MacGourmet News

Being a lover of Asian dishes, I found this a really interesting read if you ever wanted more information about how to REALLY cook with a wok.

Wok hay is what happens when excellent ingredients - like ginger, noodles, shrimp, walnuts or Chinese chives - meet a wok crackling with heat. It is both a taste and aroma and something else, too, a lively freshness that prickles your nose and makes you impatient for that first taste, like the smell of steak just off the grill or a tomato right off the vine in August. Food with wok hay tastes intensely of itself."

Missteps that prevent us from achieving wok hay, Ms. Young said, include crowding too much food into the wok, using ingredients that are damp instead of dry, and adding the oil before the wok is heated through. But, she said, "the single most common mistake made in cooking Chinese food on a Western stove is using a wok that is not hot enough."

Residential stoves here produce about 10,000 B.T.U.'s, but restaurant stoves in Hong Kong, where the chefs use compressed gas to create a more intense heat, can produce as much as 200,000. At that level of heat, and with the intense activity of a restaurant kitchen, even top-quality woks warp instantly and have to be hammered back into shape after each night's cooking.

Read The Well-Tempered Wok at The New York Times online. (Free subscription required).