleaned and trimmed
2 Tablespoons salted chopped chiles (see note at end)
2 Tablespoons chicken stock or water
1 Tablespoon sesame oil (Asian style)
1 teaspoon cornstarch
peanut, soybean, or corn oil for cooking
Have all ingredients ready before you start heating the wok.
Combine sherry, soy sauce, and 1 teaspoon cornstarch in a large shallow bowl and mix thoroughly. Add garlic and sliced strips of chicken meat and stir so that meat is well-covered. Cover with plastic wrap or some other sort of covering and set aside to marinate for 10-15 minutes.
In the meantime, mix together the chicken stock, sesame oil, and one teaspoon cornstarch in a small dish and set aside.
Heat wok until it is smoking. Add small amount of oil (@1 T) in steady stream down the side of the wok. Swirl hot oil in wok to coat sides a bit. Add marinated chicken to pan and stir-fry briefly until outside edges are opaque, then add salted chopped chiles. Allow to cook a few minutes longer, until pieces begin to brown and are mostly cooked through, stirring occasionally. Remove chicken to a clean bowl and set aside.
Rinse out wok and dry over a hot flame. Again add a small amount of oil down the side and swirl. Add ginger and stir-fry until fragrant and beginning to turn golden. Then add watercress (or spinach) by handfuls, stir-frying with other hand to coat all the vegetables with hot oil and disperse the ginger throughout. The watercress/spinach will wilt quickly and cook down considerably, exuding a fairly substantial amount of liquid — this is okay.
As soon as the vegetables have cooked down by about 2/3 their original volume, return the chicken to the pan and continue stirfrying as you add the stock/sesame oil mixture. Keep stirfrying! The liquid will boil and will thicken somewhat. As soon as this happens, remove the food to a serving bowl or platter and serve with plenty of nice hot fresh rice.
Serves 4 as part of a multi-dish meal.
Note: To make salted chopped chiles, get a pound (more or less) of a sort of chile you like. Hotter if you like that, less hot if you don’t, there are plenty of options. I find that a middle-of-the-road chile is most versatile. Wash them, dry them, stem them, and chop them into a coarse dice, seeds and all. Put ‘em in a bowl. Measure out 1/4 cup salt. Add 3 T of the salt to the chiles in the bowl and stir it around to mix. Then put the chiles in a clean dry jar (an empty pickle jar works fabulously) and pour the rest of the salt on top. Put a lid on the jar and set it in a cool dark place for a week or two, then they are ready to be used. Refrigerate after opening. They do keep approximately forever, but they’re so tasty you’ll use them up instead.
