Vol. XV · Dry Heat Plate 4 of 11stir-fry, 炒, wok, high heat, carbon steel, order of ingredients, mise en place, cut size, burner power, restaurant wokHT

Stir-Frying.

A restaurant wok burner delivers several times the heat of a home ring. At home, the same dish needs smaller batches and a pan that has been heating for minutes.

A stir-fry (炒) is a sauté adapted to the wok and to Chinese knife work (IV.4): thin, even pieces, cooked in minutes over high heat, kept moving with a spatula and a toss of the pan. The wok's thin carbon steel heats fast and its curved shape makes a very hot centre and cooler sides, so food can be pushed up the side to slow it while the next ingredient sears in the middle.

Order follows cooking time. Aromatics — garlic, ginger, scallion whites, chilli — go in first or with the oil to perfume it (爆香, XI.8); then the protein, often velveted (XVIII.6) and sometimes passed through oil first and set aside (过油); then hard vegetables, then soft ones, then the protein back, the sauce and a starch slurry to glaze (勾芡, XXII.9). Everything is cut and measured before the wok is hot (I.6), because there is no time to chop once it starts. The burner sets the scale: the workshop compares a home ring with a restaurant wok range.

Below: the temperature of a carbon-steel wok preheated three minutes, then loaded with the food you choose, on a home gas ring, an induction hob and a restaurant wok burner (stove bench), with the lowest temperature each reaches.

What you will learn
Workshop
Stove bench: a 36 cm carbon-steel wok (2 mm), preheated 3 minutes, held below 400 °C; burners rated 3 kW gas (40 % reaching the pan), 2.5 kW induction (85 %) and a 20 kW restaurant wok range (25 %). Food at 5 °C releasing up to 10 % of its weight as juice. A lumped teaching model.

Small batches, everything ready

In this model a home gas ring heats the wok to about 169 °C in three minutes and 300 g of food pulls it down to 153 °C, only just above the range where browning slows; a restaurant wok range starts near 382 °C and stays near 379 °C, more than twice as hot. Cut the batch to 150 g and the home wok stays near 160 °C. That is the home cook's adjustment: half or a third of a restaurant batch, cooked in turns and combined at the end.

Practical stir-frying. Preheat the wok until a drop of water skitters and vanishes, then add oil and swirl. Cut everything thin and even; dry vegetables after washing. Cook protein first in a hot wok in a single layer, remove it, then aromatics, then vegetables by hardness, then return the protein with the sauce. On a flat electric hob a heavy flat-bottomed wok or a wide frying pan works better than a round wok, which barely touches the element.

At the stove

Stir-fry the same dish twice: once with all the ingredients in a single batch, once with the meat seared alone first and the vegetables cooked separately, combined at the end. Compare colour and texture.

The word 炒 appears in Chinese cooking texts from about the Song dynasty; the thin iron wok and the quick, high-heat stir-fry may have spread because they cook well with little fuel.

Terms

炒
Stir-frying: thin pieces cooked fast over high heat, kept moving.
过油
Passing food briefly through warm oil before stir-frying.
爆香
Frying aromatics to perfume the oil.
Wok range
A restaurant burner with several times the power of a home ring.
Stir-fry thin, even pieces over high heat, in the order of cooking time, with everything prepared first; at home, use smaller batches.

Sources

  1. A teaching value chosen for the course: the right order of magnitude and shape, not a measurement of a particular food.
  2. H. McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, 2nd ed., Scribner, 2004.