![]() TL DR: Getting a good wok is like having a baby (based on what I’ve seen from TV): It requires extra care compared to going without, but ultimately provides a rewarding life (or cooking) experience. I certainly haven’t mastered it, but it has made me tighten up my prep game a bit. A pasta sauce or a stew can be more forgiving if you forgot to chop the onions or measure spices in advance, because it’s jamming for a long time, but with a wok, it can be a matter of seconds before something overcooks or burns. Yum.Īnother takeaway is that mise en place is more important for cooking with a wok, because things happen very quickly when you’re cooking at home over super-high heat. At first, I was too reticent in cooking this dish, doing a medium-low temp, and it was taking forever I turned it up to medium-high, and started to hear that familiar sizzle and started to see the sexy caramelization I wanted. Using the wok is a learning curve, and something I’d learned from the food I’d made over the weekend is that you cannot be afraid to cook at high heat. ![]() Photo by the author.Ī few days later, I wanted to try a more basic stir fry with more ingredients, so I did a similar but freestyled dish with broccoli, zucchini, mushrooms, garlic, ginger, and a sauce of soy, black vinegar, and a little sugar. ![]() I let it cool for a bit, and then poured some warm water over it to cool it down, drying it before I gave it a good wipedown with grapeseed oil. After thoroughly heating the whole wok, I observed as the monotonous gray shifted to a brilliant rainbow of bronze and silvers, indicating that the dreary-looking original wok was transforming into a seasoned masterpiece. I turned on the burner of my gas stove to full blast and set the wok on it in order to start cooking off the residue oils from production (which released an incredible amount of vapor and made my apartment immediately smell insane, so make sure to open a window for this step). First, I rinsed down the wok with warm water and soap, drying it fully then, I covered the wooden handles with foil, so as not to scorch them. Culling info from a number of sources, I came to the following process. I read a number of articles-including a section of López-Alt’s book-about how important it is to season woks and how to do it. When my new wok arrived, it was a dull factory gray with a weird, sticky film all over it. I do plan to get a fully-Kenji-approved wok down the line, but for now, I’m thrilled with the Joyce Chen. Full disclosure: I’d tried to order a slightly more compliant wok previously from a specialty store in San Francisco and the order never showed up, so I decided to go with Amazon on this one, mostly just to ensure that it’d actually arrive quickly on my doorstep. I’d read a lot of positive things about Joyce Chen’s woks, so I found one that mostly met López-Alt’s specifications: 14 inches, carbon steel, flat bottom, and two handles it was 1.5 millimeters rather than 2 millimeters thick, but I felt it was close enough. He explains, “get yourself a 14-inch, flat-bottomed, carbon steel wok made with material around 2 (14 gauge) thick, with a single long handle and a helper-handle on the opposite side.” The ensuing section broke down these recs even further and addressed potential questions, and after reading it, I had a sense of what kind of wok to pick up. In his most recent book, effectively titled The Wok: Recipes and Techniques (an amazingly concise title for a 672-page tome), López-Alt offers “quick and dirty” recommendations for picking up a wok to use at home. Kenji López-Alt, i.e., one of the sage philosophers at the intersection of food science and popular cooking. Whereas ancient civilizations had people like Socrates and Nostradamus to tell them what to do, we have J. ![]() As an adult interested in making high-quality Chinese food and other high-heat cooking beyond (and, now, knowing enough to prepare arrabbiata in different cookware), I decided to invest in an actually-good wok, thus graduating to become the second kind of wok owner: the person who takes it seriously, finds a solid wok, keeps it seasoned properly, and-most importantly-turns out excellent food again and again. ![]()
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