So it's Time for some Food

What's a food blog without food? I made this meal today and over the next few blog posts will share the recipes and techniques for making these dishes.

Going clockwise from the top, there is chicken and broccoli, long grain steamed rice, Onion Pepper Beef and a bowl of soup using up various odds and ends in my fridge.

The Wok: Part IV

Accessories

There are some important tools you need for cooking in your wok. There are three important ones and some other optional ones. 

Lid  You really need a lid for cooking in a Wok. Yes, even for stir fries. If your wok didn't come with a lid you should get one that is 1 inch smaller in diameter than your wok. For the common 14" woks, this means a 13 inch lid.  

The lid lets you steam some ingredients that don't cook to the proper stage in stir frying, particularly Brocolli as we know it in the west. When I'm cooking broccoli as part of  a stir fry, I give them about 90 seconds of steaming time with a little Shao Hsing wine while covered with the lid. This cooks the broccoli to the proper point, flavors it a bit and is quick. Otherwise, you need to take the time to blanch the broccoli and the quick steam trick is much simpler and faster and happens right  in the wok. When the wine evaporates, the wok quickly comes back up to stir fry temps. You might need to adapt your technique some depending on your heat source, perhaps with an empty wok for a few 10s of seconds to get back up to heat.

Some other wok cooking techniques such as steaming or smoking require a lid. 

I'm partial to the full dome lid rather than the flat topped lids. I like having some extra space for larger objects in the wok, such as the breast on a whole chicken or duck. 

Spatula or Shovel (Chuan) This is slightly round lipped tool for turning and mixing ingredients in the wok. The spatula is shaped for your wok so check that it matches your size of wok. This is both in length so you have the right reach and also the right rounding of the edge to match your wok. Generally it should be close the same length as the diameter of your wok.  I think this tool is still preferable to a flat edged spatula in a flat bottom wok as the round edge is useful where the flat wok transitions into the sides. And it's flat enough to do a good job in the flat part as well. 


Wok Ring If you're using a flat bottom wok this isn't necessary but for a gas stove they're important for safety and convenience. I prefer the solid walled types with holes rather than the wire types because you can trim them down for a custom fit on your stove and even cut notches to fit just right over your cooking grate.


Optional Accessories

Spider This is handy for removals of ingredient from a frying or blanching process. I use this more than a wok ring personally, but there are other tools to achieve the same result. An 8 inch spider is my preference.  I also use it for clearing ingredients from a pot of stock. And, on occasion, for sifting the powder from the bottom of a box of Captain Crunch to get to the last good sized pieces.


Ladle  This is a ladle with a curved lip to match the curvature of your wok. It should be about the same length as the diameter of your wok. You'll often see professional cooks stir frying with a ladle instead of the spatula. They dip the ladle into different ingredients and seasonings, add it to the wok and keep on going. That's great if you're set up like a pro but it's not practical for the home cook in my opinion. I never used the one that came with my first wok and ended up giving the ladle away. 


There are still other things you can get that I see serving even less purpose so don't get them. But for completeness:


Draining Rack  I have one and never use it. Too small and really in the way more than helpful particularly if cooking for more than one or two people.

Cooking Chopsticks These are dirt cheap and dramatic. Warp easily and most people don't have the skill to make them work usefully, including me.  You might occasionally see Martin Yan use them on his show.  I have a pair of these too. I mostly use them to separate meat that I'm oil blanching or velveting. But many other tools or even the cheap bamboo chopsticks for table use will do the job as well.

The Wok: Part III

So you're getting a carbon steel wok. Good choice. But there's more to carbon steel woks than just round or flat bottom. 

Most of the local purveyors of inexpensive carbon woks have  gone to carrying Peking Pans. I don't like these particular pans. They're very thin metal, have an unknown coating on them for low stick, a handle that will get hot. And they're most often flat bottomed as well. 




You shouldn't be able to flex the wok when pressing from the sides. Well, an average person shouldn't be able to. This is a surprisingly difficult trait to find in carbon steel wok. It's completely about the thickness of the steel too.  

My first wok is a bit flexible. I've had it 19 years now though I've not cooked on in probably 3 or 4 years. If you were watching informercials back then you'd see one about "Hand Hammered Wok" with a British guy telling you all the myths about woks and why they need to be hand hammered. I bought this when the infomercial had run its course and the extra stock was in the discount kitchen stores.

If you click the picture below, you'll see a pattern of overlapping circular marks in the wok. It's really quite a pretty effect in person though a bit hard to photograph with my skills. Has a nice patination to it as well.


 

It's OK as a wok. I've had to replace the screws in the handle with the aggressive thread dry wall type screws. Holds much better since that upgrade.  Beyond being thin, it's pretty well constructed otherwise. 

My next wok was the cast iron wok This is not in the the traditional Chinese style. It's much thicker and is actually flat on the bottom, though round inside.



 

I haven't used it a lot, mostly on my 30,000 BTU outdoor stove for some meals where I was stir frying multiple dishes for simultaneous service. 

I can't recommend it for indoor cooking unless you're just cooking for one or two people. Yes, it gets quite hot, but it's slow to get to that point. And while it creates an awesome initial sear, it's slow to recover heat as well. So it doesn't hold the right heat level except with fairly small amounts of food. 

I mostly keep it because I enjoy cast iron of all types. And you can't flex it. 

I didn't think I was in the market for more woks. But one day at Vinh Long, a local asian grocer,  I found this one. 





Aggressively hammered and called a "Pow" Wok, I couldn't flex it. And if you compare the pictures, you'll see it's thicker steel. The Wok Shop carries these still though I've never again seen one locally. This one too has the handle screws upgraded as they were loose from the start.  

Amazon has them too.

Does it cook better than my other woks? I think it does a little. Mostly in that it delivers heat a little more evenly and doesn't flex when I lift a full wok to plate the contents for serving. That always unnerved me about my first wok.  And good woks are surprisingly inexpensive so it's not much of a cost to add another one to the collection.


I picked up my most recent wok 9 months ago. This is a 12" flat bottomed wok I picked up at Kim Heang, a Laotian market. It was the only carbon steel flat bottom wok I could find with minimal flex and uncoated at the time.  The wok market is definitely changing and not for the better in my opinion.

 

I bought this one because I was so impressed with the performance of my induction burner. I knew it would be better for Wok cooking than standing outside at my high output stove all through the bad weather as I'd been doing. 

Better is probably too strong a word. Preferable. That's the right word. 

The outdoor stove still beats induction in sheer performance, but the added hassles of cooking outdoors loses out to the convenience and good performance of induction. 

And it works really well. But after all those years of stir frying in a round bottom wok, I just couldn't make the adaptation to a flat bottom wok. It takes more oil. The stir fry action is sloppy with more chasing ingredients around to get them all flipped and cooked evenly. It's better than not stir frying but...

And so I monitored the market for an affordable induction wok unit. Last year, all that was available were units costing thousands of dollars. So I was excited to see the Adcraft this fall and be back cooking in a round bottom wok the way it's supposed to be done. 

Update 5/16/2013: I recently came across a high-quality flat-bottom carbon-steel wok from IMUSA.  Good handles, good steel thickness, seasoned up beautifully.  So add yet another wok to my collection.

A little more diversion into wok stoves

One of my local Asian grocers had this fired clay live-fire stove for woks. Has some interesting design features.


Most obvious is the metal lining on the three wok supports. This gives good wear resistance on those points where a wok or other cooking vessel rests. 

But also the bottom perforations allow ashes to drop clear and air to come up through keeping the fire burning hot. 

It includes a removable wall section so you can feed the fire without removing the pot or wok. 



Charcoal is the obvious fuel choice but with that removable section, small sticks and other small flammables become options too. 

And my specialized induction wok burner came. 






Controls are pretty basic. You turn it on with the power button on the right. You select Power, Temperature or Timer with the Function button on the Left. You spin the dial to increase or decrease the setting. 

When you turn it on, it comes on at the 1200 watt setting, basically medium heat. A quick twist of the dial takes you to maximum heat, 1800 watts.




 

I wanted to see how the induction coils were placed for heating so I boiled some water. It quickly came to a boil and the picture clearly shows a ring 6 inches in diameter of rapidly boiling water. 

It's a reasonable compromise as laying induction rings across a curved surface is more work and cost than on a flat surface. 

It heats pretty evenly for cooking food.  I rather enjoyed cooking three quick stir fries in it last night of green beans and pork, chicken with leeks beijing style, and a vegetable medley of my own concoction.

The Wok: Part II

You need to pick the right wok for how you'll be cooking.

There are two materials worth considering for wok cooking: carbon steel and cast iron.  You can find stainless, aluminum, anodized aluminum, tri-ply and all kinds of woks. Don't get any of those. Carbon steel or cast iron are the two that behave properly in the stir fry technique.  Sure you see Martin Yan or Ming Tsai cooking in them on their TV shows. But remember, those are products supplied by the backers of their programs. Circulon for Martin Yan and All Clad for Ming Tsai. In their restaurants, they use round carbon steel woks.

Carbon steel is the recommended choice. It's light, inexpensive, responds quickly to heat adjustments., easy to work with and readily available.

Most modern cast iron woks are not made in the traditional Chinese style. They're thick, heavy and harder to find. But they do have some characteristics worth considering.

And there are two shapes of woks to consider as well: round bottom and  flat bottom. 

When I first got into Chinese food 20 years ago, carbon steel round woks were considered the best choice. It was also about all you could find outside of a Chinatown probably. They work OK on a western gas stove but are not as well suited to the electric coil burners or the various glass cooktops popular today. In all of these cases, you need a wok ring to stabilize the wok on the cooking surface. On electric stoves, the heat transfer is poor to a round bottom wok.

And so flat bottom woks are available too. They've been around longer certainly, but it's only been the last 10-15 years that I've seen a dominant switch to this style in books and so on.

My books from the 70s and 80s don't even mention flat bottom woks. And strongly traditional  cooks like Eileen Yin Fei Lo still recommend round bottom woks in even her current works. But the trend is towards flat bottom woks for western stoves. Grace Young argues strongly for the flat bottom wok in Breath of a Wok as do many online sources.

If you're willing to invest in a specialized burner, I still think a round bottom wok is produces the best Chinese food. I cooked a lot of dishes on a 30,000 BTU outdoor camp burner for years. Even in the winter. The food was worth it compared to what I got cooking on my 12,000 BTU gas home stove.  These guys have some impressive burners ranging from 30,000 on up to 160,000 BTU which is about the heat output of a restaurant wok stove.

Consider that a gas stove is about 33% efficient at transferring heat to a pot. So on my home stove, I'm getting around 4000 BTUs into my wok. Electric stoves are slightly more efficient. So the outdoor stove was giving me about 10,000 BTUs transferred to the wok.

If you're going to stick with common western style home stoves, flat bottom makes a lot of sense. It helps collect and transfer the heat more efficiently because it better matches the design of western stoves.

For cooking on a home stove, a flat bottom cast iron wok is attractive. It gives you the flat bottom, but is generally cast with a complete round interior. Even with that I still think it's not as fun to cook in as a carbon steel flat bottom wok.

I'm currently using a carbon steel flat bottom wok and I use it on a stand alone Max Burton induction burner. Induction gives me high efficiency heat transfer, around 90%. It heats very quickly and quickly recovers its heat when you add food to it. Like gas, induction gives you instant responsiveness to heat adjustments.  And an induction burner is quite reasonably priced.

I'd say this is close to cooking on the outdoor stove. Not quite as powerful but the convenience more than makes up for it and the food quality is quite good.

There are also some specialty wok induction burners shaped for round woks.  Most of these are designed for installing in the counter like a cooktop with higher voltage and wattage than wall current.  There are a few stand alone units for 120 V.  I've ordered this one but it hasn't arrived yet. I'm looking forward to it.

The Wok: Part I

Many cultures in the world have developed cookware very similar to if not identical to the wok. It's hard to say if they were cooked in the same was as a wok is today though.


In China, the metal wok has been in use about 2500 years. It's specific origins, however are vague.


I've read theories about Mongol warriors cooking in their helmets.


Or importing the concept if not the first woks from India.


Another theory indicates the adoption of the wok was driven by its fuel efficiency. Much of the forest had been cut to provide arable land to feed China's population. With wood limited for cooking fuel, efficiency becomes important.


The shape itself is a common shape made in many cultures for baskets, pottery and so on and frequently used for food. It's a logical extension to try the shape in metal once a culture develops that knowledge.

There are certain features of a wok that make it desirable regardless of where the idea came from.

• The dome shape maximizes the volume enclosed while simultaneously minimizing the material needed to enclose it. So it's efficient in material used.

• Its round bottom, while not stable on a flat surface is quite at home in many primitive cooking environments. A tripod of rocks, directly nestled into coals or on the earthen ware stoves with the round opening over the fire. Further, you don't have to standardize the stove hole dimensions as the round shape will nestle stably into a range of different sized holes. Conversely, different sized woks fit in one hole well too without needing different sized holes.

• There is an elegant synergy between the focused heating of the bottom of the wok and the shapes and sizes the food is cut in for cooking. This makes wok cooking fuel efficient.

• It's also oil efficient. You can cook with very little cooking oil. The last time I bought peanut oil, it was about $13.00 per gallon. That's pretty steep. But oil efficient is also good for our health by cutting out fat from our food. Lots of Chinese Restaurant food can be very greasy, but if you're cooking correctly in a wok, your food shouldn't be. Greasy food at a Chinese restaurant is usually a sign of a sloppy cook.
  

Early metal woks were cast iron. This site displays some paintings from the 1840s and explains how it was done at that time. These woks were cast thinner and lighter than the cast iron ware we're most familiar with in the West. This light weight allows the cook to use the pan to toss and throw the ingredients, a handy technique in it's own right.


There are regional differences in cast iron woks with woks to the South tending to use ear shaped metal loops for handles. In the North, they would attach a stick handle and a loop handle opposite the stick handle. These handle preferences reflect cooking preferences. The Northern cooks are more prone to the tossing pau technique where Southern cooks are more prone to the spatula stirring chau techniques.


References


http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/12/what-do-we-really-know-about-the-history-of-the-wok.html

http://www.staff.hum.ku.dk/dbwagner/wok/wok.html

Breath of a Wok by Grace Young (her site is worth visiting as well)

You Have to Have It

So what do you need to cook Chinese food?

1. Wok--Short Answer: Yes, you need one. Long Answer: You have to match the cookware to your heat source and storage requirements, but the wok can usually meet those requirements and inexpensively.
   
2. Sharp Knife--It doesn't need to be a Chinese Chef's knife as any quality Chef's knife will do.
3. Seasonings--Martin Yan makes a good argument that you only need a few basic seasonings to cook a wide range of Chinese food. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrwOSC-o3JI

• light soy sauce
• dark soy sauce
• rice wine
• rice vinegar
• oyster sauce
• sesame seed oil, toasted
• hoisin sauce

Much more can be said about all of these topics and I will. But with these things you can make quality meals simply and easily that will please you, your family and your guests.

Be excellent.

Welcome to It's All About to Happen

Welcome to It's All About to Happen. I appreciate your time here shared with me.

I love to eat and cook. I will share that knowledge and experience with you here.

My favorite food to eat is Chinese. I'm not Chinese, nor do I speak or read the language. But the cuisine is accessible and fun, offering much more than what we get in the restaurants in the US.

Of course, I cook and eat many other cuisines so there will be worthwhile diversions into those as well.

Be excellent to each other. Wise words from Bill and Ted.