Stir-Fry
The first thing you need to do is throw out every useless
bit of info you have read in English language cookbooks about how to stirfry.
I spent almost 10 years crippled in my asian cooking adventures by an inability
to properly stirfry. The bottom line is
that a western style home oven is simply not intended to be used for
stirfry. Analogously the traditional
Chinese kitchen does not have an oven for baking. How would you explain how to make a
traditional dish like a birthday cake to someone that did not have an oven?
Traditional Chinese cooking is done over an open fire using a “pit stove”. The wok sits into a hollow opening and is
literally surrounded by fire produced from small pieces of wood. The result is a high intensity heat which is
beyond even the most advanced stoves available on the market. Western style stoves heat the bottom of the
pan; Chinese style stoves heat the whole thing.
Every cookbook I read tried to adapt the stove to the traditional pan
(i.e. the Wok). This doesn’t work and is
one reason why home cooks have a hard time reproducing Asian food. The right way to do thus is to adapt the pan to the stove and the
cooking method. I learned this
after many, many failed attempts to do the opposite.
I finally solved this problem through sheer necessity. I lived in the country for many years. I had electricity, phone and internet delivered to
our home, but no gas. Some of my neighbours have these giant propane bulbs that they use for their stoves. To my mind that is like setting a giant
stack of dynamite next to you front door (do people really realize gas can
ignite?)! Once every few months a big
truck made it's way up my ponderous gravel road, and refilled the tanks with
fuel that originated deep in the soil of Alaska or Wyoming or wherever. This is one of the many places that the local
food philosophy is in direct contradiction to gourmet orthodoxy. My electric power came primarily from the
many hydropower dams which choke the Columbia river and its tributaries. As an environmental scientist, this does
give me some real problems, but at least it is pretty local (I can make it to
the first dam in around 3 hours) and renewable-ish. As I have said before however, my cuisine is
not a finished product – it is an ongoing process. So for me, advantage electric.
The second piece of the stir-fry puzzle fell into place
when, I, as the ‘grandson that cooks’, inherited the entire cast iron
collection from our family farm – I have about a dozen now. I also have fancy all-clads, Le Creusets, and
Chantals, but the ones I use day in and day out are my cast irons, especially
the full size skillets. The last piece
of the puzzle is oil – You need a lot of oil - I used to canola oil before I went paleo but now use coconut oil. I visit friend’s and family's kitchens and
see tiny bottles of oil on the shelf.
This will not work if you really want to cook Chinese food. Stir-fry requires a lot of oil, but what
people fail to realize is that much of it won’t be eaten with the dish. When stir-frying, you should expect to leave
a good portion of oil and other liquids at the bottom of the dish. This is unlike a sauteed dish, and I believe
this has been a source of great confusion for many home cooks.
So, let’s bring this section to a close. Get yourself a cast iron skillet, turn the
heat to high and leave it there, and when it is really hot (I use my finger to
test), add a really healthy amount of oil or other fat, wait until it shimmers
and form into miniature waves (about 3 seconds if your pan was the right heat to
start with), then add your aromatics (ginger, chile, onion, garlic etc) in the
order in which you want the flavor to be emphasized. For example, if making a strirfried lemon
chicken, I would start with the lemon peel; if making a spicy shrimp dish, I
would start with the chile. Add
ingredients in the order specified in the recipes below. You will (almost always) be leaving the heat
at or near the highest setting for nearly the whole time. The subtle control of heat you get with a gas
stove is totally unnecessary at this point – what you want is a consistent and
really hot heat. If you are constantly
fiddling with the heat, I suggest that you step back (maybe after that night’s
dinner) and rethink what you are doing, as it is not really necessary.
No comments:
Post a Comment