Directions: |
Directions:Stir-frying is recognized for its ability to produce dishes with vivid colors, vibrant flavors, and varied textures . . . the technique has been adopted enthusiastically by American home cooks, with only minor variations, namely, the use of moderate heat, poorly matched ingredients, and insufficient fat and seasoning, to produce mushy heaps of bland, discolored slop.
Here are a few common slop-producing errors and how to avoid them, plus my foolproof stir-fry technique and two great recipes.
WOK FRYING
A round-bottomed wok and wok shovel are traditional, but you don’t need them to stir-fry successfully.
1. Selecting a wok.
You can stir-fry in a carbon-steel, cast-iron, or nonstick skillet. A well-seasoned carbon-steel pan is best; they tend to be lighter than cast iron and have longer handles. However, carbon-steel pans are uncommon outside restaurant kitchens and cost more than cast iron. Nonstick pans work quite well for stir-frying, as long as you’re comfortable with getting the pan really hot — and superheating nonstick pans is a safety no-no.
Your pan should be large enough to do the job but not so large that it hangs well over the edge of your burner. For most stoves, that means a diameter of 12 or 14 inches.
2. Crowding the pan
The first commandment of stir-frying on a Western stove is: Don’t overload the pan.
If you’re making a meal for one, you might be able to get away with stir-frying all the ingredients at the same time. But if you’re a dinner-party type, forget it. You have to work in batches, transferring cooked food to a plate as you go.
What about that infomercial for “hand-hammered woks” where the English guy shows you how to push the cooked food up the sides of the wok? Actually, I love that infomercial, but as Helen Chen writes in Helen Chen's Chinese Home Cooking, “Put out of your mind any notion that stir-frying involves pushing food up the sides of the wok while cooking in the center. This is incorrect, and no Chinese I know cooks this way.”
3. Protein problems
When a stir-fry hits a snag, blame the protein. Meat, poultry, fish, and tofu can stick, turn tough, or fail to brown.
4. Crunchfest
Crunchy fresh vegetables are welcome in a stir-fried dish. Raw vegetables are not. If you’re using broccoli, carrots, or other hardy vegetables, add a bit of water to the pan and cover to steam the vegetables for a minute or two if necessary.
5. Too much stirring, not enough frying
Heed the warning of the common culinary-school admonition: “Let the food cook.” Line cooks at your local wok-burner-equipped Chinese restaurant can put food into a wok, flip it a few times, and serve it. But we’ve already established that you’re not working with that kind of heat. If you want a good sear on your ingredients, put them in the pan and wait a minute or two before stirring.
Don’t take my word for it. “I resist the temptation to touch the meat for 20 seconds to 1 minute,” writes Grace Young in The Breath of a Wok, my favorite collection of stir-fry recipes. “This is critical because it allows the meat to sear, intensifying the flavors.”
6. Alarming developments
Producing smoke when you stir-fry is inevitable. I don’t know about your vent hood, but mine seems to have been designed to handle a faint wisp of steam. Some smoke detectors have a silencer button that disables the alarm for a short time. Mine doesn’t.
I used to remove the battery before stir-frying, and would remember to replace it several weeks later. That I am alive today to write this column is pure luck. Now I tape a plastic bag over the smoke alarm. I can’t forget to remove it, because there’s an ugly plastic bag hanging from the ceiling.
Putting it all together
Okay, so here’s the home stir-fry procedure.
Cut and marinate your ingredients, and mix your finishing sauce.
Heat oil in a large skillet (seasoned carbon, cast-iron, or nonstick) over high heat until the oil begins to smoke.
Add protein and cook until well seared but slightly underdone. Remove to a plate.
Add oil and heat until smoking. Add vegetables, working in batches if necessary. Hardy vegetables (carrots, broccoli, peppers) should go in together; same goes for softer vegetables (cabbage, onion). Add aromatics (garlic, ginger, scallions) and cook about 30 seconds.
Return the protein to the pan and add sauce. Cook and stir until the sauce thickens and coats the ingredients. Serve immediately.
If you really love the idea of the wok, or if you already have one, go ahead and use it; woks are great on any stove for deep-frying, steaming, and making soup.
Both the traditional round-bottomed woks (designed to sit propped above a stove burner on a wok ring) and the newer flat-bottomed woks (designed to sit directly on a stove burner) still have their fans. Thai cookbook author Kasma Loha-unchit (Dancing Shrimp) says, “It is much easier to remove all particles of food from round woks without scraping the seasoning, enabling you to stir-fry two or more batches of food without having to clean in between batches.” And Grace Young recommends a flat-bottomed wok: “I feel that it is the only wok that is effective on an electric range, and it works equally well on a gas range.” |
This recipe for WOK THIS WAY! is from